We must confront extreme corporate power. Here’s why
By: Nick Dearden
Date: 6 March 2023
Campaigns: General
Challenging the excessive power of corporations has always been central to our work at Global Justice Now.
In fact, the history of the modern corporation goes back several hundred years, its origins associated with the plunder and brutality of empire.
Today, in the age of the modern global economy, ever more powerful corporations have again become the central vehicle for extraction and exploitation.
That’s the focus of our Monopoly Capitalism conference on Saturday 25 March in London, as well as a special series of articles we’ve commissioned.
The basics of life
There’s a particular problem when corporations are allowed to control the basics we all need to live a dignified life – products like food and medicines – as Niall Glynn explains in his overview of the problems with monopoly capitalism.
There’s a problem when corporations are able to knowingly pollute the planet and destroy the environment, leaving others to pay for the cost of these actions in their lives and livelihoods, as Daniel Willis writes in his article on what big oil owes the world.
And there’s a problem when corporations can monopolise technologies central to public debate and discussion, to our working and social lives, as Parminder Jeet Singh explains in his article on big tech as a form of digital colonisation.
Public power, private interests
But this isn’t simply a problem of a small handful of big businesses behaving badly in specific sectors.
Concentrated corporate power now defines our economic model, strengthened and protected by the rules of the global economy.
Under such a regime, really extreme inequality is not a side note, it’s integral to how the economy works.
And it poses more general threats to our democratic rights too.
As US anti-monopoly campaigner Zephyr Teachout says, when private interests are allowed to use public power for their own private and selfish ends, this doesn’t simply encourage corruption, it is corruption.
We believe such an economy can accurately be described as monopoly capitalism.
We hope that this label can help mobilise people from across society not only in the important but specific battles against ‘big pharma’ or ‘big agriculture’, which we’ve been engaged in for many years, but in challenging an economic model which encourages corporate power.
Only then can we build a more equal, democratic and sustainable society.
Join us on 25 March…
