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Naomi Klein, No Logo : Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, London: Flamingo

No Logo is a phenomenon. In publishing terms, in political terms, as an intervention in the culture and as an exercise in melding investigative journalism, scholarship and polemic, it is the goal to which those of us trying to be engagés in the mass media aspire.

By the time I caught up with Naomi Klein last November, nearly a year after the book's publication in Britain, the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, who'd whispered about the book at first, were shouting about it. The legend goes that No Logo had by then become a bestseller, not through a publisher's massive promotion and publicity budget, but through the same sorts of networks of email and word-of-mouth that characterised the new, tech-savvy, anticorporate red-green political movement chronicled by Klein. I haven't had time to investigate the truth of this -- someone should, because the stakes in its truth or falsehood are high. But I dearly hope it's true, because old media conglomeration, the gradual safety-netting of the new media, and the cacophony of narrowcast voices on the web, often confused by techno-evangelists with "democratisation", are going to make it more and more difficult for profound -- and profoundly subversive -- voices to be heard.

Meeting Klein was a revelation. More officious, more grown-up, more guarded, more earnest and less funny than the written incarnation I'd known up until then, she was suitably suspicious about my own approach to her as a documentary film-maker (I was working at the time for The Economist, which had all but dismissed her and her anti-Bretton Woods comrades as spoilt, misguided rich kids stealing food from the mouths of third-world peasants), and about the mainstream-media circus which was accompanying this, her unofficial book tour for No Logo. Perhaps it was just that she was exhausted. On this visit she was such a star that even her publisher had woken up to her importance and put her up in the Groucho for a week, which was guaranteed to try her patience. Every broadsheet profiled her, she was doing TV, radio, activist meetings and a keynote presentation at a conference surrounding the "Branded" exhibition at the Victorial & Albert Museum, at which that preening eighties hangover Peter York bestowed on Klein the dubious honour of his faint praise. At each of the three public meetings I saw her addressing, she reserved particular scorn for the naff slogans that various broadsheets had attached to her: she was "one of the world's most influential people under the age of thirty", No Logo was "the Das Kapital of the anticorporate movement", etc. This last soundbite is, by the way, particularly vapid -- Das Kapital is the Das Kapital of the anti-corporate movement.

If I'm still digesting the import of No Logo, it's because it's pretty early on to be putting it in context, both historical and literary. After No Logo we've had One Market Under God (by Tom Frank, editor of the Chicago-based Baffler magazine, which published much of Klein's early work), a highly sophisticated analysis of the "market populism" hinted at in Klein's work. We've had George Monbiot's The Captive State, a coruscating analysis of the corporate canker at the heart of British public life. (Monbiot shared a platform with Klein at a World Development Movement meeting in Bloomsbury in November.) And we're about to get Noreena Hertz's The Silent Takeover, the important work of a management academic turned critic of corporate power.

Personally, though, I'm still equivocal about "the movement" to which Naomi has boldly committed herself. Which doesn't mean that I won't contribute to it when it comes to certain discrete issues or campaigns, but which does mean that I squirm at the anti-intellectualism, the arrogance, the dogged strategic wrong-headedness that particularly characterise the interventions of Reclaim The Streets (as opposed to some of their more thoughtful international counterparts, such as the Ya Basta! Zapatista support groupings). Still, isn't this, as Todd Gitlin observed, the trouble with any grubby-handedly real political movement? We still have to work through the contradictions between red and green, between cosmopolitanism and protection of local custom, between internationalism and regionalism, between economies of scale and small-is-beautiful, between the agrarian and the urban, between the romantic and the rationalistic, between the reformist and the revolutionary and, frankly between the cynical, the sceptical and the idealistic.

What wins me over about No Logo, though, is that in some way it lays the ground for these debates. Most importantly, it explicitly supersedes (as does the Baffler, where many of Naomi's findings and arguments were originally published) a post-sixties atrophying of the North American and European-academic left which led to unhealthy obsessions with identity politics, media representation and so on. And, unlike so many of these texts, it's popular, it's urgent, it's materially grounded and it cares for language in more than just a technical or ideological sense.