No Logo ends with a consideration of its own limitations. In retrospect, those limitations were…greater than anticipated.
She comes right out and admits that fundamentally addressing the problem would be too hard for “most of us mortals”, so let’s fight one company at a time as a symbolic token. The problem is that not wanting to deal with it doesn’t make it go away. Now we can all see that capitalism is basically incompatible with life, and we still have to figure out how to stop, except we have 20 less years to get it done.
In One World, Ready or Not, William Greider writes that “focusing on the moral values of particular companies–or their immorality–invites a self-righteous response among readers that is too easy and undeserved…Nike has concocted a particularly sick ideology to sell its shoes–glamorous images of superstar athletes concealing the human brutalities–but why single out Nike or Michael Jordan when the US government itself is implicated in the same sickness?” Greider has a valid point. The conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a by-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investment, and outsourcing. If companies make deals with brutal dictators, sell off their factories and pay wages too low to live on, it’s because there is nothing in our international trading rules to prevent them. But eliminating the inequalities at the heart of free-market globalization seems a daunting task for most of us mortals. On the other hand, focusing on a Nike or a Shell and possibly changing the behavior of one multinational can open an important door into this complicated and challenging political arena.
Another disadvantage is that making one company the public face of evil gives its competitors a free pass.
The movement was basically about the feelings of its own members more than any particular concrete change in the world. “It’s important not to make people feel powerless…”
But there is also a clear value in the big-tree approach. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother Owens points out that although all the gas companies have skeletons in their closets, focusing on one company–Shell Oil in the case of Nigeria–can have concrete advantages. “It’s important not to make people feel powerless. After all, they need to fill their cars with something. If we tell them all companies are guilty, they will feel they can do nothing. What we are trying to really do, now that we have this evidence against this one company, is to let people have the feeling that they can at least have the moral force to make one company change.” He also says that since Shell controls more than half of Nigeria’s oil, whatever happens to Shell will serve as a lesson to all the other oil companies, including Chevron.
But the harder message is that the long-term future isn’t going to have cars, so how are we going to prepare for that?
She cites the “Frankenfoods” campaign against genetically modified food as a success.
This strategy has already proved enormously successful in the European campaign against genetically modified foods. For years campaigners had been railing against agribusiness giant Monsanto (that most impenetrable of multinationals) and its refusal to label which foods had been modified and which had not–and, in the case of soybeans, actually mixing the two together. But when campaigners broadened their focus to include not just companies like Monsanto and Novartis, responsible for the genetic engineering, but also the supermarkets that sold their foods, the issue finally grabbed the world’s attention. With shoppers shouting about “Frankenfoods” on their doorsteps and Greenpeace campaigners leading customers on “gene food tours” through their aisles, the supermarkets could not afford to share Monsanto’s cloistered attitude. Eventually, several large British supermarket chains including Sainsbury, Tesco, and Safeway all removed bio-engineered foods from their private-label brands. Marks & Spencer went further, banning from its stores, in March 1999, all foods containing genetically modified ingredients. Chains across Western Europe followed suit, as did food giants Unilever UK, Nestle UK, and Cadbury.
The Frankenfoods stuff annoyed me at the time. The previous post talks about environmental “mysticism” in another Greenpeace campaign, the one to stop the sinking of the Brent Spar oil rig. The Frankenfoods thing was likewise about feelings, an intuitive sense that we shouldn’t “play God”, and what if the genetic modifications get into the wild and…something bad happens, usually unspecified? I knew that a genetic modification was just going to produce a protein, and if I could digest that protein, what’s the problem?
It was the wrong focus. Opposing those crops IS the right call, primarily because the point of the modifications is to make the plants resistant to all the herbicides and pesticides you’re going to be spraying on them. NOW the focus is on glyphosate rather than genetic modification per se.
Here she admits another harsh truth, that “brand-based activism is the ultimate achievement of branding.”
Despite the success of these strategies, it nonetheless seems odd that we need to go to such great lengths to reshape social and environmental injustices just so that they can be brought home to us shoppers. In a way, these campaigns help us to care about issues not because of their inherent justice or importance but because we have the accessories to go with them: Nike shoes, Pepsi, a sweater from the Gap. If we truly need the glittering presence of celebrity logos to build a sense of shared humanity and collective responsibility for the planet, then maybe brand-based activism is the ultimate achievement of branding. According to Gerard Greenfield, international political solidarity is becoming so dependent on logos that these corporate symbols now threaten to overshadow the actual injustices in question. Talk about government, talk about values, talk about rights–that’s all well and good, but talk about shopping and you really get our attention. “If we can only talk about workers’ collective rights and struggles in the context of what people choose to buy as consumers,” writes Greenfield, “then it seems we face a greater challenge to building a critical, popular social consciousness than we might imagine.
There is no doubt that anticorporate activism walks a precarious line between self-satisfied consumer rights and engaged political action.
Indeed, now it’s recognized that “personal carbon footprint” is an industry-invented way of thinking about the problem. To make a dent in emissions, we have to do something about the corporations emitting them. We can’t shop our way out of it. Greenwashing made people feel better enough.
She admits that anticonsumer activists…aren’t really against consumerism.
There is another problem with the consumer-based approach. We are living, as Susan Sontag said, in the “Age of Shopping” and any movement that is primarily rooted in making people feel guilty about going to the mall is a backlash waiting to happen. Besides, the activists who are leading this movement aren’t austere Luddites who are against shopping on principle [we were awaiting Greta Thunberg]. Many of them are creative twenty-somethings designing ad jams on their Mac laptops who happen to believe that there should be some space left over that isn’t trying to sell them something or cluttered with the debris of our consumer culture. They are young men and women in Hong Kong and Jakarta who wear Nikes and eat at McDonald’s, and tell me they are too busy organizing factory workers to bother with Western lifestyle politics. And while Westerners sweat over what kinds of shoes and shirts are most ethical to buy, the people sweating in the factories line their dorm rooms with McDonald’s advertisements, paint “NBA Homeboy” murals on their doors, and love anything with “Meeckey.” The organizers in the Cavite zone often dress for work in ersatz Disney or Tommy T-shirts–cheap knock-offs from the local market. How do they reconcile the contradiction between their clothes and their anger at these multinationals? They told me they had never really thought about it like that; politics in Cavite is about fighting for concrete improvements in workers’ lives–not about what name happens to be on a T-shirt you happen to have on your back.
Something that’s changed in the meantime is that everyone everywhere has cell phones. No Logo had some dramatic moments where white savior activists would come in and show the Haitian textile workers how much the stuff they were sewing was ultimately sold for. Now, anyone could see that for themselves.
What’s interesting to me here is the “temptation” to declare premature victory because of some corporate-NGO partnership self-regulation nonsense. She concedes it’s not a victory…here:
It’s tempting to take this dramatic shift in direction on the part of so many multinationals as a massive victory for the campaigners who have battled with the Nikes and the Shells all these years. Maybe corporations really have seen the light, and we’re all on the same page now…Harvard business professor Debora L. Spar is among those hailing the dawn of this new age. She argues that the rise of brand-based activism has been so successful in shaming corporations, it is no longer in the financial interest of brand-name multinationals to allow abuses to occur. She calls this theory the “spotlight phenomenon.” There is no need for outside regulations because “firms will cut off abusive suppliers or make them clean up because it is now in their financial interest to do so,” she writes. “The spotlight does not change the morality of US managers. It changes their bottom line.”
There is no doubt that companies like Nike have learned that labor-rights abuses can cost them. But the spotlight being shined on these companies is both roving and random: it is able to shine down on a few corners of the global production line, but darkness still shrouds the rest. Human rights, far from being protected by this process, are selectively respected: reforms seem to be implemented solely on the basis of where the spotlight’s beam was last directed. There is absolutely no evidence that any of this reform activity is coalescing into a universal standard of ethical corporate behavior that will be applied around the world; and no system of universal enforcement is on the horizon.
Instead, what we have with the proliferation of voluntary codes of conduct and ethical business initiatives is a haphazard and piecemeal mess of crisis management.
In vino veritas, though. Just a few pages later, she wants the corporate codes of conduct to be working.
The beers at my hotel bar in Rosario were blissfully cold, and the gang from the Workers’ Assistance Center were all getting a little drunk. We were arguing, once again, about whether codes of conduct have any merit whatsoever. Zernan Toledo (who personally favors armed revolution–it’s just a question of when) pounded the table. “These documents are written by the transnational corporations, so they will only serve the transnational corporations–haven’t you read Marx?”
“It’s different now,” I countered. “With globalization, there need to be some common standards–and the governments certainly aren’t setting them.”
“Globalization is nothing new. We have always had globalization,” said Arnel Salvador, another of the WAC organizers.
No, I don’t think she read Marx. In the afterword, she concedes that even pre-9/11, people were getting sick of “summit hopping” and the protests were starting to look like theater that didn’t change anything, cut off from people’s everyday economic concerns.
What seems to have changed is that the 90s left was driven by comfortable college students, competing with each other to seem cool by pretending to care about sweatshops. Neoliberalism has progressed further now and eaten our own society, so today’s college students are poor and angry about class issues.
In the end it was a bourgeois movement, not a radical one. Being a “progressive” basically reflects this liberal ambivalence about capitalism.
We can conclude that symbolic focus on single brands did NOT accomplish what it was supposed to. A lot of time was wasted in emotionally avoiding the scale of the problem.