Dr Wooo writes:

"Naomi Klein, No Logo, London: Flamingo, 2001 (pb. £8.99).

Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of
Democracy, London: Random House, 2001 (pb. £12.99).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000 (pb. £12.99).

Whatever the merits of Naomi Klein’s politics there can be little doubt that
No Logo was a timely intervention. In the theatre of struggles against the
effects of globalisation, Klein has become like a war correspondent: a Kate
Adie for the liberal left. As its publicity suggests the book became part of
a movement. But which movement? That of young activists devising ingenious
means of publicising their protests against multinationals and
trans-national alliances of political forces? Or the movement within the
media that has sought to mould the collective impression of these protests?

It does not seem to have been activists who made No Logo ‘part of a movement
’. Rather it seems largely the media itself that propelled Klein and her
particular take on activism to fame. The reasons for this are relatively
clear. With the growth of diverse and often contradictory forms of
‘anti-capitalism’, society at large needed to reduce these either to
something recognisable (it’s 1968 all over again), or to something
ideologically containable (criminals, thugs and rioters). Over the last few
years groups across the spectrum of the traditional and radical left have
all made particular concessions towards aligning with a broad
‘anti-capitalist’ movement. With all manner and diversity of groups
jockeying to lead the carnival procession, what was needed was a politics of
moderation or a moderate politics. What more suited to a symbolic politics
than a politics of the symbol? Enter Klein.

Klein builds an image of capitalism driven by marketing, corporate
identities and brand imagery in the West that sits on a bedrock of
exploitation in the South and the Third World. She diligently pursues the
most familiar large corporations around the globe highlighting their
excesses and abuses of power. Carefully covering a wide range of commercial
practice – companies brokering promotional contracts with schools and
universities, the proliferation of temporary or low paid contracts wrapped
up in the language of choice, the horrors of sweat-shop labour – Klein
produces a picture of the modern world throttled by unaccountable and
profiteering capitalists. However, alongside these developments, a story is
given of resistance: that of young people seeing through the media-marketed
hype and creatively shaming, naming, prosecuting and organising against the
power of commercial society.

No Logo is not just a list of facts: it is peppered with statements from
companies and activists alike, presenting an image of a world in hot
contestation, as if the political was being reborn and recast as the fight
between staid economic interests and an idealistic youth.

Yet behind the high-rise rhetoric of Klein’s political landscape there is
the sinister shantytown of real politics. Fuelling No Logo’s and its
readership’s indignation against unethical consumption is either the
implicit idea that hoodwinked consumers in the West are responsible for the
working conditions of producers in the third world or a moral duty to
ameliorate them. In the discourse of anti-capitalism this means that the
genuineness of anti-corporate activism lies in the extent of our rejection
of the perks of Western consumer society. If we expose the criminal
production practices of major high-street retailers, the power of the
manufactured image of those companies will be subverted. Almost overnight
the onerous school-ground behaviour of judging people by what they wear has
been instantiated as a form of politics itself.

To wear certain trainers, a well-established criterion of social inclusion
for youth across the globe, has been re-posed as a sign of complicity with
the heady world of exploitation. Counterpoised to Ali G like carriers of
commodity sign values, Klein’s young anti-capitalists emerge as virtuous
ascetics happy to divest themselves of the garb of capitalist logic.

Klein’s choice of the logo as a key to unlock the secret working of the
social system makes political conclusions such as these unavoidable. However
the personable story of No Logo sets up preliminary lines of defence against
these accusations. Klein too was once inebriated with cocktails of corporate
signifiers, before she saw the light. No Logo bares all, from the sewing of
labels on to jeans to the yearning for fast food, with a spirit of
confession that would make a Catholic blush. Now saved from perdition, Klein
’s story re-enters the sinful world of her youth with a rigorous attention
to banal detail that outflanks Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and has
Douglas Coupland checking his notes.

As an artistic whole No Logo is endangered by the banality of its subject
matter. Everywhere the language of the mass-marketing machines is taken at
face value, and the bizarre justifications of commodities within market
society are read as if they expressed its inner workings. The nauseating
saturation of sign values and the televised spectacle of commercial society
are reproduced here in full. No sooner are we treated to prosaic quotes from
the likes of the chairman of United Biscuits than we are raised up by the
plight of workers sweating for a dime. Set against the tyranny of the logo,
grass roots protests are re-posed as rising up against its logic. No one
else has sifted through the garbage can of the self-serving rhetoric of the
make-believe corporate world with more zeal than Ms Klein. But no one else
has performed such a disservice to those who oppose the power of the
corporation by constantly depreciating their political activity to serve as
counterpoint to a journalistic device.

No Logo was potentially a powerful intervention. But the play between the
rhetoric of the multi-national corporation and its inhuman reality is never
really convincing. In places No Logo chastises an earlier political
generation for maligning reality in the face of the image, yet the major
import of Klein’s argument is to do exactly the same. Apparently obsessed
with the writing on the wall, 80s activism did not notice that the ‘wall had
been sold’. However, Klein’s own empirical bricks and mortar have no
foundations except the juxtaposition between a commercial muppet show and
extreme labour practices necessary to the capitalist system. In this
admixture of indignation, intrigue and outrage Klein fails to posit exactly
how such pernicious extremes have developed and the basis wherein companies
themselves present their own activity not as creating products but as the
creation of an experience through a brand.

Although No Logo tries to balance its attack on the commercial world with
the reality of production, what tends to be missing is any connection
between the ideologies of consumer society and the social needs that are
generated by the cultural reproduction of the worker. We are continuously
offered sound-bite rebukes to corporate ideology, yet the generality of
conditions that have given rise to these ideational social forms are never
explored. A case in point is a section that deals with the encroachment of
private interests into education. Though usefully detailing how in the U.S.
soft drink brands and computer manufacturers have exchanged money for
publicity with public bodies, Klein saturates the text with her own outrage
to the extent that the reasons behind these events receive little remark.
Indeed not once does she attempt to explain exactly why such processes
should be condemned. Rather she assumes that it will be self evident to her
readership why genuine public life ought to be preserved. For what reason?
The resistance against ‘brand-extension’ into education turns out to be
entirely symbolic: ‘these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space
is possible’. This might convince her coffee-shop comrades, but it will make
few inroads into shaping the politics of inner-city kids for whom Coke day
is a welcome break from being taught social obedience.

Brands are not the power, yet Klein colludes with the market rhetoric to the
extent that she presents them as such. Most capital is anonymous and apart
from high-street stores, much corporate marketing is not directed at
consumers at all, but at other capitalists. This goes on in a world where
corporate power and its legitimacy as the very motor behind social
interchange has already been established and entrenched. Brands do not
colonise space, the social power of capital has already made this space its
own. Rather the brand fills out already colonised spaces, and herein certain
companies in competition for the same market use resources to produce a
social meaning to attach to their wares. In a Marcusian vein Klein is
sensitive to the fact that this process involves the incorporation of any
manner of existent cultural discourses and their reproduction as the
exclusive property of a particular commodity. Hence the impression that
capital speaks for and can satisfy our social desires coupled with the
explosion of a market for people skilled in fabrication and mystification.
Most of this stinks, but it could never be the basis for a politics. Capital
itself is not tied to any particular identity; if one particular
manifestation is discredited it will simply move to a different domain, this
is given by its character as a social power. The celebration of symbolic
campaigns against individual capitalists shows that Klein has bought the
fetishism of the commodity wholesale. There is however no reason why we
should. As the grandfather of the critique of capital scribbled in his
notebooks so many years ago, the ‘worker cares as much about the crappy shit
he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also
couldn’t give a damn for the junk’.

Still we inhabit a world where the colonisation of capital seems complete.
It is a fair project that perceives here that the total subsumption of the
social by capital implies a reconfiguration of the sites of political
resistance. However, truths remain at the level of production that is not
subverted by this logic. This is the truth of the necessity of work and the
predominance of time spent at work. The cultural effects of market society
lie in our incapacity to be creative outside of work. Entertainment has
become a specialised industry and from computer games to motion pictures our
cultural reproduction lies in received entertainment; lacking the time and
skills, as individuals we are constrained to consume what others produce.
The enormity of time that people are forced to spend under the social power
of a master de-limits their capacity for developmental creative activity
outside of it.

Moreover, with the specification and diversification of types of work
demanded by capital, the responsibility for developing the capacity to work
is transferred away from the capitalist. Out of need we are forced to occupy
the culture of our work, to enhance our productivity, and we often feel
obliged to into making our ‘free’ social activity orientate around work. On
the level of politics No Logo degenerates from a potentially powerful
critique of the spectacle, the actualised phenomenology of the market, into
a rehashed appeal for a mode of liberalism. Economically speaking this is
the voice of the owner of a boutique crying business as usual in the
aftermath of the blitz.

Implicit here is a culturally elitist disdain against mass production and
homogenisation, wherefore the socio-political struggle of the middle class
and the desire to restate a sphere of production and consumption outside the
realm of capital, in the name of quality whether ethical or material. Behind
the general victim mentality of Klein’s vision lies disdain for the masses,
those hoodwinked into identifying quality with what is predominant, most
immediate and socially manufactured as cool. No Logo is fuel for the
burgeoning fires of cultural separation along class lines and of disdain for
the ethically irresponsible and marginalized who seemingly sustain a market
for secular idols.

What emerges as the political imperative in No Logo is not to subvert the
power behind the saturation of corporate ideology into our social space, but
to campaign against it being rubbed in our face. For all its symbolic power,
the masses’ struggle against the corporation is reinvented as a demand upon
the corporation to be ethically accountable. Forgotten here are precisely
the premises of the brand and logo: that companies are already ethical.
Realising commodities on the market now implies that the commodities satisfy
social needs for inclusion, standards and quality that are generated out of
the subsumption of the political and the public by private power. In Noreena
Hertz’s recent book, the Silent Takeover, these same processes are
understood in a positive light, and this demonstrates the extent to which
Klein’s premises by no means necessarily serve a radical agenda.

With a similar emphasis of corporate abuse of power and the excessive
gravity of the inequality it engenders, Hertz endeavours to utilise the same
type of personable journalism as her Canadian counterpart. Indeed if Klein’s
brief was to marginalize activism to a liberal agenda, Hertz’s remit was
clearly something like: ‘write a Klein-esque book, young, punchy, but try to
change the ending – if in doing so you can make out anti-capitalism to be
good for capitalists, you can write your own cheque.’ Indeed if Klein’s
demand was to build an ethical universe in response to branded corporations,
Hertz, with characteristic naivety, confesses her belief that capital is
often best placed to offer social justice. Similarly, the encroachment upon
the public is seen as a process that could be reversed. Essentially The
Silent Takeover tries to explain that the co-option of the public by
capitalists has led to un-democratic resistances to capitalism. Hertz wants
to reinvent an anti-capitalist rationale for the state that can gain
political legitimacy by kowtowing to consumerist demands that provide moral
and ethical justification for political regulation. This is not just about
making capitalism accountable; it is more explicitly a means of making
capital more profitable. Whom Hertz sees as her audience becomes very clear
when she recommends to business that a set of ethical principles would
enhance their credibility and sales potential.

The working refrain of The Silent Takeover is the crisis of representation
and the lack of faith citizens have in the democratic process. Hence ‘shop
don’t vote’ has become the hallmark of societies infected by the paradox
wherein political statements are made through the boycotting of politics.
But the most obvious problem with this book is its working motif: its basic
thesis that somehow the ‘takeover’ went un-noticed. Rather the current state
of politics, especially in Britain, is exactly characterised by the
re-management of the balance of government and business in the face of the
displacement of the traditional left. The defeat of labour was not silent,
but silenced. Indeed we are still reeling from the gradual destruction of
opposition to privatisation of public services. The battles fought out by a
dying labour movement are not represented in this book, and the symbolic
activisms that have taken their place are not at all understood in the
context of such a defeat. That her own political agenda of consumer activism
is the result of such a process rather than the basis for a new one is not
even considered by Hertz and we are left wondering what is on the cards for
the future, when the author of such a palpably ignorant and obsequiously
opportunist intervention is described as a leading new thinker of our
generation.

Graduates from Hertz and Klein’s shopping mall St Trinian’s would do well to
upgrade their diploma at where post-structuralism and Italian Marxism meet.

Empire, written over a period of ten years, is immediately relevant to the
world that Klein and Hertz have construed. What are so far tentative
conclusions – the complete subordination of the social to the force of
capital and the corresponding depreciation of the nation state as sovereign
power – are found in Empire as necessary foundations of the emergence of a
new socio-political universe. In Empire globalisation is not understood as a
process exterior to its subjects. Rather, in so far as globalisation
represents a reorganisation of centres of power, it is understood as the
basis for a more progressive mode of social organisation. The differences
lie in the depth of the analysis. Whereas Klein skates upon the surface of
brand identity, Negri’s materialism leads him to present his analysis
through the dimensions of the object of study itself. What makes Negri’s
attempt to restate a historically sensitive realism so fascinating is that
this procedure is performed without recourse to a dialectic of negativity.
Rather, the boundaries of the totality are posited as immanently present
within its ontological constitution. If Klein mirrored her subject matter
haphazardly by only dipping into its pre-conditions, Hardt and Negri have
successfully provided an ontological view of the new world order that
reproduces the hierarchy of its constitution. For us, where Empire excels is
in its clarity of exposition and a treatment of its content hallmarked by
consistency and commitment. For this reason, in respect to an emerging
politics, Empire is a tool for and a lesson in practice.

From positing the reconstitution of the political on the level of the
trans-national, Empire moves on to delineate how traditional conventions of
contractarian political philosophy must give way to the perception that the
political is thus constituted, not in spite of, yet as a direct result of
the activities and the productive, creative, desiring energy of the
multitude. The latter works as the load-bearing category in Empire,
demonstrating the debt owed to a Spinozist and Deleuzian style of thought.
Constitutive power at the level of the multitude disturbs conventional
concepts of state sovereignty, the ontological weight of the multitude’s
desires placing the whole edifice of globalised polity in a responsive
rather than proactive position. Such a plane of juridical and political
right lacks a centre but remains an ordered hierarchy. No longer the centred
imperialism of yesteryear, the constitution of the global order works in and
through a recognised criterion of human right, itself a juridical category
that even if harnessed for pernicious ends, has its origins in
non-governmental discourses that have sought to defend the very language of
human life itself in a world where that is continuously subverted.

Despite the in-determinacy of the category of the multitude – the
proletarianised many – this aged political referent serves as both the
conceptual and real counterpart to Empire. The potential of the de-centred
majority ultimately lies in its productive power. As a diverse mediated
reality Negri takes strongly from Marx and modern cultural Marxists like
Frederic Jameson the principle that difference is only possible through some
form of identity. Staying close to this tradition, the contemporary
requirements that capital demands of labour lie in the intensification of
the value form of labour through further simultaneous homogenisation and
differentiation of the concrete activity of work. Within Hardt and Negri’s
post-modern economy this logic assumes a new turn of fate. Crucial here is
the use of the Marxian notion of the general intellect, as is the changing
reality of working practices. With computerisation of production, the worker
is further removed from the object of his labour, which becomes in affect
more abstract. Yet the methods of production thus become homogenised in that
a single tool, the computer, becomes the standard technical instrument of
production. Correspondingly the service sector and the socio-biological and
cultural networks of social production lose their distinctive separation
from the field of work. Such ‘affective labour’ inaugurates the complete
immersion of productive logic into areas traditionally understood as areas
of consumption and dissemination of the surplus. Fundamental to this process
is that ‘cooperation is completely immanent to the labouring activity itself
’. Much as Marx saw the imposition of the factory system as pushing workers
towards a form of identity, Hardt and Negri see post-modern production as
forcing society to the stage where immaterial labour creates the ‘potential
for a spontaneous and elementary communism’. Yet not only does labour under
postmodernism become closer in form to its systemic social character; the
complete subsumption of labour by capital subverts the time of value
production to the extent that even when outside of the regime of work, value
is still produced. This is the world of the bio-political. It is easy to see
how socialist feminist claims concerning the productivity of domestic labour
find a place within this encompassing and integrative picture.

It is difficult to judge the truthfulness of this new regime of labour. It
is tempting to fall back on Klein and the image of the dark satanic mills to
sustain a notion that fundamental to capital is the imposition of a form of
social control and raw exploitation. For sure this will long remain a
reality of global capitalism. But if we formulate our critique of capital at
its extremes we run the risk of failing in our critique of the type of
everyday life that capital engenders within its heartlands. On the other
hand, by undermining the classical notion of ‘variable capital’ Negri runs
the risk of over-playing the positive aspect of capital’s dynamic property
of revolutionising the social basis of production.

Indeed in the Grundrisse (a text with which Negri is abundantly familiar)
Marx mocks the sycophants of the bourgeoisie who perceive that it is
productive labour when ‘somebody picks the lice out of his (the capitalist’
s) hair, or strokes his tail’. Yet it does seem that the massive
augmentation of immaterial labour complicates a rigorous separation of when
activity is productive and when not. Certainly when social forms such as the
general intellect become the productive base of highly technologised
societies we might be witnessing something like the return of child labour
in the West: young brains hacking code on micro-computers in their basements
contribute indirectly to the enhancement of the technical side of
production. Indeed it does reflect the extent of optimism behind the
postmodernism found in Empire, which sees that the interconnectivity of
contemporary societies collapses the conventional boundaries of the
measurable expounded with metaphysical surety by modernists like Marx. Truly
here, argues Negri, we can see the basis of communism, wherein our
productive activity is no longer self-serving, but is inextricably bound up
with the productive force of the whole of our society. To carry signifiers,
to consume, to think, simply to be, all assume a productive quality.

To these sanguine and heterodox claims Marxists are well placed to offer a
dash of that sobering dialectic of negativity. Indeed uncharacteristically
for Negri the insistence on perceiving capital as a imposing social power is
somewhat lost in this call upon the left to view the current situation
positively. In Empire living labour is prioritised to the extent that the
realm of objectified dead labour is ontologically weakened. Unfortunately
none of these three books offer much evidence to suggest that the power of
private appropriation has waned. Indeed all the evidence points to the
contrary. The fact that capitalists are in a position to steer, dominate and
control what passes for social life shows the entrenchment of its social
power. The absolute poverty of the conventional apparatus of representative
democracies means that any recourse to their authority mocks genuine
attempts to enact politics from below.

That young people are captured by the spectacular images of societies that
know themselves through consumption demonstrates their powerlessness against
the dominant logic. Yet Negri shows how this positing of capital as a
transcendent power with all its pseudo-religious symbols can be and is daily
subverted by multitudes that do not see the political as separate to the
social. A politics based on high-street consumption could never effectively
challenge capitalism, so long as the presupposition of market society
remains the unchallenged economic and social alienation that is the mainstay
of the social production of commodities.

Self-elected or media-sponsored representatives will continue to present the
reclamation of public space as the goal of anti-capitalist politics. Rather
for us, the issue is the reclamation of our alienated social power. To this
end the politics of bio-power, the bottom-up realisation of the potential of
people to reap the fruits of their own activity, effectively challenges both
the social power of capital as well as the ethical discourse that seeks to
limit our desires. Crucially Empire locates the potential for politics not
in the world of banal manufactured identities and the defacement of the
spectacle but in the realm of our massive creative productive energies.
Anti-capitalism need not degenerate into pathetic demands for a face-lift to
a system that is itself always pointing to a future beyond it. The invective
found in Empire that potential for change lies in the here and now is in
places being taken seriously by elements within the anti-capitalist
movement. It is a strong foundation block for a maturing movement. Empire
ends by opposing the misery of power with ‘the irrepressible lightness and
joy of being a communist’. Rebellion is cast as a project of love. Herein
lies a real potential to redefine a meaningful distinction between us and
them. Yet reading Klein and Hertz shows that the lines are not yet in the
least fully drawn. This project is one to be realised; until then we had
better keep the champagne on ice.