Lecture 5. No Logo and beyond

In 1998 Coca Cola ran a competition for schools to design a marketing plan for their product, one school, Greenbriar High School, Evans, Georgia, suspended a nineteen year old student for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt to the official Coke day celebrations (Klein 2000: 95).   Hector Liang, ex-chair of United Biscuits observed, ‘Machines wear out.  Cars rust. People die.  But what lives on are brands’ (Klein 2001: 196). In 1993, a Sri Lankan zone worker by the name of Ranjith Mudiyanselage was killed […] [after] complaining about a faulty machine that had sliced off a co-worker’s finger, Mudiyanselage was abducted on his way out of an inquiry into the incident.  His body was found beaten and burning on a pile of old tires outside a local church.  The man’s legal advisor, who had accompanied him to the inquiry, was murdered in the same way. (Klein 2001: 214-15)      

 Lecture five looks at Naomi Klein’s critique of globalised capitalism, noting that she injects a cultural note, examines the importance of brands and moves on to practical alternatives in her film The Take.Here are a list of discussion headings for the lecture.

Naomi Klein Social Dumping  

Free Trade Zones  

‘Insourcing’  

No Logo  

The Take (2004)  

Commons  

Cultural politics and production  

Seminar questions

1. What is the central thesis of ‘No Logo’?

2. How does Klein draw  on cultural critiques of capitalism?

3. Discuss the importance of social dumping and outsourcing?

4. How convincing are Klein’s economic alternatives to capitalism?  

Further Reading.

Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, London: Harper Collins
Mertes,T. (2000) On No Logo ( review) New Left Review , July-August 2000, pp. 168–72
Wall (2005) Ch 3.

http://www.nologo.org

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