… is from pages 227-228 of Martin Wolf’s outstandingly good 2004 book, Why Globalization Works; Wolf here is responding to the charge, made conspicuously by Naomi Klein, that corporations’ advertising and logos impose – or are a sign of – some sort of slavery over consumers:
This charge – that corporations own customers – is another example of the lie that freedom is slavery. We are free to make choices, however. Insisting upon anything else demeans us. It is because we are free that corporations need to seduce us. Logos exist, therefore, not because corporations are strong, but because they are so weak.
(BTW, the huge corporation that works to assist Ms. Klein in her efforts to demean the customers of corporations and to discredit the bourgeois institutions that enable corporations to flourish is itself, thankfully, not so powerful.)
