la_vie_noire | (no subject)

I started to read Naomi Klein's No Logo (I downloaded it, of course, you know that).

This is a village where some multinationals, far from levelling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of $55 billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolete by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta. IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers." Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all.

It would be naive to believe that Western consumers haven't profited from these global divisions since the earliest days of colonialism. The Third World, as they say, has always existed for the comfort of the First. What is a relatively new development, however, is the amount of investigative interest there seems to be in the unbranded points of origin of brand-name goods. The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie's little outfits back to the child labourers of Sumatra, Starbucks' lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala, and Shell's oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.

Very good, isn't it? Until the exact next paragraph:

The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I'm told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an Anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.

Uhm. So let me get this straight, Klein. You write this for First World Liberal Westerners. Who just have to wake up from their comfortable lives and fight corporations. Never mind that the same Third World Activism have been doing this for decades by now. I hope I'm reading you wrong, but I'm having a feeling you see them (us?) as Those Poor People who have to be saved by White First World Westerners. We have agency, you know.

I just hope the rest of your book doesn't treat Developing Countries citizens as The Other (Object) That Has to be Saved and Protected because I would be pissed.

(To be fair, I just started reading, so I have no idea. It says hell of important things, but it just reminded me to a post I read casually today on one of the linkspams about HOW WE NEED THE POWERFUL WHITE PEOPLE BECAUSE WE HAVE TO BE PRACTICAL EVEN IF IT COSTS US OUR DIGNITY, and sorry, I don't subscribe to your magazine. Sorry again. Powerful White People? Treat other human beings as human beings. A snake isn't more important than me, I don't care how your white self may see it. That's all.)

ETA: Also, its introduction is treating Western Activism as a Salvation and totally dismissing the effect a lot of it really has in Third World communities of color (I'm just seeing the praising of White Environmentalist). But I don't know if these things will be mentioned again through the book.

ETA 2: Ah. Okay.

Most memorably, it led me to factories and union squats in Southeast Asia, and to the outskirts of Manila where Filipino workers are making labour history by bringing the first unions to the export processing zones that produce the most recognizable brand-name consumer items on the planet.

Okay. I'm still wary. "Most memorably" because it differs from the rest of the activism she mentioned by being from South-Asian people and not Westerners? You know that's weird. But still, I may have a better relationship with this than I thought. Maybe I'm just being uber-picky because I have had a bad day at on-line discussions.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The criticisms you're making here are also criticisms that IMO hold valid for the entire US antiglobalization movement of the late 1990s / early 2000s of which Klein was a part, so I wouldn't expect the book to get any less dualistic. (I still run into this kind of thing constantly in Americans who are starting to think about colonialism but haven't worked very hard at at yet). On the one hand, awareness of how global inequality shapes the global marketplace and makes us unequal players in it is very very good. On the other hand, this tendency to relentlessly cast people in the Third World as passive recipients of economic oppression pissed me off when I was a card-carrying member of the antiglobalization movement, and it pisses me off more now. (This is also why I tend to resist the tendency of US-ian leftists to cast their own country as a literal global supervillian that is Worse Than Anything Ever in The History of the World. I mean, yes, we can suck pretty bad, and we have more power with which to suck than anyone else, and we should try to quit being such jerks - but acting like everyone else is helpless before our super-special magical never-before-seen evilness is in its own way super-narcissistic and casts us - in my view - as somehow realer and specialer than everyone else on the planet.)

. On the other hand, this tendency to relentlessly cast people in the Third World as passive recipients of economic oppression pissed me off when I was a card-carrying member of the antiglobalization movement, and it pisses me off more now. (This is also why I tend to resist the tendency of US-ian leftists to cast their own country as a literal global supervillian that is Worse Than Anything Ever in The History of the World. I mean, yes, we can suck pretty bad, and we have more power with which to suck than anyone else, and we should try to quit being such jerks - but acting like everyone else is helpless before our super-special magical never-before-seen evilness is in its own way super-narcissistic and casts us - in my view - as somehow realer and specialer than everyone else on the planet.)

Yeah, exactly, I think I pretty much agree, even if I'm more wary of the imperialism apologists, but yeah, I don't like those Westerners who think their countries are the Big bad and only them are Worthy of take it down, because clearly it all focuses on them and their needs.

Hm. I think my main problem with this whole "let's anthropomorphize Imperialism and Imperialistic Powers" is that it forgets the main reason people should be supporting and fighting these battles is because people lives and dignity are being stepped upon. It's all about what Western importance, and what Imperialism represents, and how you aren't liberal enough if you don't fight the Man, and how Capitalism is a treat for western freedom, and how you... arg. Oh, you will be saving those poor Third World People meanwhile.