By Michael Marx and Marjorie Kelly, YES! Magazine
The solution is to bring corporations back under citizen control and in service to the public good. The main components of such a movement already exist--including organized labor, environmentalists, religious activists, shareholder activists, students, farmers, consumer advocates, health activists, and community-based organizations.
We've seen the power of ordinary people working together on the streets of Seattle in 1999, challenging the World Trade Organization. We've seen them achieve impressive results curbing sweatshop abuses, limiting tobacco advertising, challenging predatory lending practices at home and abroad, and protecting millions of acres of forests, to name just a few successes.
We've also seen the growth of community-friendly economic designs like worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, and land trusts that, by design, put human and environmental well-being first.
Focus on Corporate Power
Each of these movements advocates for healthy communities, for a moral economy, and for the common good. If they acted together, they would possess enormous collective power. But as yet there is no whole, only disconnected parts. Despite many achievements, the gap in power between corporations and democratic forces has widened enormously in recent decades.
Activists and citizens are beginning to turn this around. We can build on this work. But if we are to close the gap in power, our strategies must evolve. We need to dream bigger, to speak with one voice across issue sectors, and to act more strategically. We need to focus less on symptoms of corporate abuse and more on the underlying cause--excessive corporate power. We must recognize that ultimately our struggle is for power. It is not just to make corporations more responsible, but to make them our servants, in much the same way that elected officials are public servants.
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As individuals, we can relegate our identities as consumers and investors to secondary status, elevating to first place our identities as citizens and members of families and communities, people with a stewardship responsibility for the natural world and with moral obligations to one another. We can stop buying the story that government is inefficient and wasteful, grasping that the real issue is how corporations and money dominate government. We can stop thinking that the solution is more Democrats in power, and realize it is more democracy.
The transformative changes we need will not be on any party's agenda until a citizens' movement puts them there. It's up to us to build that movement. By joining together--by taking on the common structural impediments that block progress--we can make it possible for all of us to achieve the variety of goals we're currently struggling for.
How would reducing the underlying power of corporations affect today's issue campaigns? Ending corporate campaign contributions and political advertising would benefit a great many public interest causes. How often in recent years have initiatives to protect forests, increase recycling, provide health care coverage, and raise minimum wages been defeated by corporations who outspent their civil society opponents by a ratio of over 30 to one? We've all witnessed elected leaders move to the political center once they started receiving a steady flow of corporate contributions.