No Logo Legacy

Naomi Klein, in her tour de force 2000 work, No Logo, self-reflexively places herself in much of the book—either in retrospect as a brand-obsessed teen or more affectingly as direct observer of sweatshops or culture-jamming initiatives. I hope, then, that in this spirit it’s appropriate to begin this contribution to Classics Revisited with my own experience with the book. My work is quoted briefly, and then soundly criticized, in No Logo, as an example of overly reductionistic Marxist-doctrinaire antiadvertising perspectives. A friend of mine told me about this just after the book was published. Once I read the book myself, I was of course bummed, since the criticism was in such a clearly admirable work. But over the next year or two, many other friends as well as colleagues and students would e-mail or say to me, “Hey, you’re in No Logo!” When I pointed out that it was not a favorable mention, they would say, “But you’re in No Logo!” To be dissed in No Logo was in fact a career booster! It was an early hint to me of how widely read and admired Naomi Klein’s work was. By just about any measure, No Logo is one of the most influential critical engagements of corporate marketing, globalized production, and capitalist resistance of all time. It is an outstanding piece of both advocacy journalism and public scholarship. As an expose about large-scale advertising, it takes its place next to such works as Stuart Chase’s Tragedy of Waste (1929), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and more recently Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy (2004). As a spotlight on the cost-cutting production in, and social costs of, large-scale capitalism, it belongs to a class of muckraking eye-openers that includes Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any

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