Amid the frenzy of your Christmas shopping, are you aware of the trimmings? Do you even notice when your shopping-list specifies Nike Airs, not just runners, or Tommy Hilfigger shades, not just sunglasses?
And in this maelstrom of shopping frenzy, did you notice a certain stilling of the tills for International Buy Nothing Day? Probably not.
Nonetheless, a dedicated band of activists in Ireland, and in places such as the US, Spain and the UK challenged our shop-till-you-drop culture by asking us not to shop for one day, November 25th. On the streets of Dublin and Galway they set up information stands and handed out leaflets to shoppers in an example of the growing anti-corporate movement which, buoyed by the Internet, is spreading all over the world uniting such seemingly disparate strands as anti-roads activists like the Glen of the Downs protesters, Reclaim the Streets in Britain, Indian farmers campaigning against genetically modified crops, indigenous rights groups such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the anti-sweatshop movement in the US.
Naomi Klein, a 30-year-old Canadian writer, has been hailed as one of the leaders of this rising international current of anti-corporate feeling, what she terms "the next big political movement - and the first genuinely international people's movement". Klein's book, No Logo, published this year, has been dubbed "the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement" for its damning indictment of an increasingly branded world. Charting the backlash against corporations and the brands they peddle, No Logo has inspired an increasingly politicised generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings, whom Klein tags "Generation Why", to question corporate power and attempt to reclaim that power for themselves. The book inspired the band Radiohead to ban corporate advertising from their UK tour. In London to speak at the V&A Brand New exhibition, which examines the phenomenon of the brand, Klein is concerned at the media perception of her as a leader within the anti-corporate movement. "I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being the face of the protest," she says. "I believe one of the strengths of this movement is that it is rightly suspicious of leaders and it doesn't have that kind of cult of personality leadership; in fact it has chosen not to have leaders like that." Klein concedes she is viewed by the media as the acceptable face of an often-misunderstood movement. It's a movement which only gets press attention when protesters throw a brick through the windows of McDonalds or clash with police, as happened at demonstrations in Seattle and Prague. "I know I am that respectable face but I am not the only one who plays that role," she says, "This movement is not just a bunch of kids with rings in their noses. That's only one aspect of the movement. It also involves international trade lawyers who are dissecting the WTO and political leaders and leaders of NGOs and human rights groups who are just not included in this debate and don't get on television and don't get interviewed very often.
"Nobody is going to write the bible of this movement, there is no Das Kapital of this movement, which makes it something I would actually want to be part of."
The latter half of the 20th-century witnessed the global onslaught of the brand. Streets from Dublin to Moscow, Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires bathe in the glow of McDonalds's ubiquitous golden arches while Coca Cola's advertisements portray it less as a sweet, fizzy drink, more a symbol of global unity.
The central thesis of No Logo revolves on what Klein sees as a seismic shift in the corporate world, occurring when corporations changed from selling products to selling brands. In a form of latter day alchemy, corporations, free from the grubby business of actually manufacturing products, concentrate on developing their brand as an elusive, intangible blend of aspiration, dreams and meaning.
Klein documents how ideas of freedom and democracy and the identity politics of feminism, race, ethnicity and gender have been hijacked by marketing and turned into little more than slick sales patter wrapped up in the guise of warm, fuzzy meaning. Racial harmony sells woolly jumpers for Benetton. Polaroid executives see their brand not as a camera but a "social lubricant". Nike adverts proclaim high heels to be a conspiracy against women. Gandhi, Einstein and the Dalai Lama are appropriated by Macintosh to convince us that if we buy an Apple Mac we too can "think different".
Klein feels that today's I-shop-therefore-I-am culture points at deeper failings within society: "I think the success of the brands is about our failure as a society to speak powerfully in the language of ideas. It's about the retreat of our politicians and intellectuals. People are drawn to these brands because they are selling their own ideas back to them, they are selling the most powerful ideas that we have in our culture such as transcendence and community - even democracy itself, these are all brand meanings now." Hidden behind the glossy veneer of the brand is the hard reality of the manufacturing process. The trend for out-sourcing, whereby production is transferred to subcontractors, usually in Third World freetrade zones, resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs in Europe and the US. Nike and Gap are just two of the companies which have been accused of exploiting sweatshop labour in Asia and Central America. In much of the West, corporations keep overheads down by employing low-paid, no-benefit workers on temporary contracts. There is a growing awareness of this disparity between the shiny brand image and the murky truth of manufacturing. This awareness, coupled with a growing disillusionment with the rampant corporate colonisation of ideas and physical space is, Klein believes, fuelling the anti-corporate backlash in a generation often dismissed as apathetic and apolitical. "What shocked me was meeting a new generation of activists who grew up with this as their culture, a generation who have been written off as beyond hope," she says, "They are longing for something else and when you see this happening in North America, in the most consumerist culture where kids grow up with ads in their classrooms and logos everywhere, when they start reclaiming space, space they never had, I think that is great reason for hope. "Here is this new generation who have seen the Havels and the Nelson Mandelas take power and have their economies lose control to the IMF. They are trying to get to the deeper roots of injustice and power relations, they are questioning structures more deeply than just saying we have to get our representative into office and then everything will be OK."
The anti-corporate movement, which Klein has described as "an amalgam of environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anarchy and the kitchen sink", has been criticised for its apparent lack of a unifying vision, seeming more like an incoherent mish-mash of ideologies, aims and objectives with no defined leadership. Klein points out a fundamental unity of vision within the movement: "What unites this movement more than anything else, and what unites people like the anarchists in Italy and Reclaim the Streets and the Zapatistas and the Indian farmers who are burning genetically engineered Monsanto crops, is first the spirit of reclaiming space and the idea of self-determination and also the idea that we can say no to the centralisation of power which is happening all over the world, the fact that power is moving everywhere to points and further away from our communities whether that is the WTO or the World Bank or the IMF or our own governments."
It goes beyond simply a question of choosing what things to buy, she says. "I think it is more about thinking about the role buying plays in our lives. I think it is more important not to get hung up on which brand is more ethical than others but to think about the whole way we approach shopping as entertainment, as a holiday, as being our main political sphere. "Personally, I don't respond well to people telling me what to buy and what's right and what's wrong about my lifestyle. I think it is much more positive to say you can be part of a movement and try to destigmatise activism. So many people say to me: `You know, I really agree with what you are saying but I'm not an activist so what can I do?' and I say to them: `Well, if you're not an activist there isn't much you can do.' "We must say to ourselves that it's not OK not to get involved in activism. We are citizens, we are human beings in the world, we are more than just shoppers and we are going nowhere if we can't reclaim that part of ourselves."
No Logo by Naomi Klein is published by Flamingo at £14.99 in UK