If I squint, tilt my head, and shut my left eye, all I can see out the window is 1932, straight down to the lake. Brown warehouses, oatmeal-colored smokestacks, faded signs painted on brick walls advertising long-discontinued brands: "Lovely," "Gaywear." This is the old industrial Toronto of garment factories, furriers and wholesale wedding dresses. So far, no one has come up with a way to make a profit out of taking a wrecking ball to these boxes of brick, and in this little eight-or nine-block radius, the modern city has been layered haphazardly on top of the old.

I wrote this book while living in Toronto's ghost of a garment district in a ten-story warehouse. Many other buildings like it have long since been boarded up, glass panes shattered, smokestacks holding their breath; their only remaining capitalist function is to hoist large blinking billboards on their tar-coated roofs, reminding the gridlocked drivers on the lakeshore expressway of the existence of Molson's beer, Hyundai cars and EZ Rock FM.

In the twenties and thirties, Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. These days, old Portuguese men still push racks of dresses and coats down the sidewalk, and next door you can still buy a rhinestone bridal tiara if the need for such an item happens to arise (a Hallowe'en costume, or perhaps a school play...). The real action, however, is down the block amid the stacks of edible jewelry at Sugar Mountain, the retro candy mecca, open until 2 a.m. to service the late-night ironic cravings of the club kids. And a store downstairs continues to do a modest trade in bald naked mannequins, though more often than not it's rented out as the surreal set for a film school project or the tragically hip backdrop of a television interview.

The layering of decades on Spadina Avenue, like so many urban neighborhoods in a similar state of postindustrial limbo, has a wonderful accidental charm to it. The lofts and studios are full of people who know they are playing their part in a piece of urban performance art, but for the most part, they do their best not to draw attention to that fact. If anyone claims too much ownership over "the real Spadina," then everyone else starts feeling like a two-bit prop, and the whole edifice crumbles.

Which is why it was so unfortunate that City Hall saw fit to commission a series of public art installations to "celebrate" the history of Spadina Avenue. First came the steel figures perched atop the lampposts: women hunched over sewing machines and crowds of striking workers waving placards with indecipherable slogans. Then the worst happened: the giant brass thimble arrived -- right at the corner of my block. There it was: eleven and a half feet high and eleven feet across. Two giant pastel buttons were plopped on the sidewalk next to it, with wimpy little saplings growing out of the holes. Thank goodness Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist and labor organizer who lived on this street in the late 1930s, wasn't around to witness the transformation of the garment workers' struggle into sweatshop kitsch.

The thimble is only the most overt manifestation of a painful new self-consciousness on the grid. All around me, the old factory buildings are being rezoned and converted into "loft-living" complexes with names like "The Candy Factory." The hand-me-downs of industrialization have already been mined for witty fashion ideas -- discarded factory workers' uniforms, Diesel's Labor brand jeans and Caterpillar boots. So of course there is also a booming market for condos in secondhand sweatshops, luxuriously reno-ed, with soaking tubs, slate-lined showers, underground parking, skylit gymnasiums and twenty-four-hour concierges.

So far my landlord, who made his fortune manufacturing and selling London Fog overcoats, has stubbornly refused to sell off our building as condominiums with exceptionally high ceilings. He'll relent eventually, but for now he still has a handful of garment tenants left, whose businesses are too small to move to Asia or Central America and who for whatever reason are unwilling to follow the industry trend toward homeworkers paid by the piece. The rest of the building is rented out to yoga instructors, documentary film producers, graphic designers and writers and artists with live/work spaces. The shmata guys still selling coats in the office next door look terribly dismayed when they see the Marilyn Manson clones stomping down the hall in chains and thigh-high leather boots to the communal washroom, clutching tubes of toothpaste, but what can they do? We are all stuck together here for now, caught between the harsh realities of economic globalization and the all-enduring rock-video aesthetic.

JAKARTA -- "Ask her what she makes -- what it says on the label. You know -- label?" I said, reaching behind my head and twisting up the collar of my shirt. By now these Indonesian workers were used to people like me: foreigners who come to talk to them about the abysmal conditions in the factories where they cut, sew and glue for multinational companies like Nike, the Gap and Liz Claiborne. But these seamstresses looked nothing like the elderly garment workers I meet in the elevator back home. Here they were all young, some of them as young as fifteen; only a few were over twenty-one.

On this particular day in August 1997, the abysmal conditions in question had led to a strike at the Kaho Indah Citra garment factory on the outskirts of Jakarta in the Kawasan Berikat Nusantar industrial zone. The issue for the Kaho workers, who earn the equivalent of US$2 per day, was that they were being forced to work long hours of overtime but weren't being paid at the legal rate for their trouble. After a three-day walkout, management offered a compromise typical of a region with a markedly relaxed relationship to labor legislation: overtime would no longer be compulsory but the compensation would remain illegally low. The 2,000 workers returned to their sewing machines; all except 101 young women who -- management decided -- were the troublemakers behind the strike. "Until now our case is still not settled," one of these workers told me, bursting with frustration and with no recourse in sight.

I was sympathetic, of course, but, being the Western foreigner, I wanted to know what brand of garments they produced at the Kaho factory -- if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook. So here we were, ten of us, crowded into a concrete bunker only slightly bigger than a telephone booth, playing an enthusiastic round of labor charades.

"This company produces long sleeves for cold seasons," one worker offered.

I guessed: "Sweaters?"

"I think not sweaters. If you prepare to go out and you have a cold season you have a..."

I got it: "Coat!"

"But not heavy. Light."

"Jackets!"

"Yes, like jackets, but not jackets -- long."

You can understand the confusion: there isn't much need for overcoats on the equator, not in the closet and not in the vocabulary. And yet increasingly, Canadians get through their cold winters not with clothing manufactured by the tenacious seamstresses still on Spadina Avenue but by young Asian women working in hot climates like this one. In 1997, Canada imported $ 11.7 million of anoraks and ski jackets from Indonesia, up from $4.7 million in 1993. That much I knew already. But I still didn't know what brand of long coats the Kaho workers sewed before they lost their jobs.

"Long, yes. And what's on the label?" I asked again.

There was a bit of hushed consultation, and then, finally, an answer:

"London Fog."

A global coincidence, I suppose. I started to tell the Kaho workers that my apartment in Toronto used to be a London Fog coat factory but stopped abruptly when it became clear from their facial expressions that the idea of anyone choosing to live in a garment building was nothing but alarming. In this part of the world, hundreds of workers every year burn to death because their dormitories are located upstairs from firetrap sweatshops.

Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the tiny dorm room, I thought of my neighbors back home: the Ashtanga yoga instructor on two, the commercial animators on four, the aromatherapy candle distributors on eight. It seems the young women in the export processing zone are our roommates of sorts, connected, as is so often the case, by a web of fabrics, shoelaces, franchises, teddy bears and brand names wrapped around the planet. Another logo we had in common was Esprit, also one of the brands manufactured in the zone. As a teenager I worked as a clerk in a store that sold Esprit clothes. And of course, McDonald's: an outlet had just opened near Kaho, frustrating workers, because this so-called bargain food was squarely out of their price range.

Usually, reports about this global web of logos and products are couched in the euphoric marketing rhetoric of the global village, an incredible place where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-business, and "global teens" share, to borrow a phrase from a Levi's Web site, "a world-wide style culture." Everyone from Coke to McDonald's to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM's long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.

It hasn't taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalization to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss façade. More and more over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.

This is a village where some multinationals, far from leveling 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 labor 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 laborers 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.

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.

I must stress, however, that this is not a book of predictions, but of firsthand observation. It is an examination of a largely underground system of information, protest and planning, a system already coursing with activity and ideas crossing many national borders and several generations.

Four years ago, when I started to write this book, my hypothesis was mostly based on a hunch. I had been doing some research on university campuses and had begun to notice that many of the students I was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making into their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufacturers, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research.

They worried that their education was suffering, as institutional priority shifted to those programs most conducive to private-sector partnership. They also had serious ethical concerns about the practices of some of the corporations that their schools were becoming entangled with -- not so much their on-campus activities, but their practices far away, in countries like Burma, Indonesia and Nigeria.

It had only been a few years since I left university myself, so I knew this was a rather sudden change in political focus; five years earlier, campus politics was all about issues of discrimination and identity -- race, gender and sexuality, "the political correctness wars." Now they were broadening out to include corporate power, labor rights, and a fairly developed analysis of the workings of the global economy. It's true that these students do not make up the majority of their demographic group -- in fact, this movement is coming, as all such movements do, from a minority, but it is an increasingly powerful minority. Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.

At around the same time, in my reporting for magazines and newspapers, I also started noticing similar ideas at the center of a wave of recent social and environmental campaigns. Like the campus activists I was meeting, the people leading these campaigns were focused on the effects of aggressive corporate sponsorships and retailing on public space and cultural life, both globally and locally. There were small-town wars being waged all over North America to keep out the "big-box" retailers like Wal-Mart. There was the McLibel Trial in London, a case of two British environmentalists who turned a libel suit McDonald's launched against them into a global cyberplatform that put the ubiquitous food franchise on trial. There was an explosion of protest and activity targeting Shell Oil after the shocking hanging of Nigerian author and anti-Shell activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

There was also the morning when I woke up and every billboard on my street had been "jammed" with anticorporate slogans by midnight bandits. And the fact that the squeegee kids who slept in the lobby of my building all seemed to be wearing homemade patches on their clothing with a Nike "swoosh" logo and the word "Riot."

There was a common element shared by all these scattered issues and campaigns: in each case, the focus of the attack was a brand-name corporation -- Nike, Shell, Wal-Mart, McDonald's (and others: Microsoft, Disney, Starbucks, Monsanto and so on). Before I began writing this book, I didn't know if these pockets of anticorporate resistance had anything in common besides their name-brand focus, but I wanted to find out. This personal quest has taken me to a London courtroom for the handing down of the verdict in the McLibel Trial; to Ken Saro-Wiwa's friends and family; to anti-sweatshop protests outside Nike Towns in New York and San Francisco; and to union meetings in the food courts of glitzy malls. It took me on the road with an "alternative" billboard salesman and on the prowl with "adbusters" out to "jam" the meaning of those billboards with their own messages. And it brought me, too, to several impromptu street parties whose organizers are determined to briefly liberate public space from its captivity by ads, cars and cops. It took me to clandestine encounters with computer hackers threatening to cripple the systems of American corporations found to be violating human rights in China.

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

Over the course of this journey, I came across an American student group that focuses on multinationals in Burma, pressuring them to pull out because of the regime's violations of human rights. In their communiqués, the student activists identify themselves as "Spiders" and the image strikes me as a fitting one for this Web-age global activism. Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English. Activists are now free to swing off this web of logos like spy/spiders -- trading information about labor practices, chemical spills, animal cruelty and unethical marketing around the world.

I have become convinced that it is in these logo-forged global links that global citizens will eventually find sustainable solutions for this sold planet. I don't claim that this book will articulate the full agenda of a global movement that is still in its infancy. My concern has been to track the early stages of resistance and to ask some basic questions. What conditions have set the stage for this backlash? Successful multinational corporations are increasingly finding themselves under attack, whether it's a cream pie in Bill Gates's face or the incessant parodying of the Nike swoosh -- what are the forces pushing more and more people to become suspicious of or even downright enraged at multinational corporations, the very engines of our global growth? Perhaps more pertinently, what is liberating so many people -- particularly young people -- to act on that rage and suspicion?

These questions may seem obvious, and certainly some obvious answers are kicking around. That corporations have grown so big they have superseded government. That unlike governments, they are accountable only to their shareholders; that we lack the mechanisms to make them answer to a broader public. There have been several exhaustive books chronicling the ascendancy of what has come to be called "corporate rule," many of which have proved invaluable to my own understanding of global economics (see Reading List).

This book is not, however, another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, the book is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable. Part I, "No Space," examines the surrender of culture and education to marketing. Part II, "No Choice," reports on how the promise of a vastly increased array of cultural choice was betrayed by the forces of mergers, predatory franchising, synergy and corporate censorship. And Part III, "No Jobs," examines the labor market trends that are creating increasingly tenuous relationships to employment for many workers, including self-employment, McJobs and outsourcing, as well as part-time and temp labor. It is the collision of and the interplay among these forces, the assault on the three social pillars of employment, civil liberties and civic space, that is giving rise to the anticorporate activism chronicled in the last section of the book, Part IV, "No Logo," an activism that is sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule.

Copyright © 2000 by Naomi Klein