Naomi Klein denounces Obama as neocon wrapped in branding of transformative politics [View All]

http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/the-revenge-of-the-brands/1

The Revenge of the Brands
How corporate America turned Naomi Klein’s anti-branding manifesto on its head

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That is why Klein is so unappreciative of what would appear to be a great triumph for her side. Her goal was never merely to change corporate behavior. It was to change the entire economic system. As she sees it, the newfound emphasis on selling authenticity is just further evidence of capitalism’s ability to co-opt dissent and exploit seemingly subversive niches. Reform is always the enemy of revolution, and any change that maintains the overall status quo is to be viewed with suspicion. Writing about branding was only an excuse to talk about politics, and what led Klein to re-engage with the discourse of marketing after 10 years was the emergence of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president who is also a “superbrand.”

In the new introduction to No Logo, Klein denounces Obama as little more than a neocon who has wrapped himself in the branding of truly transformative political movements. Shamelessly helping itself to the iconography of Che Guevara, the rhetorical cadences of Martin Luther King, and the “Yes We Can” slogan of Latin American migrant workers, the Obama brand is just as hollow and inauthentic, as far as Klein is concerned, as the corporate brands she X-rayed a decade before. Whenever possible, she alleges, Obama “favors the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change.” He was happy to play the role of the “anti-war, anti–Wall Street party crasher” when running for the Democratic nomination, but promptly cut bipartisan deals “with crazed Republicans once in the White House.”

You can see where Klein is going with this. In No Logo, she argued that it is simply not enough for anti-brand activists to persuade Nike to improve its production methods or for McDonald’s to fix its environmental problems. Similarly, today it is not good enough for the most liberal president in ages to settle for half a loaf when the alternative is going hungry. In both cases, she argues, a profoundly corrupt system is left intact. Any suggestion that things might have changed, if marginally, for the better is dismissed as just more marketing spin.

Still, Klein claims to spy an ironic sort of hope in Obama’s victory. Just as the success of socially conscious branding is a sign that there is a longing out there for equality, diversity, and public space, she writes, the well of hope and expectation that Obama was able to plumb is decisive proof that there is still a tremendous appetite for social justice. That he has failed to deliver is almost beside the point: The market research is done, and all that is left is for genuine transformative social movements to exploit the niche.

This gets the order of exploitation exactly backward. A more likely consequence is something roughly parallel to what happened during the last decade in the consumer realm, where the very brand-driven corporate hegemony that No Logo so forcefully critiqued came back stronger than ever.

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