The collapse of the old anti-capitalism

The democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were heralded as marking the unambiguous triumph of both the capitalist system and bourgeois liberal democracy. 'Real existing socialism' had been both practically and morally discredited. Even someone sympathetic to aspects of socialism such as the director of Russian Studies at Princeton, Stephen Kotkin, points out that the planned economy just could not deliver the goods. Rectification was impossible. The Soviet system had 'no mechanisms for self-correction'.1 Although it was once de rigueur for fashionable intellectuals to eulogise and extol the virtues of the Soviet system, as Paul Hollander recounts in Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society,2 'real existing socialism' as was has few defenders today. The only people to stand up for it now in the West are small groups of ageing men who stick together in Stalinist sects and remember their struggles of yesteryear and their fraternal visits from East European comrades.3

It was argued, most famously by Francis Fukuyama in his over-cited The End of History and the Last Man,4 that, with the manifest failure of the socialist experiment, the clash of ideologies was at an end. The broad consensus became that market-based economies had been shown to be the only ones able to deliver their people a better standard of living and bourgeois liberal democracies the only form of government compatible with human decency. The only debates that remained, or so the argument went, were to what extent capitalism ought to be regulated and how those who were unable to provide for themselves ought to be provided for.

To a significant extent this new consensus has survived the last ten years. To generalise, mainstream politics in the West is today, by and large, a discussion of how capitalism ought to be managed and how welfare ought to be provided. Major political parties are not advocating mass nationalisation. Even protest movements now talk the language of capitalism. Instead of proselytising against the evils of capitalism, the established campaigning organisations are more likely to be found holding seminars for the business community extolling the virtues of corporate social responsibility, or arguing that this or that aspect of the global economy ought to be 'reformed' in order to soften its harsher edges. Organisations such as Greenpeace International, while still being highly confrontational towards specific companies when they believe it to be appropriate, also spend much time telling companies that they should embrace environmentally friendly practices, or invest in renewable energy sources or some other 'green' technology, because it is in the companies' own economic interest to do so. Such organisations may not like capitalism, but they see it as 'the only game in town', and thus they can only hope to achieve anything by working within its framework.

The rise of the 'new' anti-capitalism

Over the past five years, however, the Western world has seen the rise of new protest movements that are challenging the ideological settlement that seemed to have emerged by the early 1990s. There have been large, often violent, anti-capitalist demonstrations and street events in most major Western cities. These demonstrations have usually been organised to counter some international financial summit or around some symbolically important day such as the first of May. These new protesters see as their targets what they perceive as the evils of globalisation, the supposed ever-growing reach of corporate power, and the insidious influence of corporate brands. At most, tens of thousands take part in each of these demonstrations. The underlying appeal of their message, however, goes much further than this. The violence of some of the demonstrators may be seen as somewhat extreme, but the fears that animate the demonstrators resonate with many.

The rise of this new protest movement has taken many by surprise. The protesters seem to be articulating a new language of social concern. What is their message? Do they have a new agenda that is radically different from the older anti-capitalist agenda? Or are these new issues simply a repackaging of old arguments? Are they a new marketing device? Today's protesters undoubtedly do not see the former Soviet Union and its satellites as any sort of model. Many do not even reject capitalism in its entirety. That is not the question. What is the question is whether the issues they are campaigning on today, the reasons they hate the market economy as it is currently constituted, are the same ones which animated earlier generations; whether the claims they are making are the ones that experience has shown to be false.

Anti-capitalist protest and the baggage of the past

This is a matter which affects their credibility. But it also affects something else. It is not just a matter of whether the 'new' protest ideology is in fact new but about whether it is based on new cultural impulses. Francois Furet concludes his magisterial study of the attractiveness of Communism by saying that 'the Communist idea will not rise again in the form in which it died ... [it] has undoubtedly come to an end along with the Soviet Union'.5 But those words suggest it might return under another guise. And Furet argues that people will be reluctant to accept that the society we have is the best possible. We are reluctant to accept that we are condemned to live in the world as it is. Democracy creates the need for a world beyond itself, a utopia.

If the new protest movements pull at the same heartstrings as the old, then to understand the protesters, it will be necessary to dust off the old analyses of the attractiveness of socialism, especially to intellectuals, and to re-apply these. Thus, for instance, Paul Hollander analyses the 'estrangement' of radicals from their own country, society and economic system.6 What is it that makes them not only ungrateful to the hand that has fed them with such historically incomparable largesse but full of hate towards it? He looks at the appeal to intellectuals and armchair warriors of 'force', of making history, of tidying up the world, of imposing theories on realities. He looks at their use of false moral equivalence.

At the end of the day the question of the relationship of today's critics of capitalism to yesterday's must substantially change the debate about the worth of their claims. If they are, in part or in whole, the inheritors of yesterday's protests then they are suddenly faced with baggage to defend. They are no longer free spirits to flit here and there denouncing this abuse of labour in India or of that field of crops in Essex. They are part of a historical movement and they have some very questionable and ugly events and tendencies to account for. This needs to be thought about and argued. It is not enough for them simply to argue that earlier attempts to replace capitalism went wrong, or degenerated, at such and such a point, or that earlier rejections of capitalism were not 'true anti-capitalism'. If any lesson can be drawn from history it is surely that utopian claims do not lead to utopian consequences Who is to say this movement will not degenerate, that this movement is the true face of anti-capitalism? Such easy dismissals of the past failures of anti-capitalism ignore the structural factors within non-market systems that led to these failings.

To think about the claims of the anti-capitalist, anti-corporate movement and their supposed novelty, I have deliberately taken those that look the newest and have proved the most attractive, those about brands. Are the claims being made about brands genuinely new, or are they simply a restatement of old, discredited claims about capitalism? Is anti-branding, in fact, simply a marketing exercise? To answer this one must look at the claims of the anti-branders and what there allegations are.

How anti-capitalists see brands

Brands are ubiquitous. Brands such as Coca-Cola, Levi's and McDonald's have even entered everyday language. Wherever one looks - in the high street, in advertising, within television programmes themselves, in the cinema, even in art galleries and at sporting events - brands and their propaganda confront one. These same brands now make their presence known regardless of where one is. MTV and Nike are to be found in London, New York, Moscow, Beijing, Bangkok, and Johannesburg. And where once brands were only the products they sold, they are now much more than that. Trainers are no longer just trainers, soft drinks are no longer just soft drinks, and coffee is no longer just coffee. For the brands do not simply sell a product, they sell a lifestyle. Drink this drink, wear these trainers, use this perfume, and you too will be sexy, young, athletic and western, you too will be glamorous, you too will have a beautiful partner - in short, you too will be happy. The brands manufacture anxieties to sell their products, they spend vast sums to create fashions and trends, and they make us believe that we are somehow not full persons unless we consume their products. The brands have colonised every facet of our lives.

The culture that the brands have created is a wholly materialist one in which people measure their own worth in the image of the corporation, namely by the colour of their money, not the contents of their character. And what is worse, the brands often sell this materialism as anti-materialism - nicely wrapped up as a facial scrub at £7.99, a self-assembly bookcase at £79.99. And what are the immense profits of the brands, the engines of their growth, builtupon? Exploitation - the exploitation of the poor in poor countries, especially women and children, working in the sweatshops and plantations of the South; the exploitation of the poor in rich countries through the casualisation of labour in the North; the exploitation of consumers everywhere who buy the brands' over-priced products in the elusive hope that these products might somehow bring them fulfilment and happiness; and the exploitation of the environment through the production of unnecessary goods.

This would be bad enough on its own. Even worse the brands portray themselves - with vast multi-million dollar budgets - as being caring, concerned and 'on our side'. They have appropriated a vibrant independent culture of rebellion, and turned it into just another sterile sales pitch. More than this, the brands frequently try to associate themselves with progressive causes - gay rights, the empowerment of women, environmental thinking. The brands are cynically seeking to colonise protest culture. They portray themselves as the solution to the problem that they themselves constitute. Their vast advertising budgets on their own would mean that the media could not afford to criticise the brands and the feel-good world view they propagate. What is worse is that the ownership of capital is becoming more and more concentrated and intertwined. The same companies own the news media and the entertainment industry and make vast synergistic profits from merchandising and the brands they build up. They are hardly going to challenge the branded world view from which they profit. We live in a world of synergistic censorship where the mainstream media will do everything to shore up the economic system from which they profit. The only way of combating these brands and their hegemonic world view is to show up the corporations behind them for the exploiters that they really are. In other words, branding is about building positive images around products; anti-branding is about dismantling these images and replacing them with negative ones.

Why and how anti-capitalists attack brands

The above is a snapshot of how the current crop of anti-corporate activists view brands in general. It is obviously a composite picture, but it does sum up the broad thrust of why activists are targeting brands so assiduously. It is why these activists have made their attacks on brands, alongside their attacks on the myriad international political and financial summits and conferences which they perceive as the incarnation of a global corporate wealth and power grab, the twin pillars and mainstays of their campaigns. The attack on brands is arguably the more important of these pillars, since it has greater popular appeal and is seen as more mainstream. Brands are more visible than the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization or the World Economic Forum and suchlike; these meetings have only emerged from a relative public obscurity to become occasions for major media coverage as a result of anti-capitalist attacks upon them. Publicity is obviously an inherent and essential requirement for a successful brand. This inherent visibility will make attacks upon brands seem more immediate and relevant, and thus have more popular appeal. The actions against international financial summits have come to be seen as extremist by the public due to the highly photogenic antics of what is admittedly a minority of violent, balaclava-wearing, menacing protesters. Anti-branding does not suffer from this image problem, again reinforcing its popular appeal.

While today's anti-corporate activists have common enemies, they are an extremely heterodox lot. They have divergent ideological bases for their views - some are anarchists; others every conceivable shade of green; a few still would describe themselves as Marxist. Most are best described as simply anti-capitalist or anti-corporate, having no clear end-vision of where they want to be, except away from where we are. They talk vaguely of building a more democratic state and society which is responsive to the 'true desires' of 'ordinary people', whatever and whoever these may be, not to corporate interests. This vagueness has been a cause of criticism of some of today's activists, and indeed of exasperation, for such veteran anti-capitalists as the noted British journalist and would-be revolutionary Paul Foot.7 But regardless of this, today's anti-capitalists are in agreement as to who the enemy is, if not as to what they want once the enemy is defeated. Type the name of any major brand - from The Gap to Starbucks, Levi's to McDonald's -into an Internet search engine, and sites will come up, as often as not above the brands own official sites, attacking that brand for its alleged abuses. These sites are usually slick and well-produced, and are often parodies of the brand's official sites. The anti-branding sites tend to link up to a whole gamut of other sites attacking other brands. For the activists the attraction of this kind of campaigning is that their message can reach a vast global audience. There is the added pleasure, from the activists' point of view, of knowing that this audience is obtained via the name recognition, achieved and maintained at huge expense, of those they are attacking. Nike, for example, keeps itself in public consciousness via an annual advertising budget of over $150 million.8 The brands are doing the activists' advertising for them; they are obtaining an audience for the anti-capitalist message. All the anti-capitalists, on the other hand, need to get their message across is a second-hand computer, a website, a few design conscious, IT literate activists, and, most importantly, a high profile brand they can parasitically piggy-back their message upon. It means a virtually no-budget campaign can suddenly have a very significant impact. The current anti-branding movement is very much a product of the Internet culture. Its messages could not have reached the vast audiences they have if it were not for the Internet. The protesters talk of censorship by the mainstream media, but they have found a way of circumventing the mainstream media and still obtaining vast audiences.

Of course the new anti-corporate activism does not stop with the Internet. Billboard advertisements are cleverly altered or defaced. The idea is to change what is being advertised from the brand itself to an attack upon that brand, from a consumer product to an attack upon consumerism. Using the imagery of consumerism in an attempt to question consumerism is, of course, not an entirely new phenomenon; it is the basis for such iconic American pop art as Roy Lichtenstein's overblown pastiches on advertising and cartoon strips and Andy Warhol's representation of Campbell's soup tins, or, in Europe, Italian artist Mimmo Rotella's use of advertising posters in his 'socially critical' collages. The difference, however, between this and the work of today's campaigners is that the campaigners are far more self-consciously political. They are not just playing with popular imagery and seeking to raise a few questions, but have a distinct political message to sell. The campaigners are also adept at staging attention-grabbing spectacles and publicity stunts to promulgate their positions. The anti-branders will seek out whatever vehicles are open to them, from pickets outside shops to turning court actions against them into trials of this or that corporation, in order to damage the reputation of the brands they are attacking.

The popularity of anti-branding: The case of Naomi Klein

This anti-branding message does seem to have popular resonance. This does not mean that the brands themselves are losing out, but anti-branding is itself acquiring a positive public image. For all the protesters' talk of censorship and the need to create alternative, Internet-based channels of communication, the anti-branding message has been very successful in breaking through into the mainstream media. A book which can be seen as both the manifesto and history of the anti-branding movement, No Logo9 was in the UK top ten best-sellers list for many weeks10, usually somewhere between Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution. No Logo has also been a major publishing success in the USA and Canada and a top ten best-seller in France.11 It can be found piled high in airport bookshops next to John Grisham and Jackie Collins, and has been the no1 best selling business book in the UK for many months, elbowing aside the usual diet of chief executives' memoirs and guides for aspiring young executives on how to be effective . No Logo has been described as 'a movement bible' by the New York Times and as 'capturing the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century' by that quintessential twenty-first century brand, Amazon.12 It has been the subject of the cover, and lead article, in The Economist.13 It has even been positively reviewed by image-conscious men's lifestyle magazine, GQ.14 This is no mean achievement for a radical political tract.

No Logo's author, thirty-something, Canadian Naomi Klein, has become something of a poster girl for anti-branding activists, and has been a favoured guest on radio discussions and news programmes. She has been sought out by the media to comment whenever attacks on corporations and their brands make the news. Major advertising agencies have asked Klein to give presentations to their executives. She, however, has refused these offers, feeling they would undermine her credibility.15 Klein has also been a star turn at the growing number of international anti-corporate gatherings, such as the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre,16 a city in Brazil whose local government is seen as something of a role model by many anti-corporate activists. These gatherings are being organised as the antithesis and supposed antidote to the 'neo-liberalism' of mainstream, establishment international gatherings, such as the favourite target of anti-capitalist protesters, the World Economic Forum, usually held in, and associated with, Davos, Switzerland. However, in 2002, as an act of solidarity for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, the World Economic Forum was held in New York, less of a role model for anti-corporate types. The 50,000 people attending the World Social Forum, could hear, along with Klein, assorted other heroes of anti-capitalism: French farmer-activist José Bove; South American leftist, populist politicians; 'intellectuals' associated with the high brow French paper, Le Monde Diplomatique, who believe their role is to give anti-globalisation theoretical rigour; and, in 2002 as it is an election year, various French Presidential candidates trying to outdo each other in their anti-Americanism.17 Klein has perhaps become the leading public voice for the younger generation of Anglo-American anti-corporate activists and their anti-branding message. The cynical might suggest that Klein's anti-branding has become itself a brand, with the help of her UK publishers, Flamingo, a brand of News Corp's (and thus Rupert Murdoch's) HarperCollins. To take this analogy further, as with all successful brands, she has her competitors.

Naomi Klein's competitors - Noreena Hertz and George Monbiot

No Logo is not the only recent English language example of anti-corporate polemic becoming a mainstream publishing success. Other publishers have sought to compete for this market by publishing their own similar, and similarly packaged, mass market tracts. Perhaps the best British examples of this are Heinemann's The Silent Takeover - Global Capitalism and The Death of Democracy18 by Noreena Hertz, and Macmillan's Captive State - The Corporate Takeover of Britain19 by George Monbiot. One thing the anti-corporate movement is clearly not suffering from, whatever they themselves might think, is censorship or exclusion from the mainstream, 'capitalist' media.

The success of these anti-corporate books is symptomatic of the popularity of the ideas that underlie them. John Lloyd, the associate editor of the left-of-centre British news magazine New Statesman, describing this movement, says 'Very rapidly - the speed perhaps reflecting the avidity with which the media swallow, chew over and regurgitate anything with the label 'new' attached - these themes have become part of the mind-set of the educated, especially the young educated, of most wealthy and middle-income countries.'20 He argues that far from marginalising the anti-corporate movement, it is to a significant extent the mainstream media's interest in it that has brought the politics of protest into the mainstream of current ideas. Whatever the reason may be, many undoubtedly see anti-branding and the ideas behind it, however erroneously, as new, daring, subversive, edgy. In short they are fashionable and popular. This popularity stretches much further than those who are inclined to go on demonstrations. For those who wish to be perceived as bright free-thinkers, who are willing to challenge the orthodoxy, parroting these types of views is almost de rigueur. If they want to be perceived as really on the cutting edge, liberally throwing Noam Chomsky into the conversation seems to do the trick.

When discussing No Logo and the branding of anti-branding, the British satirical magazine Private Eye suggests, 'with its glamorous author and groovy graphics [it] bears as many signs of the brander's stamp as the average tube of toothpaste.' It is easy to dismiss such comments as crass, glib, even sexist, but they do in fact illustrate the nature and techniques of anti-branding activism extremely well. For what the anti-branding movement does is take on board the culture, ethos, language and techniques of branding, and then use these to attack the brands themselves. The anti-branders believe that the consumer brands have appropriated radical ideas to sell their products, so they will appropriate the methods of branding, and the notion that image is everything, to attack the brands. They will not have the brand's budgets, but they will be able to piggyback on the brands' own renown.