The revenge of the brands: how corporate America turned Naomi Klein's anti-branding manifesto on its head.

• Author: Potter, Andrew
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book review

No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition, by Naomi Klein, Picador, 544 pages, $16

READING OLD works of journalism is like looking at old photographs, serving as a useful reminder that politics has its own fads and fashions that years later seem as incomprehensible as muttonchops or leisure suits. For the politically engaged, it can be embarrassing to be reminded of the forgotten fears that once loomed so large, the abandoned fights that at the time seemed so stridently important.

Recently, the 10-year anniversary edition of Naomi Klein's No Logo appeared in bookstores, complete with a new introduction by Klein herself. Originally released in early 2000, No Logo was an impeccably timed report on a growing youth movement that was rising up in response to the new-world-order agenda of liberalized trade, corporate outsourcing, and political deregulation that became known as "globalization."

Klein's writing caught the wave of anti-globalization protests that swept across the planet a decade ago, beginning with the massive and violent demonstrations against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in November 1999. Almost immediately, wherever world leaders gathered--international economic conferences, G8 summits, trade negotiations--they would be met with street protests and a parallel meeting of the planet's angry marginalia, including counterculturalists, environmentalists, socialists, labor organizations, and human rights activists. No Logo was quickly adopted as the movement's bible and, along with Nalgene water bottles and khaki cargo pants, became an essential part of the general-issue battle kit for campus lefties.

What are we to make of No Logo a decade on? It remains a passionate and ambitious snapshot of the newly globalized youth and consumer culture at the end of the 20th century. It is also an often infuriating work of agitprop that marries old Marxist prejudices about the market economy to a paranoid and conspiratorial account of the business of advertising.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be enough to dismiss it as a period piece, the journalistic equivalent to a box of old Polaroids. Sweatshops, the McLibel trial, Brent Spar ... weren't those the days? But that would be a mistake, since it would miss the way in which, in its quest to undermine the branded economy and expose the capitalist propaganda that motivates all advertising, No Logo inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade.

The organizing conceit of No Logo is the notion that the American economy has stopped making things and is now focused on managing brands. Where once a corporation might have employed domestic workers to make its jeans or sneakers or computers, now companies such as Tommy Hilfiger or Nike or Dell simply market their brand images while outsourcing the manufacturing to...