Resisting Money Politics
An interview with Naomi Klein
by Jane Slaughter

Naomi Klein, 29 and a native of Toronto, is a self-described "anti-corporate Deadhead." That means that if protesters are in the streets against the World Trade Organization in Seattle a year ago, or confronting the World Bank in Prague this September, she's there. Her 1999 book, No Logo, captured the spirit of the worldwide anti-corporate movement, spearheaded by the young, that confronts head-on the corporate domination of our cultural, political and economic space. Sometimes that movement is called "anti-globalization," but in fact its foundation is a profound internationalism.

No Logo both predicted "Seattle" and explained how corporations' profit strategies are backfiring, creating in the next generation a core of activists who have no stake in the system.

The Witness: You've written about the alternative politics exemplified by the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and by the protests at the Republican and Democratic conventions. Can you sum up what these protests are about?

Naomi Klein: Pretty much all the issues fit into the analysis that corporations have grown far too powerful and that there needs to be a citizens' movement to rein in that power.

It's important to understand that Seattle didn't begin it all. The U.S. is playing catch-up. Seattle was an important turning point, but there had been protests of that size, of that level of militancy, even with that level of diversity, in other cities around the world. In June 1998 there was an anti-debt, Jubilee 2000 protest where people created a human chain all around Birmingham [England] when the G-7 leaders were meeting there. That was followed by an anniversary of the WTO, in Geneva, with riots that went on for two days. Then, June 18, 1999, you saw the riots in London, in conjunction with the G-8 summit in Cologne. There was a counter-summit in Manila during the APEC [Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation] summit. Seattle was really about Americans joining an international movement in mid- stream.

The strength of Seattle was the coalition of young protesters and labor. It was Teamsters and turtles; that was what made it extraordinary. But Seattle was also about Jose Bove [the French sheep farmer who led an attack on a McDonald's outlet] coming from France and meeting the leader of the Philippines peasant movement, who then came and testified at Bove's trial in France; and maquiladora workers marching with steelworkers; and Indian farmers who had been campaigning against genetic modification of foods meeting British campaigners and American campaigners. That was the strength of Seattle--it was all those coalitions.

The internationalism of this movement is not just a hobbyhorse. It is the power that it has. And the internationalism is exactly where the World Trade Organization and the World Bank leaders around the world have targeted their attacks. This is where they're trying to break the coalition. Immediately after Seattle, The Economist magazine ran a cover of a starving Indian child: "Why are you trying to take my food away?" Their rhetoric is, "Global trade is a mass philanthropic project, and you people are just selfish."

T.W.: How do people who are acting out of a faith perspective fit into this grand coalition?

N.K.: A lot of the anti-sweatshop work has come from church groups. Sweatshops became a moral issue. But there's a real diversity in religious activism on the sweatshop issue. There are very radical religious leaders who see their work within the context of a labor movement, and then there are religious groups who use a charity model. The charity-based model has created a lot of discord among labor activists in the developing world, who aren't sure whether this is about supporting their right to form unions, which is really the only thing they're interested in, or is it about feeling sorry for young child laborers?

The charity model means that instead of looking at root causes of why Nike might use child labor to produce soccer balls, you just sit down and try to negotiate with the company, get them to pass a resolution. There wouldn't be worker involvement. It sends a message to workers in the developing world that this is not about building an international labor movement, it's just about appeasing the conscience of shoppers in America. One of the very few groups that has successfully unionized free-trade-zone workers is a church group in the Philippines. They're a very radical group that believes that the Catholic Church is the church of the poor, and what that means is that they have to bring unions into the free trade zones. If they had just been an independent union that had decided to try to organize those workers, there would have been a serious crackdown. There's a very clear and understood rule that you're not supposed to unionize the free-trade zones. But because that church was the absolute center of the community, that left the authorities very little room to move.

T.W.: You've written that much or some of the movement actually calls capitalism into question. What's the difference between anti-corporate and anti-capitalist?

N.K.: For many people, anti-corporate means a perception that corporate power has grown in a very unhealthy way. That we as nations have had a balance in our relationship with corporations that grew out of New Deal-type policies, that we learned as nations to rein in the power of our national corporations, and as corporations have gone global, we have lost the ability as citizens to counterbalance that with any kind of system of rules and regulations. So what we need is to figure out new ways to do globally what we did on a national scale. That's not anti- capitalist.

Then, for a lot of other people, anti-corporate politics is anti-capitalist politics with training wheels. It's a process that leads to a questioning of the entire system. You start by talking about Nike sweatshops, and then you talk about how the larger picture is really corporate power, and then the next thing you're talking about is how you have to smash capitalism. I've seen that happen with lots and lots of young activists. Which does not mean that they're socialists and communists, because a lot of them are green anarchists.

T.W.: In No Logo, you write that corporations' own strategies are creating resistance.

N.K.: What we've seen is a convergence of all these pockets of anti-corporate activism -- all these people deciding to go after corporations in a way that uses the power of corporate marketing against itself.

I was in my early 20s, in the most desirable demographic, and I experienced myself what seemed like a new voraciousness in marketing. We went from being really uninteresting to marketers, when they were still interested in baby boomers, to being stalked by marketers. All these ideas we thought were very cutting-edge were suddenly appearing in Benetton ads.

So one part of the resistance was a rise in ad-busting and culture-jamming, which is basically street-level media criticism. Culture-jamming takes many, many forms, but say, downloading an advertisement and changing the message so it says something that the company wouldn't want. Scaling up the side of a building and changing a Big Mac billboard. Changing Joe Camel into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine. For a lot of young activists that I know, that was a first taste of direct action against corporations.

Young people today have grown up with the idea that there isn't a moment's delay between when a new idea enters youth culture consciousness and when it gets sold back to you in the form of a Sprite ad. Everything's been co-opted, whether it's been feminism in Nike ads, or the very idea of being a rebel -- anything. This logically leads you to the idea that you want advertising to shut up every once in a while. So that's a shift.

And that attitude, of hand-to-brand combat, was spreading to different areas. You could see it in the McLibel trial in Britain [where McDonald's sued two environmental activists for libel]. They were using all the power of McDonald's against itself to, in effect, put this massive multinational corporation on trial, and by extension put the entire economic model on trial, very consciously.

T.W.: How and why did "branding" get to be so ubiquitous? What are some examples?

N.K.: When I started to write the book I didn't understand the difference between advertising and marketing. I wanted to write about anti-corporate activism, and I knew that a lot of the young people who were getting involved felt they were over-marketed-to, but also that they had the freedom to go after these corporations, because they in no sense expected job security, or basically anything, from them. They felt that corporations' messages were everywhere, but on an employment level, maybe you'd get a barista job at Starbucks [the people who serve the coffee], but it's not like they're the anchor of your community and you have to be loyal to them because they employed dad for 50 years.

By reading marketing books and magazines, I came across this idea that has gripped the corporate world in the last 15 years: If you want to be a successful corporation, you don't just have to advertise more and better. You have to produce a brand--not a product. If you read these books you get the sense that if you produce your own product, somehow you're lowly, you're a lower order of corporation.

Branding is this rush towards weightlessness, becoming a hollow corporation. Instead of a product, what corporations are about is the dissemination of a brand idea, whether that idea is "transcendence through sports," if you're Nike, or "community," if you're Starbucks.

T.W.: It used to be that corporations wanted to be seen as solid, like the Prudential rock.

N.K.: Now being solid is being cumbersome, being weighed down. This is what the downsizing of the late 1980s, early 1990s has turned into. All that restructuring and streamlining led to this fundamental questioning of production itself.

T.W.: Well, somebody still has to do the production of all those sneakers and coffee beans.

N.K.: Your contractors, your Taiwanese and Korean contractors who produce the stuff, they aren't the top order of corporations. The most respected corporations on Wall Street are the ones who have managed to figure out how to produce nothing. If you're a manufacturing company, the model is Nike, which doesn't own any factories; it's a brand-production machine. You hear a lot about companies embracing "the Nike paradigm." If you're Microsoft, the way you do it is by keeping a third of your workforce classified as temps. If you're Starbucks you do it by doing what everybody in the fast-food industry does, which is to convince their workforce that they're not really workers, that they're students, they're just trying to make a little bit of extra money, so they don't expect job security.

When I started to understand this mania in the corporate world for producing brands, not products, the two sides of the argument that I was researching in No Logo came together. One of them was this rise in more voracious marketing and the loss of public space to marketing, and the other was the loss of job security. It was the same piece of ideology fueling both of these phenomena.

T.W.: And so for the activists, it all fits: We hate you, Gap, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that you own sweatshops.

N.K.: Exactly. We hate the fact that you have colonized our neighborhoods, we hate the fact that you're co-opting youth culture in your advertisements, we hate the fact that you use sweatshops, and we also hate the fact that the only jobs we're going to get from you are as sweater-folders.

That's why the companies are so confused, because they've always assumed that they were dealing with 1970s-style boycotts -- they just had to stop doing the thing that people were upset about, and then all the anger would be defused. What they're finding is that their very active coming at people with public relations is just seen as more intrusion.

T.W.: What is the relationship of this sort of alternative politics to traditional electoral politics? Or is there any?

N.K.: The reason you have this generation of activists who've made the decision to go after corporations is that they have decided that the traditional means of politics, i.e., going after government, no longer works because government is so beholden to corporations, that essentially there's been a power shift. The way you respond to that power shift is by going to where the power is, and the power is with the corporations. They're realizing that in many cases the best way to get at policy is to get at the corporations themselves, and then you get the attention of your political leaders.

The best example of that might be the campaign against genetically engineered foods in Europe, which was an anti-corporate campaign that turned into a policy campaign around labeling. First the activists went after supermarket chains, and got many of them to agree not to carry GE foods anymore. Then, once a few corporations are successfully targeted, they often turn to the politicians and say, "This isn't fair -- you have to level the playing field and develop some sort of across-the-board legislative response," for instance, that genetically-engineered or modified foods have to be labeled. Which is what happened in Europe.

So it's an alternative to electoral politics. Just because you realize that it doesn't matter which party you elect, they're all going to do the same thing, doesn't mean you're going to just play dead; you have to find other ways to change the world. What was significant about the protests around both the Democratic and Republican conventions was that for a lot of younger activists, it was the first time they were even giving the time of day to politicians. And they were doing it not to say who to vote for, but to say, "This entire system is corrupt, but we're not just going to leave it at that. We're going to politicize the way in which money has taken over politics."

Freelance writer Jane Slaughter lives in Detroit, Mich.