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Today, 78 of the 100 world’s largest economies are corporations. They have more power than ever before and shape our lives like never before. If you are an activist, you will invariably confront a corporation. Yet for such a powerful institution, we often know remarkably little about corporations. How they are structured, how they work, how they are changing, their strategies.
For our ninth flagship State of Power report, we decided to delve deep into the origins, nature and changing dynamics of corporate power today with contributions by prominent activists and scholars worldwide. We hope you find its mix of video introductions, illustrations and insightful essays useful for your work. If you enjoy it, please do two things: first share it with networks, movements, individuals via email and social media, and second consider donating to TNI. We really need your financial support to keep doing the work we do.
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| Charming psychopaths: The modern corporation |
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In 2003, law professor Joel Bakan made a splash when his book and film, The Corporation, argued that corporations had the pyschological profile of a psychopath. Find out why Bakan believes 17 years later that corporations today may be even more dangerous.
> Read online |
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| Rethinking the Corporation |
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Conversation with Tchenna Maso, Nomi Prins and Barnaby Francis
Human rights activist, Tchenna Maso works in a Brazilian movement that helped win criminal charges against 15 managers of the mining giant Vale. Nomi Prins was a Goldman Sachs executive before she left to advocate for radical reform of the financial sector. Artist and activist Barnaby Francis made a 'deepfake' video of Zuckerberg that exposed Facebook’s unethical publishing practices. Read this fascinating conversation by three leading figures on the nature of today's corporation, how to best mobilise against its power and impunity, and what could replace it.
> Read online
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| The intelligent corporation: Data and the digital economy |
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Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami
The Corporation is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ as a result of its massive accumulation of data powered by algorithmic-based intelligence. Social movements need to grasp this change quickly.
> Read online
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| Beyond ‘China, Inc.'understanding Chinese companies |
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Lee Jones
119 of the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies are now Chinese, just behind the US (121). How does a Chinese transnational differ to a Western one and what are the implications for movements that confront their impacts?
> Read online
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| The corporate architecture of impunity: Lex Mercatoria, market authoritarianism and popular resistance |
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Adoración Guamán
Key to corporate power today is the way corporations have helped forge national and international law to protect them from accountability for human rights violations and to bolster a politics of market authoritarianism.
> Read online
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| Corporations as private sovereign powers: The case of Total |
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Alain Deneault
Canadian academic Deneault has faced lawsuits for his exposure of mining corporations. In this essay, he delves deep into oil giant Total to expose how corporations have effectively become private sovereign powers.
> Read online
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| The financialised firm: How finance fuels and transforms today’s corporation |
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Myriam Vander Stichele
The financial sector does not just provide a lifeline to corporations, it is actively helping them expand and changing the very nature of the modern corporation.
> Read online
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| The end of the Corporation? It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete |
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Marjorie Kelly
We need to envisage and create an entirely new concept of the company – a just firm – designed from the inside out for a new mandate: to serve broad wellbeing and the public good. Author of the award-winning Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution sketches out possibilities for a post-corporate future.
> Read online
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Mathias Hein Jessen
In this exploration of the origins of the corporation, Jessen shows how corporations have always been a fundamental part of how the state has governed and continues to govern social life. Understanding their intertwined relationship with the state means we can also imagine alternatives.
> Read online
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| Bright lights, tech city for the no-collar worker |
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Filipa Pajević and Carla Maria Kayanan
Every city seems now to be looking for its 'Silicon Valley'. But what's the reality for cities that embrace Big Tech? Exploring two-case studies in Dublin, Ireland and Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo in Canada, this essay explores how urban space and public policy is transformed by digital corporations and how the allure far exceeds the concrete benefits.
>Read online
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| Touching a nerve: How a peoples’ campaign at the United Nations is challenging corporate rule |
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Brid Brennan and Gonzalo Berrón - through their insiders account of the historic movement for a Binding Treaty - that using international human rights law as part of a broader strategy of mobilisation and struggle can address corporate impunity and access to justice for affected communities.
> Read online
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| The limits of law: why ‘corporate accountability’ will not change the corporation |
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Grietje Baars argues that law is fundamentally limited in its potential to challenge corporations' power and their harm, because the law has been created to facilitate capitalist accumulation and therefore the rights of the property-owning class to force others to submit to its will.
> Read online
What do you think? Let us know by emailing stateofpower@tni.org
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