For the economic, political, cultural and environmental sovereignty or our peoples: let us put an end to the impunity of transnational corporations and corporate capture, let us defend democracy and our rights!

Geopolitical transformations and changes within the capitalist system are consolidating changes in the nature of conflict and the current correlation of forces between peoples, states and corporate power. Eight years after its launch, the Global Campaign re-asserts its vision of the world and reiterates the validity of its raison d’être: to dismantle corporate power as a hegemonic power, put an end to corporate impunity and reclaim the sovereignty of the peoples.

The transformations of capitalism

Neo-liberal globalization driven by the capitalist powers and their transnational corporations (TNCs) has condoned the savage exploitation of the world by the big economic and financial powers. These have gradually taken over our lives and the planet, creating a mantle of impunity through the dismantling of the rule of law, the systematic violation of legislation – protected by the architecture of international trade and investment treaties and contracts that give more rights to “investors” and capital than to peoples. Thus, the rights of the peoples have thus been systematically violated, the earth and its resources destroyed, plundered, contaminated, and popular resistance criminalized. Meanwhile, corporations continue to commit economic and ecological crimes, as well as crimes against people’s lives, with total impunity. Motivated by the desire for endless profit and the imperative to grow at any cost to maximize their profits, transnational corporations evade and avoid paying the taxes, fees and tariffs that constitute the fiscal base of the democratic State. They also promote corruption and try to pit the workers of different regions against each other. This reality takes on a much more dramatic and criminal character when it refers to the forced displacements that not only have local impacts but push entire peoples to flee from poverty – or wars – to struggle for their survival at the risk of everything, even their own lives.

The face and form of corporate power have also been transformed over the decades. Hand in hand with mega all-powerful financial capital, in an increasingly financialized world, large technology, information and communication corporations have consolidated themselves as the new winners, on a par with, or even surpassing, the traditional chemical, pharmaceutical, metallurgical, oil, mining, agricultural and trade industries. The new “platform economy” is pushing more people into flexible and precarious forms of work, in which platforms profit and workers bear the costs and risks.  New forms of exploitation overlap with existing ones and spread across the planet and into all sectors of the economy.

Another expression of these transformations is the modality of work used by transnational companies through the use of global value chains. These activities can be carried out by a single company or among several, which are connected in a single geographical location or spread over larger areas. Only 7% of the labor force is registered or recognized; the other 93% is absolutely invisible, working in precarious conditions and without recognition of their rights.

In this scenario, the identification of the protagonists of the corporate world, the successful entrepreneurs, or the new and old “billionaires” coexist with the fragmentation of responsibilities in the corporate decision-making. At the same time that it is possible to identify these new protagonists of today’s capitalism, there is the consolidation of the “corporate veil” resulting from the financialization of the economy and the hyper-accelerated dynamics of mergers and acquisitions, which has meant that individual responsibility for corporate decisions is increasingly left in impunity.

Finally, the transformation of capitalism in recent decades has led to the formation of the neoliberal state, which is presented as the cornerstone of a new expansionary phase of capitalism. This new phase is characterized by the domination of economic power (TNCs, banks, financial institutions, etc.) over political power (governments) through the dismantling of the state apparatus and its capture by the private sector. The objective of this corporate capture is simple: the State, and thus international intergovernmental organizations, must stop interfering in the logic of the market. The aim is to favor the privatization and liberalization of the entire public apparatus in favor of the private sector and put an end to the role of the state as the center of accountable power and decision-making. The state and intergovernmental organizations must only ensure a favorable business and investment climate for capitalist corporations.

Geopolitical transformation

The definitive ascendance of China as a world power, expanding its political and economic influence in the world, is an indisputable reality of the global system. China has become the global factory, world creditor and major international investor, and a  technological scientific pole. It is also the first international commercial partner for many governments as it extends its presence to all continents with its weight in the world correlation of forces strongly increases. At the same time, the United States, without abdicating its uncontested military power, is slowly declining in its responsibility as a global hegemon. Unlike in former times, Donald Trump’s United States had turned in on itself, renouncing “multilateralism” and slowing down the pace of negotiations on multilateral trade and investment agreements with the aim of giving priority to the specific defense of its national interests – to a sector of its corporations and to the narrow nationalist constituencies of its population, through bilateral or plurilateral free trade and investment agreements.

The new geopolitical disputes freeze or roll back the status quo of the international governance system. The so-called “crisis of multilateralism” is both an effect and a cause of this geopolitical transformation. The decision to defund the system of multilateralism by the powers that created it, especially the United States, is related to the difficulties perceived in the “democratic” rules that give equal representation to states that are “not equal in fact”. It is posited that this adds to excessive bureaucratization that hampers the implementation of the policies adopted by the system. All this has contributed to an interpretation that gives less relevance to multilateralism and, therefore, to its economic and political maintenance. This political-economic minimization of the UN system will only be reversed by the force and sustained pressure of social movements, sovereign peoples and committed states.

As a replacement, a parallel private multilateralism is under construction – or rather a multistakeholderist approach to global governance – long advocated by the World Economic Forum. The persistent hollowing out of multilateral institutions resulting in their failure to respond to global problems has made it easier for the owners of capital and its organizations (companies, business associations, philanthrocapitalist business foundations, business forums, among others) to create funds, partnerships, “alliances” and other mechanisms to take over the different aspects of global governance outside of government institutions. Education, health, migration, asylum, the seas and many other areas already have seen such private mechanisms emerge to set standards, norms, agendas and public policies. At the same time, the owners of capital are advancing on the formal take-over of decision-making at the UN system through the establishment of a multi-stakeholder governance structure, of which Goal 17 of the SDGs is undoubtedly the starkest example. The co-optation of the international governance system by capital, named as “corporate capture”, has been racing ahead in the last decade and its negative impacts on people’s lives are massive.

Contrary to democratic principles, TNCs usurp institutions and, acting with the complicity of national ruling classes and economic elites, achieve the approval of laws and policies that allow them to continue plundering the wealth of nations and to maintain their predatory relationship with nature. They have blatantly used mechanisms such as Corporate Social Responsibility and voluntary self-regulation frameworks to privatize public policies and rehabilitate their image in the face of growing resistance that what is really needed is a Corporate Social Accountability regime.  Additionally, TNC control the large media, as well as new technologies that play a key role in ensuring the continuity of their hegemony through the dissemination of images that present the capitalist model as the only possible path to human needs fulfillment.

Political transformations

We have witnessed the ending of the popularly supported democratic governments in most of Latin America with the coups d’état in Brazil and Bolivia; the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Victor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India. Together with the  growth of ultra-right wing, neo-conservative and proto-fascist political expressions in various regions of the world, this is bringing us to a scenario hostile to the peoples and their demands for democracy, human rights, peace and social justice. Right-wing populism reaps the fruits of the economic failure of neoliberal globalization to provide well-being for people, while unscrupulously taking advantage  and aggressively using digital social networks to proclaim the absolute sovereignty of individualism, the culture of individual entrepreneurship and the progressive breakdown of collective reason, and of social solidarity.

Popular organizations and movements, especially feminist, LGBTQ, trade union, peasant, Indigenous Peoples, migrant, refugee and Afro-descendant communities and organizations, are persecuted and criminalized. But also leftist organizations, including political parties, face strong attacks. There is a firm intention and policy to dismantle organizations, not only at the territorial level, but in general the organizations and movements of the popular classes. In the face of this offensive, which today threatens movements such as the trade union and peasant movements, among others, it is fundamental to be alert and committed to defending the organizational expressions of the popular movements.

2020, a catalyst year for the transformations of global capitalism

The Covid-19 pandemic exposes all the above set of factors in a brutal way: a global health problem like this ought to have a coordinated response from the multilateral system. However, co-opted mainly by the interests of the large transnational health corporations, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has lost its capacity and is made to fail in its task.  Instead of a global coordination,  responses are again organized nationally, addressing particular vested interests, facilitating the spread of the pandemic and wasting the opportunity for collective efforts to, for example, quickly find a cure and implement massive vaccination all over the world. Health systems have fallen victim to neoliberalism and are increasingly privatized, with access to medicines and testing dependent on the patent system, which limits their access to the select few. All of this is promoted by the World Bank, the WHO itself, and regulated through international trade and investment agreements that protect pharmaceutical companies instead of the general population, frontline workers and public health systems.

We, the undersigned organizations and social movements invite you to join forces and build together this process of mobilization, organization and global campaign against the power of the transnationals and their crimes against humanity and against  Mother Earth.  We will mobilize a powerful popular movement with a class, social, economic, environmental and gender justice perspective, including a feminist and anti-racist perspective in solidarity and internationalist action for the defence of our rights and democracy. We will build a world free from the power and greed of transnational corporations – much to be done and we are steadily moving in that direction.

About the Campaign

The Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity (Global Campaign) is a network of over 250 social movements, civil society organisations (CSOs), trade unions and communities affected by the activities of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). These groups resist land grabs, extractive mining, exploitative wages and environmental destruction caused by TNCs globally but particularly in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

We signed it! Read the full campaign’s statement and know all the signatories: https://www.stopcorporateimpunity.org/call-to-international-action/