Silence no more
Over the past couple of years thousands of activists have participated in anti-capital demonstrations from the City to Seattle, and most recently in Prague. They are often criticized for their violence and supposed ignorance. They are accused of being mindless vandals, who do not know a structural adjustment programme from a sweatshop, Wal-mart from the WTO. Although there is no denying the presence of a violent minority, the charge of ignorance is ill founded. For shunning fame (or infamy), quietly and thoughtfully, a theorist has emerged to powerfully guide this burgeoning movement. Her name is Naomi Klein and her book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, is one of the most influential of last year, as reflected in celebrity followers including Radiohead.
Revolution, especially as envisaged on a global scale has always been a predominantly male preserve. It is not that women have ever been afraid of change per se, but rather that the immediate consequences of violent social upheaval have always weighed more heavily upon them. Whilst men played the hero on the barricades, women were left struggling to feed their families. Nonetheless, Klein's attack on global capitalism threatens an upheaval, to the extent that it has even been described as the Das Kapital for the 21st century. Yet she remains adamant that "I am a feminist and this is a feminist book".
No Logo is an in depth analysis of the way that global capitalism functions and its human consequences. Klein, 30, has trained as a journalist and her research is rigorous. The book is packed with statistics but also with personal testimony. Klein herself visited sweatshops in the Philippines and the conditions she reports are truly horrific. There are rules against talking and smiling, toilets are padlocked and women have to urinate in plastic bags under their sewing machines. Workers have died after being refused time off sick. Moreover, exploitative working conditions are by no means just a feature of the developing world. For example it is not difficult to draw parallels with call-centres, often considered the sweatshops of the service economy. It is an issue of universal concern, but as long as the pay-gap persists and women continue not to receive equal pay for equal (and equally degrading) work it must also be a feminist issue.
Global consumption is a feminist issue because women are both the prime producers and the prime consumers of the goods manufactured under these conditions. Klein's book is a sustained critique of advertising techniques, equipped by teenage years spent hanging out at the mall, enthralled by their promise. We are all familiar with the ways in which advertising exploits women, but Klein also points out the way in which companies have harnessed, and consequently disarmed the imagery of the Left (think Benetton's 'anti-racism' or Nike's 'anti-sexism'). If the old politics of the Left has itself become a slave to consumerism then a new form of action would seem to be required. Advertising is about appealing to individual desires and as such it is up to each of us to reject the vision of society that multinationals present and replace it with our own. This is a grassroots movement, composed of a huge diversity of individual actions, from defacing posters, to protesting in Prague, from fighting for a children's playground, to choosing where you buy your coffee. And because it is a grassroots movement it is a movement that women can and must claim as their own. Perhaps what will then emerge are politics rescued from the structures of masculine political discourse, politics as plural as female experience itself. As Gloria Steinem has said "No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice or the universe".
12th Oct 2000