Can we still prevent global catastrophe? Yes — by fighting corporate power, now

Humanity cannot — now — avoid troubled and turbulent times. Extreme events will powerfully influence the course ahead, the shape of things to come after the turmoil. They could help or hinder: provide the moral force for urgent action or preoccupy us with crisis management. 

Writers like Rebecca Solnit and Junot Diaz have described the revelatory, and potentially revolutionary, nature of disasters. Not only can they bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us, but they also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often cause or contribute to disasters, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible. 

In the process of causing things to fall apart, Diaz says, apocalyptic catastrophes also give us “a chance to see aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denial." Apocalypses are also opportunities: “chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change.”

The next 20 years will settle this issue. We will know by then the extent to which we are locked into global crises, and if so, what we can do to minimize their impacts and to shape the world that lies on the far side. 

I made these comments in a 2012 essay entitled “Whatever happened to Western civilization?” in the Futurist, the magazine of the U.S.-based World Future Society. The essay was itself a reflection on a 1993 Futurist essay, “The West’s deepening cultural crisis.”

So are disasters, piling one upon another, providing the moral force for urgent action? Well, we haven’t had to wait 20 years to see the choice we have made between deep systemic change and the management of specific calamities. As I feared, governments have become shockingly irrelevant in failing to match their responses to the magnitude of the challenges facing us (what I call a "scale anomaly" or "scale discrepancy"). 

This is despite the growing evidence and the insistent warnings by experts that we risk societal and civilizational collapse — and even evidence that collapse has already begun. Governments have, instead, become ever more preoccupied with trying to deal with a growing cascade of natural, social and political upheavals, some of their own making, others the result of intensifying global trends.

Running out of time to save the world

This situation has made me reconsider what we should do about our predicament. One theme of my work has been culture and its importance to human well-being and futures. (My 1993 Futurist essay focused on how modern Western culture is failing us, including arguing that the many serious problems we faced — seemingly intractable economic difficulties, a widening social gulf, worsening environmental degradation — were fundamentally problems of culture, of beliefs and moral priorities.) 

Cultures define and describe how we see the world and our place in it — and so how we live and behave. In a sense, cultures "permit," and so limit, what we can do. As I outlined in an earlier Salon essay, we need to remake Western culture if we are to meet the challenges confronting us. The magnitude of this transformation is akin to that from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the medieval mind to the modern mind. We face another rupture in our view of ourselves that will change profoundly how we live. 

I now accept, however, that that window has closed, at least for now. The shift in political consciousness to focus on dealing with specific disasters and calamities — fires, floods, wars, economic upheavals — means there is no longer the scope for a deep dialogue about cultural transformation.  We need a new emphasis.

I feel the same way about the recommendations of the recent roundtable report “A World Call to Action,” by the Club of Rome and the Council for the Human Future. It states, “Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks”; adds, “The crisis is already here, and will get worse”; and concludes, “Together, these risks endanger our ability to maintain a civilization, possibly even to survive as a species”.

The report says the crisis is vast, complex and interconnected. It will affect everyone on Earth for generations to come. There is at present no plan of action to resolve it, nor even a concerted effort to develop one:

This "polycrisis" is an interconnected web of challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss, global poisoning, food insecurity, resource depletion, retreat from democracy, nuclear proliferation, spread of war, uncontrolled use of AI, misinformation, economic, social and gender inequality, rising inequity, failing healthcare systems and geopolitical instability.

The report’s recommendations include a World Plan of Action, a U.N. People’s Assembly, an Earth System Council, an Earth System Treaty and an Alliance of Partners for the Planet, People and Peace.

However, the times are no longer conducive to such actions. And even if these structures were established, they would not be effective enough to avert our fate. Witness the current impotence of the United Nations in the face of the many global challenges, and the despair of its secretary-general, António Guterres, who has said that with climate change, “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”

As one of the roundtable participants, Jem Bendell, a sustainability expert and author of "Breaking Together," puts it: "Convening elite collaboration accentuates the illegitimate and ill-informed agendas of corporate and bureaucratic officials…. Calling for action to prevent collapse requires ignoring or downplaying the last eight years of data, which indicate modern societies worldwide are already at various stages of fracture and there is a momentum in their trajectories."

Corporate crimes against humanity

The times now demand a much sharper, simpler, more radical focus: an all-out revolt against the power of corporations. Of course, many activists already see themselves doing this. But it is not the way debate and action are framed in mainstream politics, the media or science. For example, debate about climate change focuses on the science of global warming and international and national efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide.

A greater awareness of corporate power and its abuse has advantages: This awareness is already in the public mind and the structures and procedures of action already exist; they just need to be massively scaled up. The attention to corporate harm also brings into focus the wide range of societal changes that we need to improve and sustain the quality of human life, not just, for example, climate change. It allows us to target specific wrongdoing, while drawing attention to their common roots.

Many Industries have worked relentlessly and ruthlessly to defend themselves against evidence of harm by sowing scientific doubt about the evidence, buying influence and shifting blame. They use the tactics and strategies developed by tobacco companies in countering smoking restrictions.

Writer George Monbiot warns that we face the greatest predicament humankind has ever confronted: the erosion and possible collapse of our life support systems, the speed and scale of which have taken even scientists by surprise. Yet the effort to persuade people of the need for action is not working. One reason, he says, is those who job it is to do this are "massively outgunned":

For every pound or dollar spent on persuasion by an environmental charity or newspaper, the oil, chemicals, automotive, livestock and mining sectors will spend a thousand. They snap up the cleverest and most devious communicators to craft their messages, offering salaries no one else can afford.

Monbiot says that after retreating over the last decade or so, climate and environmental science denial is back with a vengeance, fueled by corporate and political campaigns — many of which operate below the radar — and amplified by social media. Governments sit and watch, he says, as tiny warriors flail in the face of the corporate army. “We cannot build social consensus without the state. Where is it?”

The fossil fuel industry knew about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming decades ago but chose to spread lies so it could continue to make massive profits. It also opposed the introduction of unleaded gasoline (or "petrol," in much of the English-speaking world), causing untold harm to children in particular. (As a science journalist, I was involved in the campaign to remove lead from petrol in Australia in the 1980s.) The evidence that fossil fuel companies have been working behind the scenes to delay the transition to renewable energy, including spreading false stories about electric vehicles, is just the latest example of the subterfuge. 

The arms industry, through the military-industrial complex, promotes and profits hugely from war, including in Ukraine and Gaza. Chandran Nair, the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, says the world needs to wake up to the fact that the global military-industrial complex poses a grave threat to civilization:

We have failed to keep in check an industry that needs wars, death, and destruction to grow.… It poses an existential threat to world peace because it has captured — at least partially — the political economy of the most powerful country on the planet: the United States, the modern-day military state.”

On a matter I don’t fully understand, the big banks (whose practices caused the global financial crisis of 2008, and which were bailed out by governments and largely escaped punishment) are contributing to what banking expert Ellen Brown has described as a “ticking time bomb” or “casino” based on financial derivatives valued as high as several quadrillion dollars. (A quadrillion is one thousand trillion.) This far exceeds global GDP, which amounted to about $100 trillion in 2022. Investor Warren Buffett famously labeled derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

More broadly, a massive and growing media marketing complex culturally "manufactures" modern high-consumption lifestyles, which are inimical to the environment and to human health and well-being. Increasingly, the mainstream media have become agents of propaganda for failed government, corporate excess and unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles. There is increasing surveillance, censorship (including self-censorship) and suppression of dissent.

The growing influence of social media and the tech billionaires who own them is another concern that is testing government power. As media scholars Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd warn:

Is the world better off with tech bros like [Elon] Musk who demand unlimited freedom and assert their influence brazenly, or old-style media moguls who spin fine-sounding rhetoric about freedom of the press and exert influence under the cover of journalism? That’s a question for our times that we should probably begin grappling with.

Nothing here is new. Corporate greed and ruthlessness have been around for centuries, including their role in colonization and the building of empires. The shocking history of the East India Company, which transformed itself from an international trading company into an aggressive colonial power between 1600 and 1874, is a classic example. And activists, journalists and academics have long worked to expose these corporate crimes.

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To cite one recent example, in “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” investigative journalists Claire Provost and Matt Kennard reveal how transnational companies have been able to challenge and even overrule various state actions — and threaten our ability to respond to existential threats like climate change and nuclear war. 

They explore the international investment treaties that protect corporate profits; the foreign aid and global welfare system that nourishes corporations and helps them expand; the special economic zones that exploit poor workers, especially women; and corporations’ use of private armies and security forces to get their way.

The critical need to tackle corporate power

We must, then, use every nonviolent means — legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation — to reduce or even eliminate the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations which hold so much sway over democracy, government and our lives, and so often act against our common interests.

Some of their actions should be considered crimes against humanity, in that the term has been used to condemn acts that “shock the conscience of mankind." These acts include human-made environmental disasters, with the intention behind such a definition being either to register moral outrage or to suggest that they be recognized formally as legal offenses.

The link between my interest in culture and corporate malfeasance is through ideology. Culture has been said to exert a pervasive but diffuse influence on actions, providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life. In unsettled times, cultural change can become focused into an ideological contest, in which ideologies exert a powerful, clearly articulated but more restricted basis for social action. Today we are dealing, in the West, with the dominant influence of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism), which has captured government in the interests of those with money and power.

My aim in this essay is to strengthen the message that the destructive behavior of global corporations, set within the context of this ideological dominance and the threat to human civilization, needs to become the focus of political debate and action. If I have been slow to come to this position it is because my background is in science, not politics, and I chose to focus my own work on the less discussed, more fundamental drivers of humanity’s predicament.

I watched the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. For me, the most striking feature was that neither candidate showed any awareness of the need for fundamental changes in American society and Western civilization (although Trump did mention America’s decline and the peril of nuclear war). Harris affirmed her support for the military several times, contrasting her position with Trump's. As a retired general has reportedly said, "She’s more hard-line than most people think."

No matter who the president or presidential aspirant, and no matter their politics, gender or race, American politics remains captured by the status quo, dominated by corporate interests. Corporations are so deeply embedded in all our lives, and we depend so much on them for jobs and consumer goods and services, it is nigh impossible to draw back far enough to see how much we are controlled, even enslaved, by them. Explanations for the growing institutional mistrust and political alienation dwell on specifics such as cost of living, not on this deep dependency.

Yet the dependency runs both ways, and is a means for challenging corporate abuses of power. A study of nonviolent action by Dalilah Shemia-Goeke finds that multinational corporations are deeply entangled with states in reciprocal relationships of dependence. While this puts constraints on the ability of states to regulate corporations, power imbalances between business and society can be redressed when people withdraw the support on which corporate entities depend.

Shemia-Goeke reports that corporations depend on workers, consumers, investors, insurers, legislators and others: “When these constituencies withdraw their consent and support … their ability to pursue their goals and their power erodes.” Her case studies show how civil society campaigns have tackled the dependence of corporations on people and activated the latent power of people.   

In "Silent Coup," Provost and Kennard conclude:

Overall what we uncovered was dark, and suggested that much less is up for grabs in national political debates and elections than we’re led to believe — and that many of the scandals that occupy our media may actually be quite small in comparison to the silent coup that has been enacted against our democracies. But we also saw light. Around the world — as well as in historical archives — we had met and learned about people resisting these trends, and pushing for safer, healthier and more democratic futures.

In a 2022 Salon essay, I argued that a deep and dangerous divide exists in liberal democracies between people’s concerns about their lives, their country and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to face up to our predicament. They can’t see it, or if they can see it, they can’t imagine what it takes to address it. The same can be said for corporate culture.

For all my working life of over 50 years, scientists and others have declared each decade to be a time of reckoning for human civilization and our planet. As each decade passes without the necessary action, we declare the next decade to be the decisive one; we are still doing it. Now it is the 2020s that we claim to be the last chance to avert catastrophic consequences, with climate change uppermost in our minds.

In my 2012 essay in the Futurist, I concluded that we might no longer be able to get out of the mess we were creating for ourselves, but we could get through it. There was still plenty to dream of, and to strive for. 

Today, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.