Naomi Klein

If you do your shopping in London this Christmas, you’ll be wished the compliments of the season via the Oxford Street fairylights. Happy Christmas… from Bird’s-Eye, you’ll be told: season’s greetings and buy our products, all in one. But don’t complain. These days, with a war underway, unprecedented restrictions to civil liberties en route, and a massive global recession (and anthrax!) in the post, our own tricksy love-to-hate-to-love relationship with branding and consumer culture is the least of our problems.

And, at some level, at the very root of them. Called “the Bible of anticorporate militancy” by (the now-defunct) Select magazine, written before “The Battle of Seattle”, gone round the world largely via word of mouth like a benevolent computer virus, the book No Logo has turned journalist, activist and lecturer Naomi Klein into a kind of unwilling celebrity spokesperson for the antiglobalisation movement.

The fact that the messenger is a well-spoken, telegenic 31-year-old Canadian woman (whose conversation, like her writing, is as peppered with pop-culture references and youthful colloquialisms as it is with hard cold socioeconomic facts) and not a crusty anarchophile or a dogmatic hyperliberal, is probably a significant reason, among many – not even counting September 11th – that 2001 has been the year that the anti-globalisation movement became, finally, unignorable.

No Logo does an amazing job of drawing back the curtain, of showing us the complicated machines and machinations of capitalism in extreme, highly revealing close-up. It details the devouring of small local businesses by franchises whose goal is total saturation even if they end up in competition with themselves; the government-sanctioned blackmail that has allowed sweatshops to flourish; the growth of a society where logo is king and freedom from branding is an unwanted consolation prize for people who can’t afford cool gear; and the bleeding dry of popular culture for capitalist fun and profit.

Perhaps its greatest accomplishment, however, is in providing alternatives, and in suggesting the very simple, and revolutionary, idea that change is possible. It indicates that there are other ways the world can work, just waiting to be imagined; that taking personal responsibility on a global scale is doable and desirable; and that we do not have to do what people – governments, and economic policymakers, and marketing directors – tell us to do.

What, as you see it, are the main goals of what people refer to as the “anti-globalisation” or “anti-capitalism” movement?

Well, it really isn’t one movement. It’s a bunch of different movements, globally, that converge around some common demands. In terms of core goals and what people are working for, the strongest thread of connection, I believe, is a desire for another kind of democracy, a more direct form of democracy, based in participation, and a rejection of political and cultural spectatorship. That’s the part of this kind of “movement of movements,” so to speak, that I feel most positively about personally, and that I identify most with.

I think, particularly after September 11th, I’ve been feeling really clearly in my own mind that what I’m against, is fundamentalism, in all of its forms. Economic fundamentalism or religious fundamentalism, but also political fundamentalism. And there’s plenty of that, um, last one! (laughs) But I sorta feel emboldened, post September 11th, to really stand up to that, because I think it’s incredibly destructive.

“Political fundamentalism” is an interesting phrase… Lately, if you watch the news, and read the papers, you seem to have that kind of fundamentalism taken to both extremes – massive anti-American finger-pointing on the one hand, and unquestioning jingoism on the other. I read that CNN are being encouraged to finish any live reports from Afghanistan with a reminder that this country may be harbouring terrorists, to offset the horrific scenes of destruction.

That’s astonishing. But, you know, even before that, there was first the pressure to stop picking up al-Jazeera’s feed (Taliban controlled broadcast network), and all the major networks agreed to that instantly…

Wasn’t that for security reasons?

Well, there were several reasons, and one was they were concerned about hidden messages. But some of the reasons were just that they were worried about riling up anti-American sentiment. I mean, they said that.

Then there’s the other issue, of the Pentagon buying up the only commercial satellite imaging system that is good enough so that you can see figures. You can’t see detailed faces or anything, but you can see movement, of people. There’s this incredible asymmetry: you know, who gets to be human. Whose lives are taken in anonymity and whose lives are mourned in… sorta, Technicolor.

My first thought, on September 11th, as I was watching the CNN coverage, was, I felt we were never again gonna be able to have a videogame war, we weren’t going to be able to use the bloodless language of the videogame war in the same way.

“Videogame war”?

Well, since the Gulf War, the way we’ve got television coverage of wars has been: we look through the viewfinder. And it looks like a video game. Like, you see a building, which is just a target, and then you see whether it was hit or not, you see laser tracer fire in the air. But you don’t actually see the people. And what we saw on September 11th was the casualties of a war, in a sense, in all its gruesome vividness. And this is very new to Americans and Canadians. And I thought that that experience would make it impossible for us to dehumanise warfare in the way that we have since the Gulf War, and the bombing of Kosovo. Because that ability to dehumanise warfare, and treat it like a video game, is what allows us to tell ourselves that we can have wars without casualties. And I thought that would change, but what’s clear, is – I mean, there are very clear attempts now to… try to block those human connections. One of the interesting things, about polls coming out of the US, is that support for “collateral damage”, as it’s called, is weakest in New York. It’s weakest where people are closest to tragedy.

Travelling and lecturing and campaigning internationally, what kinds of responses to recent events have you encountered?

I think some of the responses from the Left were more emotional, rather than well thought out - in the sense that, if you actually want to stop a war, you have to change people’s minds. You can’t just be right. It’s not enough to just be right. And people are frightened, and they don’t want to feel blamed. But there are ways of making connections - with economic policy and foreign policy – that don’t develop a direct causality. ’Cos I think direct causalities are dangerous.

We don’t know who did this, even. We don’t know exactly what motivates them. If it is Bin Laden, we certainly can’t take him at his word. He’s not a freedom fighter, he’s an opportunist. And that means he preys off of opportunities. He preys off the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians, and of the poor, and he preys off the crumbling infrastructure in countries like the Sudan, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan – and it’s not only him: this is the way religious fundamentalism has always spread. These types of ideas, and this type of fanaticism, would not be possible if the social infrastructure wasn’t in a state of such total collapse. So we need to look at this in the context of foreign aid, of debt, of the war on the public sector. And these are the arguments that I’m trying to make. But I’m trying to make them in a way that in no way says that the acts are justified.

So what, do you think, is the best response?

I believe that there needs to be, simultaneously, a multilateral strategy to get the mass murderers, and bring them to justice. And I don’t have very much patience for a peace movement that doesn’t take that seriously. And I think that we have an opportunity where the US has suddenly discovered the wonders of multilateralism, because they have an enemy that crosses every border in the world, right? So, they’re finally realising that they can’t do this alone, no matter how powerful they are.

Before September 11th, the US was running roughshod over the entire international community: they weren’t paying their UN dues, they sabotaged Kyoto, they blocked every weapons treaty, they were pushing for the Missile Defence Shield – Bush came to power in a flurry of unilateralism. And it wasn’t much better under Clinton. And at that point, people felt that there really wasn’t much they could do. But now, we’re in a situation where the US is going to every country in the world and making demands – they want military intelligence, they want airspace, they want all kinds of things.

And that’s where there could be a voice from this sort of movement of movements – to be the voice of genuine internationalism, instead of being pigeonholed in this idea of being anti-globalisation. It’s an opportunity to articulate what real globalisation could mean: a globalisation that isn’t just based on trade.

Since you mention it, after reading No Logo, it seemed to me that the phrase ‘anti-globalisation’, as it’s used to describe this “movement of movements”, is a misnomer. The movement seems entirely pro-globalisation: just not the kind of globalisation we currently have.

Yes. You can make a distinction between internationalism, which is about collaboration between nations, and setting common goals and standards; and globalisation, which in a sense implies the globalisation of a single policy. But, there’s been a very successful PR bundling (laughs) of internationalism with a specific economic model: neo-liberalism, which is pretty much the economic model of slashing taxes, privatising, deregulating, and then praying to the gods of trickledown economics. But it’s just a PR strategy.

It’s what the agro-business companies do when they’re faced with criticisms about genetically modified foods. They can’t prove why GM foods are good, or why they’re necessary, right? So they start running ad campaigns about drugs that save little children. Which has nothing to do with genetically modified wheat! But they understand that they have to bundle it with something that people do want. So that’s what we’ve seen with the bundling of neo-liberal economics – “turbo-capitalism” – with basic ideas about international collaboration, interconnection, internationalism. By bundling the two, then you can say turbo-capitalism is inevitable. And you can hide the fact that it’s actually a set of very clear political choices that are made.

The most frequent criticism of the anti-globalisation movement – or, the “internationalism” movement is that it has no visible leaders, no clear, unified agenda. Do you think that, in very basic PR terms, as a global culture, we still need movements to have faces and labels and very clear manifestos, in order for them to be effective in the mainstream?

I think that there are separate issues. I think that we do have to have alternatives that we’re working towards, and we do need to articulate positive agendas: not just one, either, but lots of them. And we need to point to models that work. Like Porto Alegre [Brazilian city with very progressive municipal authority], where they have participatory city government, and things like that. We need to look at other kinds of trade, other economic models: put together a real platform around other ways to run the world. So I think that part of it is definitely true. But I don’t know about the solution simply being leaders, and slogans, and a clear message, which is what I hear all the time.

I suppose a danger might be the oversimplification of what is actually a very diverse set of goals and ideas.

Exactly. And I also think that there’s good reason to be suspicious of centralised leadership structures. And I think in many ways what drives this movement of movements is a desire for diversity, and decentralisation, and participation. There is a tremendous amount of pressure to organise oneself into a media-friendly way, and I’ve been really heartened by the fact that it has been resisted… quite doggedly. And I think in the context of that resistance, what’s actually happened is that, despite all the doom-and-gloom predictions that we’ve heard since Seattle, about how unviable this model is, and how doomed to failure it is – the movements are growing everywhere.

And I think that many of the issues that we’ve been talking about, are becoming much more concrete in people’s lives. I think one of the strongest threads of connection is the anger over the privatisation of life, for instance.

The privatisation of what?

Of life, of everything. The privatisation of basic resources, like water, and of basic services – and the patenting of lifeforms, that’s the deepest form of privatisation that you can have! And of course the privatisation of public space, and of ideas.

That’s one of the things in the book that rang truest with me personally: the hijacking of ideas by marketing, the idea of even metaphorical free space being taken up.

In terms of that, I think nowhere is it truer than New York, where – certainly before September 11th – there is a powerful feeling of airlessness and claustrophobia, a sense that there is no outdoors. Everywhere you go there are television sets, there are wraparound ads, there’s a powerful sense of enclosure. And a lot of people in New York express that feeling, and see it as a major change in the past seven years.

Times Square and the Village are particularly upsetting in that sense, I think. I mean, Times Square was a slum before, but now, funnily enough, it’s absolutely ruined. It’s as if there’s this idea nowadays where you can either have slums, or alternatively, entire neighbourhoods turned into colossal shopping and branding opportunities. It’s as if there is no third option.

Exactly. And it’s sad, because I think a lot of us thought New York was immune, that it had so much character that it couldn’t, it couldn’t happen to New York. I mean, Christopher Isherwood once said, about Americans: “Europeans hate us, because we’ve retreated to live inside our ads, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.” It’s a great image. And it’s interesting now, because you think about this image of bin Laden in a cave, right? But we’re in our own caves.

But there is this powerful flood of connection running through this movement that is a resistance to that kind of enclosure - the taking away of common areas, the privatisation of the self, where we see ourselves as shoppers, as opposed to as citizens – and the loss of the sense of outdoors, or wilderness, or possibility, or anything.

And what’s happening inside the US now, particularly given the bioterrorist threat, is there’s this sudden rediscovery of the value of the public sphere. And it’s happening in a country that has waged war on everything public, for the past twenty years. Now they’re finding out that they’re vulnerable because they have privatised airport security, because they have underfunded their food inspectors, their health inspectors, their hospitals – I mean, this war is being waged at the post office, at the reservoir, right? It’s an infrastructure war. So, in terms of whether or not our work continues to be important, it’s never been more important.

I always say that the movement is not about trade, it’s about tradeoffs. It’s about all the things that we’re told we have to do in order to be competitive, you know: welcome to business, and certainly you know about this in Ireland. I’ve got nothing against trade. I have a problem with neo-liberalism – turbo-capitalism – and the amount of tradeoffs we’re all asked to make.

What do you think has gone wrong in western society where we have been so ready for manufacturers to stop selling items and start selling our dreams back to us via branding? How were we so ripe for that?

I think it’s different in every country. I mean, you’re in a religious country…

(hotpress laughs) Not so much these days.

Well, even more so, then. Because it certainly has to do with the fact that we want more than products. I mean, branding is based not on the idea that we want these products so badly, it’s based on the idea that we want more than them. We want meaning. We want poetry, we want philosophy (laughs). We want all these things that we can’t get from these products. And they’re things that we used to get elsewhere.

Where?

Well, I think it depends. I think we used to get them from having more of an intellectual, artistic public life, where philosophers and artists and intellectuals and politicians and religious leaders did speak to us in the language of ideas and meaning, more than they do today. So we have a longing for meaning in our lives. And brands are opportunists. They fill that vacuum. They do their market research, and they find out that people long for something deeper in their lives, and then that’s what is sold to us along with our running shoes. And that’s why we actually are never really satisfied.

You know, to live in a culture like ours is to live in a constant state of longing (giggles). There’s the promise everywhere of transcendence. And then you get home, and all you have is the stuff.

Over the last week, I’ve been paying closer attention around town, and everywhere you turn, there’s someone in a Gap sweatshirt, there’s someone wearing a huge Nike swoosh, there’s someone else in a Boxfresh hoodie. Why are we okay with, essentially – if you wanted to be really cynical – paying to wear adverts?

Well, I think a lot of it is tribalism.

It feels less like tribalism than, kind of: Pick which uniform you want to wear.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it really depends. I mean, it’s the height of… It’s a lack of creativity. For kids, it’s about security. Kids I understand. It’s the adults that freak me out (laughs).

Sorry?

The impulse to do this when you’re a kid, I understand, it’s adults that freak me out (laughs uproariously). Because, for kids, when you’re fifteen years old, basically your life is pretty shit, right? You’re in the middle of forming your identity, and you’re obsessed with what other people think of you. I mean, if you read surveys of kids - what they’re worried about, what they think about – their number one concern is what other people think of them. And, in that context, brands are a suit of armour. You wear your logos on the outside of your clothing, and you’re protected from your peers. It’s kind of a password. It’s not an expression of fashion, it’s the opposite of that. It’s ‘you can’t touch me, because I have the right armour on’. So I understand why kids feel the need to do that. I find it bizarre when I see 50-year-olds doing it.

Are you concerned that there are people growing up now thinking that brand emporiums – Nike Towns, or whatever – are a normal shopping experience – this illusion of choice, where it’s actually a case of, Which Nike tracksuit best shows off your personality? Which snap-on mobile phone cover reflects your individuality?

Well, that’s kind of why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because I can see the change, I lived through this change. I knew that people younger than me would take it for granted. And older people – my mother can’t see the difference. She thought I grew up in a commercial culture, and she thinks today’s kids do too. She can’t see a difference in you know, advertising, and branding.

But the question is, which one is the infrastructure? Is advertisement occasionally interrupting culture? Or has our culture become brand content? And I feel like I witnessed that shift – it happened in my lifetime.

I remember a time where ads were hitching a ride on our culture, were interrupting our culture. And now, we’re brand content. We are inside the brand. (giggles as if trapped) And I feel like I was you know, 18, 19, 20, 21 when that shift happened. And that’s why I wanted to write the book. I wanted to write it down, because I knew that it was a really amorphous shift, and in a sense I just kind of wanted to say that this happened.

And to some extent, it does freak me out that kids today, as far as they’re concerned, shopping has always been this sort of quasi-theme park experience. But I also think that teenagers, people younger than us, are more likely to create alternatives. Because they grew up in this context. They’re not overwhelmed by it. They have this powerful sense that they have to build an alternative outside of this enclosure, and protect it.

There can be a fine line, though, can’t there, between culture “proper” and adverts that take on a cultural life of their own, which is kind of a sneakier, more slippery thing. I mean, when I was a kid I used to collect those Absolut adverts done by different artists, Warhol and Keith Haring…

Well, you don’t have to feel so bad about it, because it’s entirely owned by the Swedish government.

What is?

Absolut Vodka. It’s owned by the Swedish government. (Laughs) It’s a public company.

Really!

Yes, I was very surprised to learn that. You’re feeding the Swedish welfare state, whenever you drink Absolut. (Giggles quite a lot)

That’s excellent news to pass on to hotpress readers.

Yeah, they’ll be psyched.

What I’m saying, though, is, there are plenty of adverts that are well done or clever, or even uplifting or beautiful, occasionally. Do you think it’s okay at any level for there to be a merging of culture and marketing, or do you feel we really have to be hardline about how we respond to these things?

Well, I think we have to say, Of course they’re beautiful. I don’t think the question is whether or not they’re beautiful. I think it’s about a massive cultural trend to turn artists into content providers. So I think it’s important to acknowledge that it is beautiful – and still manage to have a critique of the phenomenon.

I know Radiohead are big fans of your book. How effective a statement, or action, or gesture, do you think their decision to tour recently with non-sponsored tents was? What do you think they accomplished?

I think it was an amazing gesture, actually. And I think it was quite a humble gesture, if you think about the way rock stars usually enter politics. And I found that it was very much in the spirit of how people are trying to change the way they work, or do business: in the spirit of reclaiming space. So, instead of ‘Rock Stars Save the World!’ it’s more like: Okay, well, what we can do, is try to develop a more immediate relationship with our listeners.

Because I mean when you have a band like Radiohead – with such a very, very powerful connection to their fans – everybody wants to get in on that. They say, hmm, that’s a powerful connection, I think I could sell Gap clothes with that. And there are all these kind of interceptions, and interruptions: attempts to try to bottle that feeling, and exploit it, and turn it into a whole, self-enclosed lifestyle. And lots of bands are very into becoming brands, themselves. So I think Radiohead did something really simple, which is to kind of try to kick out a lot of the interruptions.

But how effective was it?

I guess the testimony for me is that I know, in a « continued from 73

way that I think few people can know, how much they have politicised their fans. Because they come to my lectures. I mean, there are always three people in Radiohead T-shirts in the front row of every lecture I do. Like, every single – And I get a lot of letters from them as well, particularly after Kid A first came out, saying, “You know, I usually don’t read books like this, but I did, because I read that the band read it.” And I think that everybody needs entry points, everybody needs doorways. And I know that these guys are very quietly providing all kinds of doorways, and they’re doing it in a very humble way. Like, if you go to their website, they immediately link you to [independent news service] Indymedia, or whatever. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the way they’ve chosen to do this. Not as preachers, not politicising their music, not telling people what to do, but just providing gateways, and portals, and bridges.

Is there any room for a symbiotic and positive relationship between corporate sponsorship and things like tours and festivals? A lot of these things are, I think, simply not financially possible without sponsorship on board. Or, have I just been brainwashed into not seeing other solutions?

I don’t know. I mean… (pause) I think there are other solutions. Most of them involve government funding, or community funding. I think we get into a mindset where we think we can’t do anything without sponsorship. Even the most basic, sort of community gathering, needs a corporate sponsor.

I think it comes back to what we were talking about before. I mean, what bothers me most, is the lack of bargaining. I think that almost all artists go to sponsors with cap in hand, with a feeling of: We couldn’t do what we do without you. Instead of recognising that they, the companies, couldn’t do what they wanna do, without YOU. Right? It’s a two-way street. Instead, there’s a powerful sense that you have to roll over for whatever the demands are, which is why the brand becomes the infrastructure, and then the art, the music, whatever, is the brand content. And we’ve seen it a million times. And I don’t think that it necessarily has to be this way, but I think the arts community have given up so much independence – and power! – by not entering into genuine negotiations, by not saying, You need us. And these are our rules.

Well, I’m just thinking, if you have an artist who is saying, You need us, then the beer company says, That’s cool. We’ll go find another band. No problem.

Well, that’s the other good thing about what Radiohead do. There’s such a powerful logic - in the arts world, and in the music world – that artists don’t have any power, and these are the rules and you have to play by them or you’re gonna lose. So, it’s important for successful bands that do have power, to try and rewrite some of these rules before it’s too late.

What can parents do – how do you have a conversation with a kid who feels like a leper if the tracksuit has two stripes instead of Adidas’ three? Have you ever had this conversation with a young relative?

(Laughs for ages) …Yeah, I have… I guess I don’t… have… much hope… for kids... (rueful giggling) But, I have a lot of hope in kids. In the sense that I think it’s important to have the conversations, and know that they’re not going to have any immediate effect, but you never know where it’ll come out later, years down the road. I mean, I had a really hard time being a kid, and I think brands make kids feel safe. And the only things that parents can do is not over-lecture, and try to understand the sources of the insecurity and need for belonging, which can usually be dealt with much more powerfully, indirectly, not by making somebody feel guilty because they need to have the third stripe (laughs), but by understanding why there is such a powerful sense of vulnerability.

And some of these are personal issues, and some of these are socioeconomic. I mean, brands are talismanlike, especially in the poorest communities, where it’s not only a way to belong among your peers, but it’s a way to send a message to a whole society that you’re better than they think you are, that you’re just as good as them. Even if you have to spend the last money you have, or rob to get it. And brand culture in poor areas is impossible to discuss without discussing the roots of that exclusion. Brands become a momentary, illusory inclusion in a world that is totally out of reach. And marketing and pop culture feed into that, it’s not something that an individual parent can necessarily deal with on their own. Except just to try to understand the psychology of what brands are standing in for, because brands are always surrogates. They’re surrogates for something. But having been a brand addict myself, I always tell parents that they shouldn’t give up hope.

What’s your own main priority, or main hope, over the next year?

(long pause) …Well, I’m terrified right now, because we’re a week away from the next WTO summit [in Qatar, November 9th to 13th], and most people have been totally focused on the war, and we’re dealing with people who are unrelenting political opportunists, and who are using this moment of distraction and fear to ram forward the most incredible agenda that is probably gonna be passed, like, every Darwinian security law, anti-terrorism law, surveillance, racial profiling.

I live in Canada, and we’re about to lose our sovereignty to the US. Because we have reorganised our economy to be completely dependent on US trade, and now the Americans are saying that they don’t trust us to police the border, so we have to harmonise our immigration and refugee policy with them, and let them police our borders for us, which is basically the end of the country, right? So, I mean, it is a little hard to be positive right now… (laughs)

So what’s to be done?

I guess I feel like, in the midst of all of this, we have to start doing things. I mean: more than protesting. And I feel like we really need to start humbly. I feel like we need an international campaign to reclaim our cities and towns, and run progressive candidates, and introduce participatory economics, and completely redo the way politics happens, on a much smaller scale. And to do it in a networked way, so that people aren’t giving up on the global.

So, I’ve been thinking about how to do that. And I think about it from a local, Canadian perspective. But a lot of people are thinking about it around the world. And I’m going to Porto Alegre, which I mentioned before, and which is I think a very helpful development. Every year, all the CEOs and world leaders go to Davo, Switzerland and have their big get-together, the World Economic Forum. And so, last year, the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil began holding a world social forum in their city, because they have this really radical government in power which is doing things completely differently. They said, We want to be the headquarters for the other kind, the new kind of globalisation: globalisation that’s driven by the needs of people instead of trade. And they invited everybody to come, and about 15,000 people came, and it was absolutely insane, and I think this year as many as 100,000 people are gonna go.

And the idea is that it’s not a protest: it’s part festival, part conference, part popular-education, part just seeing a part of the world that is actually trying to build alternatives, and you can actually see them in action instead of just talking about them. So I’m gonna be going there again this year, and I guess I feel most positive about some of the ideas that are coming out of that process. So, um (giggles) …that’s where my money is.