Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation

by Amanda Ciafone

Counter-Cola  charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
 
Coca-Cola's success has not gone uncontested. People throughout the world have redeployed the corporation, its commodities, and brand images to challenge the injustices of daily life under capitalism. As Ciafone shows, assertions of national economic interests, critiques of cultural homogenization, fights for workers’ rights, movements for environmental justice, and debates over public health have obliged the corporation to justify itself in terms of the common good, demonstrating capitalism’s imperative to either assimilate critiques or reveal its limits.

 

Genres: History

424 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2019

Reviews

[Dr Tejinder Singh Rawal · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book on evolution of capitalism.

[Tralala Tralala · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I expected from this book, but this reads like Marxist propaganda with a dose of white guilt. It's a non stop attack on capitalism, written by someone who's seemingly never worked in a corporation.
Obviously, business practices aren't always the best, but criticizing them without offering a credible alternative is just pissing in the wind. Makes me think of Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government except all others". I'd say the same for capitalism / market economy: really doesn't work that well, but all else that's been tried is way worse.
Throughout the book there's the unspoken implication that governments do it better, syndicates do it better, communities do it better, but where's the evidence, and how about "maybe, no they don't?".
I'm a westerner who's been living in a frontier market for 6 years now so I can relate to situations of local businesses or communities impacted by US groups. I'm not a Coca Cola fan by any stretch of the imagination, but this book is just unfair Marxist propaganda, and anyone who's intellectually honest and vaguely versed in human history will recognize that communism is the kind of cure that kills the patient.