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Yes Logo!

Corporations are here to stay. So why not give in to them? We here at The Stranger did. In fact, we've devoted an entire issue to them.

by Sean Nelson

n No Logo, Naomi Klein confronts the ugly truth of life in the corporate miasma. The book describes a world in which corporations, desperate to stave off the crisis of overproduction, use branding to brainwash consumers. Corporations have managed to replace the traditional model of goods and services--you make a purchase to fill a need--with a sinister economy that equates purchasing with "the spirit of individuality, athleticism, wilderness, or community." While Klein's polemic has managed to galvanize small groups of activists, resistance to corporate culture is increasingly futile. Calls to abolish the corporate state may be rhetorically gratifying, and even morally righteous, but they are about as realistic and effective as a vote for Ralph Nader.

Our "Yes" to Klein's "No" is not intended as a smarmy rejoinder, but rather as a simple statement of fact. No matter where you are in any city in the world, you need only turn your head a single degree in any direction to understand that, yes, the logo of big-business branding is omnipresent, and we have all been so compromised by it as to be complicit in a dirty scheme to replace discourse with product selection. And short of apocalypse, nothing is going to make it go away. There is simply no escaping corporate culture.

And not only is resistance futile, it's also counterproductive. Time was when it seemed not just possible but necessary to resist the sweep of corporate monoculture through protest, refusal, rejection. But corporate assimilation of so-called outsider ideas now seems to happen in a matter of hours. The style and energy of your resistance today will be used against you in an ad campaign tomorrow. This is not to say that an outsider book like, say, Thoreau's Walden couldn't be written today, but that if it were, it would be published by Warner Books, reviewed in Time magazine, selected by Oprah, and sold at Wal-Mart. In art as well as politics, what Thomas Frank calls the commodification of dissent is now complete.

With that in mind, we've prepared an issue which attempts, in some small way, to examine the reality of corporate culture as it applies to the culture we examine every week. Every section of this week's paper, from news reports to art reviews, swims in the mainstream that we are normally lucky or blithe enough to dismiss. Many readers will be quick to point out that The Stranger can hardly claim purity in this department, since we already cover plenty of major-label bands and big studio films--often to the exclusion of worthy local and independent artists and causes. Fair enough. But our cultural coverage--and at the risk of getting seriously moist, our argument--is a response to the totality of pop culture, leaning heavily toward "alternative" offerings, without writing them a blank check. But this week, we're all about mass culture, which, for most of the rest of the world, is the only culture there is. We cannot like it, but we can't not see it. Corporate culture is here to stay; you're soaking in it.

PIZZA MEANS DOMINO'S

If resistance is fuel for the sinister forces of the enemy, what's the alternative? Clearly, blind submission is no answer. Buying your morning cup of coffee at Victrola instead of either of the two nearby Starbucks locations doesn't change the fact that to most Americans, Coffee Shop means Starbucks--just as Video Store means Blockbuster, Pizza means Domino's, and Bookstore means Barnes & Noble. Or that going to the movies means going to the mall to watch giant-sized televisions. Or that voting for president means choosing between two barely distinguishable lapdogs of a corrupt political establishment. As the big picture grows ever bleaker, and noble ideas like patriotism and freedom of speech and choice are branded with the rhetoric of consumption--of purchasing goods not only to exercise freedom but to ensure it--what is a reasonable person to do?

No one has been able to answer this question satisfactorily, but a good start might lie in addressing matters rationally, putting aside the resentment, and focusing on what could be while letting go of what should be. Globalization, Free Trade, Brand Culture--these things are not going away, and pretending that we can end them is naive. We can, however, lead them.

But to do that we have to acknowledge some obvious truths. Like this one: The rise of Corporate America, and by extension, Corporate Planet, has resulted in changes that, however much it pains us to admit, bettered the lot of a great number of Americans. The dirty little secret of Marx and Engels is that the "law of increasing misery" has been proven false. "Accumulation of wealth at one pole," Marx wrote, "is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital." The prediction was that as profits soared, the lives of all workers would necessarily be diminished. Think Metropolis.

I'm no economist, but I know that the overwhelming majority of this country's citizens are not starving in the streets, are not slaving in subhuman workplaces, are not illiterate dupes. One need only reach for Upton Sinclair to see where industrial society was heading this time last century. Still, it would be moronic to suggest that just because we're out of The Jungle means we're out of the woods. Nor can one deny that American prosperity has been built on the backs of exploited workers around the world and at home. But corporate culture has created more happiness than it has misery, a fact that makes corporate power all that much harder to combat, much less defeat.

Only the eternal vigilance of a civilized society can bring corporate power to heel, and only by focusing our attention on corporations can we begin to restrain and reform them. We will, however, never be rid of them. Unfortunately, most Americans fall into two problematic camps: those who blindly bathe in corporate consumerism, unaware of the degree to which corporations control our every waking moment, and those who think that smashing windows, or holding "sumptuous international anti-corporate buffets" (as a local socialist organization did on New Year's Eve) will make corporate power go away.

Both sides could use a wake-up call from the rest of us, who are trying to navigate Klein's miasma with dignity and purpose. How do we stave off despair and lodge our demands for reform? Demoralizing though it may be to admit, in a world defined by consumerism, neither ballots nor bullets, but buying dollars have become (to paraphrase Michael Stipe) the only vote that matters. No Logo is a powerful dream, but it's a dream. Welcome to reality. Please come again. —Sean Nelson