Book Review: No Logo

No Logo - Naomi Klein

Over the last couple of decades, western society has been completely inundated with celebrity endorsements, billboards, commercials, and brands. Without even noticing, we have experienced a silent takeover of our public and private space. Festivals are now sponsered by car dealerships, the town square has been replaced by the mall and even our schools have been hijacked by the brands (Pepsico being the official Highland brand). In No Logo, Naomi Klein traces the history of corporate brands and their consistantly agressive tactics.
It's interesting to watch as more and more brand logos are popping up everywhere as fewer and fewer corporations own them (example: corporate mergers such as the recent Time-Warner). Klein points out that it has gotten to the point that most large corporations don't actually produce anything anymore; they simply own the "means of production", to quote Marx.
It used to be that corporations competed by producing the best quality product, or the newest innovation. Today, corporations like Nike simply hand down the task of production to the lowest bidding contracter. The contracter in turn searches for another contracter and again until the production ends up in a impoverished country such as Indonesia where the workers can be paid only a few cents an hour. The shoes that cost a few dollars to make are now marked up hundreds of dollars to sell to wealthy consumers in the west.
No Logo extensively covers all of this and what people are doing about it. Klein travels everywhere to the "free-trade zone" countries to parts of the west interviewing sweatshop workers, whistle-blowers and anti-globalization activists all the while writing in a modern get-out-there-muckraking style reminiscent of Eric Schosser (Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness). While some corporate themed books I have read tend to have an underlying political theme (such as Corporateering and the Corporation), No Logo is more extensive (500 pages) and largely focused on the cultural aspect of the corporations and how the affect our daily lives.