This is the sixth article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic: states must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

If the preceding sections have diagnosed the problem, that growth is politically constructed, ecologically destructive, and militarily enforced, then the question becomes what material infrastructure could actually sustain a different kind of economy?

The collaborative finance (CoFi) space offers a way through. The field is growing, diverse, and often poorly understood. It spans mutual credit, community currencies, cooperative banking, commons-based resource management, and a range of mechanisms for organising exchange and investment outside the logic of interest-bearing debt and speculative capital.

The reason to focus here, rather than on public banking or green bonds or MMT-informed fiscal policy, is specificity. Those approaches work within the existing monetary architecture; they accept the operating system and try to run better programmes on it. Collaborative finance asks whether the operating system itself might be part of the problem, and whether communities can build their own. This is not to dismiss projects like state-led investment. Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the entrepreneurial state makes a compelling case that public institutions can and do drive transformative innovation when oriented around clear missions. (1) But the state alone is insufficient, particularly when states themselves are captured by growth imperatives and subject to the electoral cycles that make long-term ecological planning so difficult. What collaborative finance offers is a layer of material infrastructure that can function independently of, and if necessary in opposition to, the existing monetary system.

This matters for everything discussed so far. Capital flight is one of the most potent weapons wielded against progressive governments (at various scales). Investment strikes can kneecap a transition before it begins. If the money a community depends on is created, controlled, and withdrawn by institutions whose interests are fundamentally opposed to degrowth, then the transition is always at the mercy of those institutions. Alternative financial infrastructure is, in this framing, a security question as much as an economic one.

A new approach to finance begins by redefining purchasing power as a tool for ecological stewardship rather than a licence for endless consumption. Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” framework captures the operating space this implies, a safe and just space between planetary boundaries above and social foundations below. (2) Alternative credit systems can be designed so that currency is only valid within that space, enforcing systemically responsible purchasing power. Currency issued in a new economy could even be programmed to become unusable once a share of emissions or key resources is exhausted, preventing anyone (or any region) from spending beyond their ecological ceiling. In this way, money itself becomes an instrument of responsibility. Though it is worth mentioning that this should not be necessary, as assuming this system achieves widespread adoption, it would be under conditions of widespread changes to how our basic needs are met, and a collective detachment from viewing consumption as a means of self-development as we currently do.

This model also implies intentionally restricted markets for high-impact goods. Instead of allowing money to chase environmentally destructive products freely, new exchange mechanisms would steer consumption toward low-impact, necessary goods. One could deploy targeted exchange mechanisms that are accepted only for ecologically benign or essential purchases. A community might issue local food or transit passes that cannot be spent on fossil fuels or luxury imports. Such currencies function as built-in regulators of demand, directly tying what can be bought to what the planet can safely provide.

What we consider money thus transforms from a universal exchange token blind to impacts into a conditional medium of relationships that carries the planet’s limits within it, which is why the expected resistance from dominant capital groups will be so fierce. Recall Nitzan and Bichler’s insight that capital is the unit of account for differential power. Redesigning money is in this lens a direct attack on the instrument through which dominant capital groups measure, maintain, and enforce their dominance. Every feature described here – ecological ceilings on spending, non-convertibility, demurrage, local democratic control – is a feature that makes money unusable as a tool of accumulation. That is the point, and it is why alternative financial infrastructure must be built with the expectation that it will be fought.

Alternative currencies are only part of the picture. What is needed is a coordinated economic framework that can orchestrate multiple forms of exchange, monetary, care-based, and gift-based, within a coherent institutional architecture. Raworth and Mazzucato have both argued, from different angles, that economies must be understood as embedded in social and ecological systems rather than abstracted from them. The implication being that mutual credit networks, care economies, and gift economies should not be treated as separate, parallel experiments, but woven together into what we might call structured cooperative economies, frameworks that manage flows of financial, social, natural, and intellectual capital in an integrated way. This is what moves the conversation from “alternative currencies” to “alternative economic systems”.

Systems like this generate value in ways that conventional accounting misses. For a community that invests in urban tree canopy, permeable surfaces, and rain gardens, the returns are measurable: carbon sequestration, stormwater management and reduced infrastructure maintenance costs. Adjacent neighbourhoods see increased footfall, rising property quality (though not necessarily prices, if land governance is designed correctly), and improved aesthetics. At a systemic level, public health indicators improve, respiratory illness declines, mental wellbeing increases, and social cohesion strengthens as shared green spaces become hubs for intergenerational activities. At the broadest level, these investments support the growth of a regional green economy, create skilled employment, and enhance the city’s climate resilience.

The economics literature on ecosystem services, most comprehensively synthesised in the TEEB framework (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) and the subsequent development of natural capital accounting, has spent two decades trying to make these cascading layers of value visible. (3) The problem is that the existing financial system has no mechanism for recognising or pricing this value, nor of distributing its benefits to the multiple stakeholders who contribute to and depend on it.

A new financial system also demands a relocalisation of monetary circulation through regionally rooted credit systems. Rather than relying on global banks and mobile capital, communities might create networks of credit that keep exchange localised as far as makes sense. Mutual credit is inherently scalable thanks to its federated design, with networks being able to link with other networks, forming a web of exchange that spans regions and sectors. The Credit Commons Protocol formalises this with ‘nested’ mutual credit ledgers, where groups of any size trade internally with their own unit, and inter-group trades are accounted for by higher-level ledgers in a fractal hierarchy. In plain English, a small town’s credit circle can connect to a regional one, which connects to larger and global clearing networks, all without reverting to conventional money.

In such a system, local businesses and residents extend credit to one another for purchases, and balances are cleared within the community or federation rather than through multinational banks. Because ledgers can be interconnected in a web, even inter-regional trade can occur in a moneyless yet organised way, creating a pluralistic monetary system under local democratic control.

Modern mutual credit networks push this further, using fan clearing techniques to inject a small amount of external liquidity at the most connected points in a network, which can unclog whole webs of debt. They generate endogenous liquidity, meaning the network creates credit as needed from within, backed by the productive capacity of its members. With mutual credit, communities and enterprises can finance themselves, coordinate complex production, and invest in infrastructure without feeding the growth of traditional banks.

A key advantage of relocalised finance is regional economic resilience. By backing credit with local productive assets, communities insulate themselves from the wild swings of global markets. Examples like Switzerland’s WIR or Sardinia’s Sardex show that producer-issued credit can keep commerce flowing during wider financial crises by providing a medium of exchange that stays in local hands.

Perhaps the most provocative consideration in new financial systems is demonetisation, or gradually freeing whole sectors of the economy from the realm of money and markets. The core idea, as Timothee Parrique and others emphasise, is to reduce and eventually abolish society’s reliance on monetary exchange for meeting basic needs. (4) In this context, alternative exchange mechanisms are not ends in themselves but transitionary tools to expand the commons while the monetary economy contracts.

Many community currencies deliberately limit convertibility so they cannot be freely swapped for national currency or speculative assets. Sardex credits for instance cannot be turned into euros at will, which forces them to be used within the community for real goods and services. This design shields the commons from being siphoned into global financial circuits and starves speculators of any incentive to hoard. If you want value from a local credit, you must spend it into the community, meaning the currency only rewards productive, mutual exchange. Similarly, alternative financial mechanisms might come with demurrage (a built-in decay for holding onto currency) to discourage accumulation. This prevents the re-emergence of a rentier class living off interest or trading money for its own sake. Value should flow to those who actively contribute to provisioning and care, not to those who manipulate money. In effect, such financial infrastructure is rigged to favour use-value over exchange-value.

Finally, these alternative financial infrastructures must be woven into the broader fabric of post-growth governance, ensuring they are materially connected to energy systems, provisioning networks, and democratic oversight. A currency constrained by carbon allowances, for instance, only makes sense alongside an energy system that is transitioning to renewables and managed as a commons (so that allowances reflect real energy availability). Local mutual credit networks work best when anchored by local supply chains, food mutuals, community-supported agriculture, artisans, repair cafes, and renewable energy commons, which give the currency genuine backing in goods and services.

These entities, if deployed at scale, could redefine the principles of governance in the 21st century. Researchers emphasise that building and scaling up such systems will only succeed if they are “adequately politicised” or tied to political movements and community decision-making. (5)

Notes

1. Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press.

2. Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Random House Business.

3. TEEB (2010). The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature. A synthesis of the approach, conclusions and recommendations of TEEB. See also Costanza, R. et al. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26, pp. 152-158.

4. Timothée Parrique. The political economy of degrowth. Economics and Finance. Université Clermont Auvergne [2017-2020]; Stockholms universitet, 2019. English.

5. Gerber, J.-F. (2015). “An overview of local credit systems and their implications for post-growth.” Sustainability Science, 10(3), 413–423. See also Marshall A. P. &, O’Neill D.W. (2018). “The Bristol Pound: A Tool for Localisation?”. Ecological Economics, Volume 146.

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On October 4th, hot on the heels of the Stroud Festival of Commoning, Matthew Slater and I ran a workshop for the Bristol Commons, on building collective financial power.

I am very grateful to Matthew for offering to do this with me, after I posted in a chat about a potential CoFi study group. He does not live in the UK, so it was great to take advantage of him being there.

With this post, we are also introducing a new Collaborative Finance section on this Substack focusing on finance and monetary systems, especially the kind mentioned in our introductory post on CoFi. You can subscribe to this section separately.

What is money?

“A banana is not very suitable as money, as it will rot quite soon. But that also means you cannot hoard it, which is good.” Matthew was delighted with that observation from a young participant in our workshop. “Yes, indeed, that is what some money theorists have demanded of a healthy form of money: that it should age like natural goods do. Have you read up on this?” Turns out, he hadn’t.

The tasks at hand, to pick one of a list of objects and, in pairs, argue for and against it being money, spawned lively discussions around the room.

Another attendee commented after the workshop:

“Sure, a banana has a value, and can be traded or swapped. But it’s not permanent, I reasoned. Who, after all, wants a mouldy, brown piece of fruit?

But the question “What is money?” is, I quickly realised, slippery, tricky and profound all at the same time.

Other objects we were asked to consider as a currency included tally sticks, gold, Bitcoin and these large stones that were swapped on an island in Oceania.

This part of the workshop was crucial, I felt, for anyone new to the concept of collective financial power. Because unless you take time to think about money, you can’t even get your head round what the alternatives might be.”

When reflecting on the characteristics of money after the exercise, the first thing mentioned was that it needs to be generally accepted as such. We need to agree on what serves as money. The state plays a crucial role here, by declaring money that can be used to pay taxes with.

Looking at all the examples though, might it not be possible to issue money ourselves? In a smaller network of trust, where each of us had something of value to deliver, could the promises to do so function as a kind of money?

Money vs finance

With that question, we are jumping quite far ahead though.

Here is something else to contemplate first: If the definition of money is slippery, what do we understand by finance?

Before we started our exercise, I had offered some thoughts inspired by a book with a lot to say on that matter: The End of Finance by Massimo Amato and Luca Fantacci. From what I said at the workshop:

“At its root, finance is about settlement and bringing transactions to an end. In the Latin of the Roman Empire, finantia meant in fact the ‘amicable settlement of a dispute’, from finare or finire, to terminate, conclude.

We settle a debt-credit relationship amicably. The interesting thing here is that we are not yet talking about money. Somebody does something for somebody else, or gives them a good, and the other party renders something in exchange.

And it does not even have to be symmetrical, between just two parties. We can look at a group of people doing favours for each other, or saving up together, or sharing a resource, or sharing risk. When they agree how to do that, and follow through with their agreement, they settle on something.

So, in that sense, finance has an end as in a purpose, and also an ending, or a series of endings, where things are resolved.

If we look at how the word ‘finance’ is used today, it is tightly bound to money. And we have in fact a financial market where money itself is a product, where interest-bearing debts are bundled and sold off, and where more and more money is injected into the system and ends up in speculative markets that are detached from the actual economy of goods and services.”

Matthew then talked about his experiences with being part of, and writing software for, community exchange systems including Local Exchange Trading Networks (LETS); the potentials and limits of these systems; and the great value they can bring in strengthening communities.

Build your own

It was finance that we turned to again after looking at potential money-objects.

“Money can be seen as a financial service; a foundational one to modern finance”, as Matthew stated. “Let’s look at financial services in general.”

Next up, we asked volunteers to mime some financial services with the help of fake paper notes. This turned out not to be an easy task, but also quite fun. A performance that was supposed to mean ‘insurance’ led one audience member to ask if the answer was “organ donation”. ‘Splitwise’ was something only familiar to the younger generation, and unsurprisingly nobody knew about ‘Polymarket’ – including me before the workshop: a “cryptocurrency-based prediction platform” where you can place bets on anything you can think of, created by a Silicon Valley whizz-kid.

Insurance, credit, payment systems, pensions and benefits, savings and investments, gambling, and clearing, were the more general types of financial services we ended up with.

In the last exercise, people discussed in groups how we would design one of those services if we wanted to provide it for ourselves. I briefly joined a group that contemplated mutual insurance for farmers against foxes killing chickens. I learned that foxes take away the meat to leave it to rot before they can eat it – that’s why they kill so many animals at once.

Opening it up to the whole group, there was a wider discussion on the challenges of creating your own services. How do you ensure there will be enough resources, and how do you make sure people are rewarded fairly? Who holds the power over decisions?

The final slide had the title “It’s already happening!”:

The most immediate example concerned the building the workshop took place in. The Bristol-based organisation CoExist, together with the Bristol Commons and current studio residents, are about to launch a community-share offer to buy the Bethesda building, also called The Spark Space. Over £120,000 of a £400,000 target have already been pledged.

In Stroud, the Housing Commons is a new model of co-ownership that provides secure tenancies without having to take up a bank loan. Housing co-ops in Catalonia, and the Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany are further examples of community-owned housing.

LocalLoop in Liverpool uses algorithms to clear outstanding invoices between businesses in a local network for better liquidity.

Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) are a millenia-old way of saving money together and members taking turns to withdraw bigger sums of money.

Then there is LETS, timebanking, mutual credit and local currencies – and many more.

You can find more concrete examples in our post on Collaborative Finance.

Conclusion and future plans

Having created the workshop mostly via email correspondence, it was great to see it come alive. I was especially delighted to see family members who came along genuinely interested in the content, when this had been difficult to achieve by just talking about it. I also got feedback saying that the session had helped people see things in a new light.

I could imagine running this workshop again, but for now it is back to the original plan of the study group, and possibly creating a course with Matthew’s help.

There is already a Money MOOC that he ran with Jem Bendell for a few years from 2015, and which you can still follow online.

The idea of the study group comes from learning programming languages together with others in-person – which had worked really well.

Thematically, it’s a leap, and if there’s to be a book it will still need to be written, but I think it could work and is worth trying. The idea is to have a ‘lesson’ every four weeks, and a catch-up session two weeks after each of those, starting with the monetary system and the role of the state.

The aim is to look at both how our current system fails us and why, and what kind of systems could work better and have done so in the past. There is no easy way to make significant changes to what we have now, but there is still value in exploring these things I believe. If something practical can emerge on a small scale, even better.

If you are in the Bristol area and interested to take part in such a course, please get in touch.

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‘[E]conomic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.’ - Gilens & Page (2014)

Contents

1. Capital flight, investor strike and credit strike

2. Layoffs, hiring freezes and plant closures

3. SLAPPs

4. Global institutions

5. Credit rating agencies

6. Conclusion

This is one of a series of articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

I’ve argued that anti-capitalists should reject state communism as a route to a post-capitalist world. I then looked at how states and corporations have been united since the birth of corporations, how corporations set the agenda for politicians, and get what they want via pestering and manipulation and bribery, money and the ‘revolving door’.

In this article I look at the ways that corporations threaten and punish states to get their way.

The threats below become punishments, of course, when corporations follow through on them. In the next few articles I’ll look at what corporations get in return from their partner states.

Capital flight, investor strike and credit strike

Corporations threaten to transfer financial assets or operations abroad if policies or actions threaten their profits. That could mean relocation of factories, headquarters or financial reserves. So for example:

• If a government or unions in one country are pushing for better working conditions, higher corporation tax, minimum wage or better health & safety legislation, corporations threatening to take factories and jobs elsewhere can put a stop to that.

• If local laws prevent exports to certain countries, corporations can move their plants to another country. Transnational corporations don’t have to play by the rules of any particular country.

This is especially damaging for poor countries that are sources of raw materials for richer ones. Corporations in extractive industries like drilling, mining or logging register profits in jurisdictions (tax havens) with extremely low taxes, or no taxes at all, so that money that could have been used to alleviate poverty ends up in the pockets of the world’s wealthiest people.

The numbers are mind-boggling: trillions in wealth extraction versus billions in development aid. But the development aid is what people know about, and complain that if the receiving countries are still poor, they must be wasting the money we send them. And tax havens serve millions of companies and thousands of banks – way more than can actually do business in those (often very small) countries.

Corporations also have so many branches and affiliates in various countries that they can gain from payments between them. In most tax systems, interest payments are tax-deductible, while dividend payments are not. So an affiliate / subsidiary in a low-tax country lends money to a branch in a high-tax country. The high-tax country branch pays interest on the loan, and deducts the interest payment from its taxable income (reducing its tax bill in the high-tax jurisdiction). The low-tax country branch receives interest income, which is taxed at a much lower rate. So profit is effectively shifted from a high-tax to a low-tax regime. Poor countries have to roll over and allow their raw materials to be extracted without sharing very much at all in the resulting profits.

Capital flight means that even in the unlikely event that an anti-corporate government is elected, it won’t stay in power for long. Recently I saw Zack Polanski (UK Green Party leader) saying that ‘corporations destroy nature, community and democracy’. My position exactly. But the corporate press will tear him apart, and even if he gets elected, capital flight will take wealth out of the country and damage the economy, so that he loses the next election.

The result is a ‘race to the bottom’. Even pro-corporate institutions like the OECD now explicitly acknowledge this dynamic, saying that “[d]igitalisation and globalisation have allowed large multinationals to structure their global operations in a way that lets them shift profit and achieve effective tax rates on some or all of their income that are much lower than those paid by smaller businesses or workers. This practice has also put pressure on countries to lower their corporate income tax rates or offer incentives to compete for capital and investment, leading to a race to the bottom.”

Government ministers, finance departments and economic advisers know that profit and investment are mobile. Before passing legislation they think about how the markets will react, and whether investment will shift, companies will relocate and/or their competitiveness will be damaged.

That means the preferences of mobile capital can become incorporated into government decision-making even without corporations explicitly lobbying or threatening anyone. No corporation has to order governments to do this. Governments compete with one another because capital can move.

Ludovica Rogers of Co-ops UK puts it well:

“States are an integral part of the current system and therefore, the political parties who try to run them, even if with the best intent, end up obliged to follow the logic of “pragmatism” over the values they stand for, as they are called upon to run the state in a way that is efficient for the market economy and guarantees the competitive advantage of the country within the system. Political decisions of our governments have always been strongly influenced by capital, but in a world where finance capital has become the dominant factor, the rapidity with which it can flee a country that does not welcome it, means that it needs to be courted, just as the Tory government is explicitly doing, but also as the left wing parties across Europe, including Syriza, have been forced to do.”

Corporations (as well as pension funds, asset managers, investment funds and other financial institutions) can also withhold new investment or expansion in a country to get their way, rather than going elsewhere. States are much more scared of investor strikes than worker strikes nowadays.

Corporations and individual investors don’t act as a single bloc, but they’re connected through the financial system and the information ecosystem surrounding it. Together they have enormous structural power because governments depend upon the continued investment of capital. That capital is controlled by non-financial corporations, as well as by a vast financial system of banks, investment funds, pension funds, insurers and asset managers, while millions of individual investors also participate in financial markets. Their decisions are influenced by financial institutions, professional advisers, analysts and financial media. The result is not a co-ordinated corporate conspiracy, but a system in which the interests and expectations of capital become a powerful constraint on governments.

Credit strikes mean that banks and financial institutions refuse to buy or roll over a government’s debt. They stop showing up at bond auctions, demand prohibitively high yields, or refuse to refinance maturing debt. The 2011 European debt crisis is the clearest example. German banks publicly warned that they might stop funding government deficits, and the ECB pressured Italy and Greece through threats to withhold bond purchases. They made it clear that this would continue until governments implemented austerity policies, at the very least.

Layoffs, hiring freezes and plant closures

Corporations announce job cuts around elections (if their preferred candidate doesn’t win), or right after minimum wage hikes (or any other policy they don’t like), in an attempt to reverse the policy (as a bonus, it can shift the blame for decisions they may have been planning anyway). One of the clearest examples was in 2012, when defence contractor Lockheed Martin threatened to send layoff notices to 123,000 employees just days before the presidential election, as a way to warn politicians against making cuts to the defence budget. They knew that massive layoff warnings on the eve of the election would scare voters in key states, forcing politicians to take action to block defence cuts.

The same goes for threats to stop hiring. The toy chain The Entertainer announced that it would be freezing head office hiring and scrapping two planned store openings in 2024, in protest at the UK government’s National Insurance increase. It’s the same with threatened plant closures – corporations claim that a tax hike, new regulation or subsidy cut makes a facility ‘uncompetitive’. The message is: ‘if you pass this, we’ll close down, and your constituents will lose their jobs and blame you’. Exxon Mobil in Scotland provides one example.

SLAPPs

SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. It refers to a lawsuit filed to intimidate, exhaust, and silence individuals or organisations who speak out against them. When activists, journalists or NGOs attempt to expose or challenge corporate behaviour, corporations use the courts to initiate costly lawsuits, intimidating and exhausting the participants, thereby creating a ‘chilling effect’. The aim is to send a signal to potential critics that challenging corporate power is extremely costly. It’s a tool for suppressing democratic accountability, which doesn’t directly capture the state, but protects the state’s captured order from challenges.

Global institutions

We’ve seen how corporations capture states and regulatory bodies via social connections and the revolving door. The same goes for global institutions, which are also captured through institutional design. Corporations get to sit at the table with governments as stakeholders with equal standing. The classic example is the UN-World Economic Forum Strategic Partnership, signed by the UN Secretariat without a vote in the General Assembly, which embedded WEF staff directly into UN departments as advisors. The WEF’s board is entirely composed of major corporate figures, yet they were given direct access to shape UN decision-making with no formal accountability mechanism.

The same goes for many other global institutions – for example the World Health Organisation or the COP process. Many global institutions are dependent on corporate funding, and often the internal operations of those global institutions are kept secret – for example, the Bank for International Settlements, the WEF and many more.

There are too many ways that international institutions coerce and threaten governments to cover adequately in one short article, so I’ll just pick a couple. A very well-known and long-term example is the way that the IMF forces poor countries to adjust their policies to align with corporate priorities before they can receive loans. Another is the World Bank’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, that allows corporations to sue governments in private arbitration tribunals over policies that harm expected profits. For example, an Australian mining company sought $11.5 billion from Greenland (more than ten times Greenland’s annual budget) after the government banned uranium mining. They failed, but similar cases have targeted tobacco control in Uruguay, fracking moratoria in Quebec, coal phase-outs in Germany and many more. Governments have admitted scaling back action on environmental protection to avoid such claims.

Credit rating agencies

Credit rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, Fitch) provide credit scores (similar to your individual credit score) to any institutions borrowing money, including countries. They operate with quasi-regulatory power, as institutional investors are bound by legally-binding mandates to only hold assets above certain rating thresholds. A downgrade can mechanically force pension funds and insurers to dump a country’s bonds, triggering a self-fulfilling crisis, as bond yields are increased to attract investors, making it more difficult for countries to pay.

Credit rating agencies favour corporate-friendly policies, such as social spending cuts, corporate tax cuts and weaker worker protection. They’re corporations themselves, after all, although there are other ways that corporations influence them:

• First, the agencies are paid by the corporations or governments whose bonds they rate, not by the investors who use the ratings. The Securities & Exchange Commission has explicitly stated that this model creates a fundamental conflict of interest and incentivises agencies to improve ratings to please their paying clients.

• Second, agencies also sell lucrative consulting services to the same issuers they rate. Academic studies have found evidence that issuers who purchase these ancillary services receive ratings that are higher on average, suggesting a direct link between extra revenue and more favourable treatment. This is a conflict the SEC and European Commission have both flagged as problematic.

• Third, the major agencies are owned by large asset managers and financial firms. For example, Moody’s largest shareholder is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (around 14%), followed by investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard. One study found that after Moody’s went public, it systematically inflated ratings for firms affiliated with its largest shareholder, Berkshire Hathaway.

Conclusion

This article is about corporate threats and punishments. The threats are listed above – and the punishment is, of course, following through on them. Violence is the ultimate threat and punishment. Corporations kill union organisers and activists all the time in the Global South (although that doesn’t help them capture states directly). And although corporate pressure on governments via all the methods mentioned in this and the previous 4 articles can lead to wars that are very profitable for corporations, I’ll cover that in the next series of articles, about what states do for corporations in return. Corporations have legal personhood, but no corporation has ever been killed in a war. War is not something corporations fear, as they’re inhuman, literally.

States have to dance to the tune of international capital or investment will go elsewhere, along with jobs and growth, which spells disaster for any hopes of governments being re-elected. This is, I’m sure, one of the first things that’s explained to a new prime minister or president who might actually want to change society for the better: ‘Do what you like, as long as it doesn’t harm corporate interests’. The problem is that governments are national and the corporate empire is global. After the removal of barriers to the movement of capital (but not people) around the world, the financial world can move its money anywhere, looking for investment or speculative opportunities to maximise returns. This forces states into a position where they’re unable to implement policies autonomously, and can only compete with other states to serve corporate interests.

I’ve talked about how corporations have been tied to states since their inception, and I’ve mentioned all the ways I can think of that corporations control governments – in the West at least. There will be many more, because of the labyrinthine ways that corporations control institutions on which governments rely. Here’s an overview of the methods I’ve covered in the last 5 articles:

1. Think tanks

2. Corporate infiltration of education

3. Ownership of mass media

4. Astroturfing

5. Social connections and shared values

6. Lobbying and regulatory capture

7. Corporate money in politics

8. The revolving door

9. The threat of capital flight, credit strikes, plant closures and more (this article)

As well as all the above, corporations control states just by being so huge. Large corporations become so integral to government functions that agencies can’t sanction them for misconduct. Even the World Bank talks about the corporate capture of states (and here I am thinking I’m radical). The conclusion really is that it’s not possible to have an economy dominated by corporations, with the wealth concentration that brings, and democracy. Calling the Western political system democratic is absurd. In this sense, it’s no more democratic than China, Russia and Iran – but at least the BRICS alliance doesn’t run the world (yet).

I’ve received some pushback on this – for example that corporations are not a unified, co-ordinated force, and in fact compete against each other; and that some legislation is passed that corporations don’t want, like the recent Renters’ Rights Act in the UK. That’s fair, and I’d add that laws were changed after the Enron scandal, and top executives went to jail. So sometimes, yes, small victories can be had via the electoral system. If there were none at all, the legitimacy of the electoral system would collapse very quickly. But states can’t deliver the scale of change that we need, because that would have to include removing the corporate grip from the steering wheel, and the state has been captured too much for that. There isn’t much hope for state policies that undermine the corporate system generally. So yes, commoners can use the electoral system as a tool in some cases, but let’s not spend as much time on it as we do. Let’s focus much more on organising in communities and less time obsessively talking/thinking about party politics.

Having outlined all the ways that the state is captured by the corporate sector, I’d like to suggest that corporations don’t exactly have to ‘capture’ states at all. They were initially formed by states, and they’re part of the same beast – the same people, with the same aims. States are corporate, and corporations are state creatures, along with intelligence services, banks, the military, think tanks and global institutions – the Military-Industrial Complex, as Eisenhower labelled it. Just an old-fashioned empire, really, disguised to look like competing interests. I don’t know about you, but all this makes my blood boil. I find it absolutely absurd that we let these things happen. But in a corporate world, we have to suck it up, because there are no institutions with the power to overrule the corporate sector.

A lot of suggestions for how to prevent and reverse state capture by corporations involve policy proposals. For example, Transparency international do a good job of explaining how corporate money corrupts politics, but their solution seems to be regulation to keep corporate money out of politics. Is it not obvious why that’s not going to work? Change needs to be from the grassroots, to cut off their routes for extraction, which will stop them concentrating wealth in the first place. And a community-based, commons approach is the only way I know of that can do that.

We need excellent leadership to navigate the problems that are headed humanity’s way, and the electoral system just doesn’t deliver it, captured as it is by billionaire interests. In the following articles I’ll look at what states do for their corporate partners. It’s certainly not excellent leadership. It’s cowardice and capitulation. Corporations have their partner states. As we build commons, we’ll need ours. But they will be structured very differently, to serve human communities, not inhuman corporations.

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Agroecological practices being applied in Ankazobe, Madagascar. The land is managed with respect for its ecology – here, plants are grown in small holes to help them retain moisture and nutrients, which is needed in the dry, nutrient-poor ecology. Image from Cactus0625 on Wikimedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Farming buzzword purgatory

Depending on how often you stick your nose into the food and farming news cycle, you might have seen a bunch of terminology being flung about every which way. “Regenerative” is the current favourite plaything of a lot of talk from all kinds of political backgrounds (just a quick search reveals both traditional environmentalist groups like the Irish Green Party and right-wing MAHA mogul RFK Jr. say we should do regenerative agriculture). Add that to a long list of terms like sustainable, organic, cruelty-free…

…I can’t blame anyone for feeling like these things are just hollow buzzwords being slapped on packets of biscuits and cartons of eggs. It’s an understandable impulse. They often are.

Given capitalism and consumerism’s knack for diluting terms until they’re not much use apart from the marketing benefits, I want to clearly state the base ethos of agroecology and how it serves as a powerful means of survival and for building commons.

What is agroecology?

Imagine a community that wants to produce food on their land. Most farming practices, whether industrialised or not, start with the question: what do I want to farm here? Some consideration may be given to the ecology of the place, such as which crops are suitable or where to put fallow areas to support pollinators. The trepidation of many consumers to try unfamiliar foods narrows down the options to what is already considered a normal, good thing to farm.

Agroecology is a scientific and social movement that leads with a different question: what best suits this place? The unique ecology of a given location is centred. This includes the selection of species, how these species fit together, how the soil and water are managed, when/if to use burning, flooding, or grazing, and countless other things. The land is cultivated with the ecology and its history as a guide, seeking to boost biodiversity for the purposes of resilience and efficiency. It’s not back-to-the-land, embrace-tradition stuff, nor is it a call to redesign ecosystems into what we narrow-mindedly consider “good” (i.e., “greening the desert”). Traditional and indigenous knowledge can be paired well with experimentation and invention, so long as the focus on a specific ecological context is kept in mind. These practices are predicated on a deep, intimate connection with, and constant study of, the dynamic and specific character of the land.

Modern agroecology is championed by La Via Campesina, a grassroots peasants’ organisation who see it as empowering to downtrodden communities, healing cultures and the rifts between humans and nature, and as a route towards food sovereignty.

If you want to read a more comprehensive essay on the more historical and political aspects, I’ll point you to this piece by Andy Ciccone of the Poor Prole’s Almanac. As for an in-depth description of agroecological practices, Altieri and Toledo (2011) describe examples from Latin America and Khadse et al. (2018) discuss practices from India (which cannot simply be copy-pasted elsewhere… read on!).

A commons by necessity

By centering the ecology of a place, agroecology arguably necessitates a commons approach.

The non-human world does not care about property boundaries, and its landscapes and networks are too vast and complex for one person to handle. Chopping things up into parcels and homesteads only dislocates and alienates people from one another and from the life they’re trying to steward.

At the same time, putting the needs of the land first means that knowledge and practice will often be hyper-specific. Every place on the planet is different: different species, rainfall, sunlight, temperature, wind, humidity, seasons and seasonal variations, so on and so forth. Something that works in one place won’t necessarily work elsewhere. You’ll have to experiment, adapt, and/or try something entirely different.

This results in the communities carrying out agroecology – those with their feet on the ground and fingers in the earth – being the most knowledgeable and most capable of making good decisions (Altieri and Toledo, 2011). Subsidiarity is a natural outcome. (Ciccone mentions this briefly in the essay linked in the above section). Agroecology flourishes via campesino-a-campesino teaching, as in, farmers practicing agroecology teaching their peers, using their own land as a location and a tool for doing so (Bernal et al., 2023; Rosset et al., 2011). Hierarchical, long-distance agroecology (for example, if a national government tried to manage it) cannot keep its grounding in the local ecology without handing off power and responsibility. Agroecology must evolve into commons, or eschew its status as agroecology.

This is a characteristic of agroecology that differentiates it from other practices (e.g., the design system, permaculture1) which are typically top-down and have plenty of leeway for performing practices regardless of context (or even efficacy), simply because someone important said so; not to forget those practices that damage the local ecology. Agroecology’s centre of gravity is in the Global South, where it serves as a revolutionary basis for meeting the subsistence needs of communities (Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Khadse et al., 2018). There is room for experimentation, but not dogma.

I must emphasise the (normalisation of the) rejection of dogma and practice of critical reflection and reflexivity. It is sorely needed in most aspects of our lives, and rarely cultivated in Global North cultures. This aspect comes with an added bonus: the approach of agroecology casts a skeptical eye towards prescriptive, unsubstantiated claims2. If someone approaches with an idea of how things can run better, an agroecological culture says: okay, show me how it works, explain to me why it works, and where this idea comes from. Just because something works elsewhere does not make it work everywhere. Just because someone has credentials or is an expert doesn’t mean they’re unassailable. And, for good measure, just because a whole lot of people seem to say the same thing does not mean that thing is right. These pitfalls are traps lined with influencers who will gladly take your money to teach you context-deprived stuff about farming and community. I don’t think I’m alone in believing our culture could use a healthy dose of critical thinking.

Considering “food” is something that humanity is always going to have to think about, a food system necessitating a commons-culture is fertile ground for commoning in other spaces. If you take down the fences between yards and co-manage a landscape with your neighbours, your status as strangers dissolves. Collaborating, trusting, and sharing becomes everyday. Practicing rejecting the idea of a “one best way” to do things builds confidence and autonomy. Commons appear less utopian.

The logic of commoning comes more easily to people who have done it before and have seen it work. Agroecology is one such opportunity, one where commoning is not just an alternative but the best approach to achieve the practice’s goals.

Works cited

Altieri, M. A., & Toledo, V. M. (2011). The agroecological revolution in Latin America: Rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(3), 587–612. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.582947

Bernal, D., Giraldo, O. F., Rosset, P. M., Lopez-Corona, O., & Perez-Cassarino, J. (2023). Campesino a Campesino (peasant to peasant) processes versus conventional extension: A comparative model to examine agroecological scaling. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 47(4), 520–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2023.2164882

Khadse, A., Rosset, P. M., Morales, H., & Ferguson, B. G. (2018). Taking agroecology to scale: The Zero Budget Natural Farming peasant movement in Karnataka, India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(1), 192–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1276450

Rosset, P. M., Sosa, B. M., Jaime, A. M. R., & Lozano, D. R. Á. (2011). The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: Social process methology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1), 161–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2010.538584

This is the fifth article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic: states must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

If there is one takeaway from the analysis so far, it is that the Westphalian nation-state system, built on sovereign competition, militarised borders, and GDP-maximisation, is poorly suited to navigate safe passage to a sustainable future.

The climate crisis, resource constraints, and the need for equitable development all overflow national boundaries, and our primary political units jealously guard their short-term self-interests.

Timothy Morton has described climate change as an entity so massively distributed in time and space relative to humans that it eludes conventional understanding or governance. (1) The same can be said for biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the destabilisation of hydrological cycles. These phenomena cut across every boundary, temporal horizon, and institutional jurisdiction that the Westphalian system relies on. They cannot be governed by an architecture designed around bounded sovereignty because they are, by their nature, unbounded.

Gayatri Spivak draws a useful distinction here between two ways of thinking about our relationship to the earth. (2) The concept of the ‘global’ is an extension of the nation-state, an aggregation of territories into a totalising organisational logic. It sees the world as a surface to be mapped, divided, and administered. The concept of the ‘planetary’, on the other hand, acknowledges human coexistence with other species and systems on an earth that precedes, exceeds, and contains us.

For clarity, a truly sustainable politics cannot be anti-internationalist. But it must reject the flattened, human-centred map of competition, while embracing the planet (the living, entangled reality that makes any human world possible in the first place). Dipesh Chakrabarty pushes this further, arguing that climate change forces us to think of ourselves simultaneously as political subjects with histories and as geological agents embedded in deep time, a dual register that no existing political theory has adequately addressed. (3)

Post-Westphalian governance is rapidly becoming a necessity. As Claire Vergerio notes, the Westphalian system as we know it is built on a sequence of myths and inaccuracies, sovereign states as we know them are a relatively recent construction, and webs of complex governance and polities have long been the defining default of political organisation throughout human history. (4) Vergerio goes as far as to say that at this moment of global crisis, we must “imagine ways of organising the world that do not involve either nation-states or organi[s]ations of nation-states.”

We need governance structures that privilege human and ecological security over the prerogatives of individual states. Lattices of nested governance where local communities hold substantial power over their own affairs, but are also linked in larger cooperative networks that manage issues no village or city can tackle alone. This could take the form of bioregional federations, watershed-based governance for water resources, renewable commons infrastructure controlled by public/community partnerships, and transnational councils for managing shared forests or fisheries.

Elinor Ostrom spent decades documenting how polycentric and nested governance systems manage common-pool resources in practice, from irrigation systems in Nepal to fisheries in Maine to forest commons across the world. Her design principles for stable commons governance – clear boundaries, proportional costs and benefits, collective decision-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, and the right to self-organise without external interference – read like a blueprint for the kind of structures described above. (5)

Ostrom comprehensively dismantled the assumption that commons inevitably collapse without state or market intervention, with the evidence actually showing the opposite. Communities that govern their own resources, with appropriate nesting into larger cooperative frameworks, consistently outperform both centralised state management and privatisation. What gives Ostrom’s principles durability is something she was explicit about in later work, that they are conditions for systemic viability. Paul Lewis and Paul Dragos Aligica, writing in 2024, showed that the Ostromian approach to self-governance was deeply informed by cybernetics, specifically by the question of how a complex system maintains coherence across multiple scales without centralised control. (6)

Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, developed to analyse exactly this problem, maps closely onto Ostrom’s design principles. (7) Each level of a nested governance structure must have sufficient autonomy to manage its own variety, while remaining coupled to higher levels through defined channels of coordination and accountability. The implication is that nested governance is not a pragmatic compromise between local and global scales but closer to an architecture that complex adaptive systems require to remain viable under changing conditions.

A governance structure that collapses local variety into centralised uniformity feels oppressive and often alienating as much as it is brittle. The capacity to respond to local disturbance and to absorb shocks without system-wide failure depends on the distributed semi-autonomous structure that both Beer and Ostrom describe. This matters for a post-growth transition because the pressures ahead, such as climate shocks, resource disruptions, and political volatility are the kind of heterogeneous disturbances that centralised systems handle worst and polycentric ones handle best.

Nested structures alone, great as they are, are insufficient. They require a theory of how different levels communicate, coordinate, and make legitimate decisions across scales. Bruno Latour spent decades arguing that the modern separation between nature and politics, objects and subjects, has paralysed our capacity to govern shared ecological challenges. (8) His actor-network theory proposed that governance must account for the agency of non-human entities, and that political representation must extend beyond the human franchise if we are to compose a common world rather than simply administer a divided one. Donna Haraway takes this relational ontology in a different direction, arguing for a politics of ‘staying with the trouble’ that resists the temptation of either techno-optimism or despair, and instead commits to building multispecies alliances rooted in specific places and relationships. (9)

The practical question is how legitimacy gets constructed in polycentric, non-electoral governance.

Enter, deliberative democracy. James Fishkin’s work on deliberative polling demonstrates that randomly selected citizens, given adequate information and structured deliberation, consistently produce more nuanced and well-reasoned policy recommendations than either elected representatives or opinion polls. (10) John Dryzek extends this into what he calls ‘deliberative systems’, arguing that legitimacy in complex governance arrangements comes not from any single decision point but from the overall quality and inclusiveness of the deliberative process across multiple forums and scales. (11) Citizen juries, consensus conferences, participatory scenario development, and neighbourhood assemblies can all contribute to what Benjamin Bratton calls ‘planetary computation’, not in the technocratic sense of algorithmic decision-making, but in the sense of distributed sensing, modelling, and collective reasoning at a scale commensurate with the problems being governed.(12)

This also demands a fundamental rethinking of what commons governance is for. Ostrom’s framework is primarily about the governance of shared resources, preventing overuse and ensuring fair access. But the challenges ahead require something more generative. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that commons should be understood not as static pools of shared resources but as living systems of social practice – commoning – that actively produce and reproduce the conditions for collective life. (13) Peter Linebaugh’s historical work on the English commons makes a similar point, showing that the commons was never simply a piece of land held in common. It was a set of relationships, practices, and obligations that sustained communities over centuries. (14) Silvia Federici extends this into feminist political economy, arguing that reproductive commons – the shared work of care, social reproduction, and ecological maintenance – are the foundation on which any market economy silently depends. (15)

The question then is how commons governance moves from preservation to generation. The alternative financial systems discussed in the next article are one answer to this question. They do not merely preserve commons; they build the economic infrastructure through which generative commons can sustain themselves.

One further dimension that deserves attention is property. The modern liberal order treats property rights as foundational; sovereignty is territorial, and ownership is the primary legal relationship between persons and things. But this framework is already being challenged by movements that seek to extend legal standing to non-human entities. Ecuador’s constitution recognises the rights of nature (Pachamama) to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles. (16) New Zealand has granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River. (17) In the United States, Thomas Linzey and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund have pioneered the concept of ‘self-owning land’, embedding rights-of-nature language into conservation easements so that ecosystems can hold legally enforceable rights independent of any human owner. (18)

These represent a practical legal architecture for a world in which the separation between “persons” (who have rights) and “things” (which are property) no longer holds. Ostrom’s ‘bundle of rights’ framework already treats property as a set of separable, overlapping claims – use rights, management rights, exclusion rights, alienation rights – that can be distributed among different actors depending on context. (19) Self-sovereign nature pushes this further, asking what happens when the land itself, or the river, or the forest, holds certain rights that no human can alienate.

This connects to the monetary argument developed in the next chapter of this series. If money should stop being a vehicle for accumulation, and land should stop being property in the conventional sense, then together these two moves describe a more complete post-capitalist infrastructure, one in which neither the medium of exchange nor the object of ownership serves the logic of infinite expansion.

It is unlikely that networks built on these principles would be alliances of states (as the UN or EU are), but alliances of peoples and localities. They might treat borders as permeable for cooperation (though not necessarily for armies or capital flows that harm local resilience). One could draw inspiration from indigenous confederacies or contemporary movements like Via Campesina (the transnational peasant network) that govern common resources through solidarity rather than competition. A post-Westphalian order would also demand rethinking sovereignty. Rather than absolute state sovereignty, we move towards the concept of responsibility and interdependence. The Earth’s stability is a common good. No single government should have the right to destroy rainforests or pollute the atmosphere on the grounds of national sovereignty.

Post-Westphalian governance might empower regional or planetary institutions to enforce sustainability standards and human-rights protections in a way that today’s system finds intrusive. Understandably, that raises concerns about authoritarian global government. This does not mean we can’t envision instead a commons governance where multiple stakeholders (cities, NGOs, indigenous nations, scientific bodies, citizen assemblies) have a seat at the table, rather than just diplomats, Silicon Valley techno-libertarians, billionaires, politicians, and CEOs.

We already see embryonic versions of this. The concept of ‘planetary boundaries’ suggests we need an Earth-scale approach to regulation. Likewise, the rise of city networks (like C40 for climate action) hints that sub-state actors can lead where states fail. A genuine post-Westphalian leap would formalise and expand these trends, creating channels for planetary civic participation to check great-power abuses.

Importantly, post-Westphalian does not mean the end of all states overnight, but it does mean eroding the primacy of state-centric thinking. National governments would, eventually, cede some powers upwards (to cooperative frameworks) and downwards (to communities), in exchange for greater overall security (the primary function of a Hobbesian social contract) in a volatile world.

This is admittedly a tall order. The nationalist and far-right resurgence in recent years shows many are clinging tightly to what is known. If we don’t evolve new modes of democratic governance, we will likely remain locked in a competitive race for calling ourselves the captain of a sinking ship that undermines any collective action on keeping a world worth living in.

Notes

1. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2. Spivak, G.C. (2003). Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.

3. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), pp. 197-222. See also Chakrabarty, D. (2021). The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4. Vergerio, C. (2019). ‘Context, Contestation, and the Subversive Power of Historical Narratives: Revisiting the “Westphalian” Myth’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 32(6).

5. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. Lewis, P. and Aligica, P.D. (2024). ‘The Ostroms on self-governance: the importance of cybernetics’. Journal of Institutional Economics, 20, e23. See also Beer, S. (1972). Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane. Beer, S. (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. Chichester: John Wiley.

7. Beer, S. (1972). Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane.

8. Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. See also Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity.

9. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

10. Fishkin, J. (2009). When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11. Dryzek, J. (2010). Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12. Bratton, B. (2021). ‘New World Order for Planetary Governance’. Strelka Mag, May 27.

13. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (2019). Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers.

14. Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press.

15. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. See also Federici, S. (2019). Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press.

16. Republic of Ecuador (2008). Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, Articles 71-74.

17. New Zealand Parliament (2017). Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017.

18. Bollier, D. (2023). ‘Rights of Nature, Self-Owning Land, and Other Hacks on Western Law’. Resilience, July 10. See also Linzey, T., interviewed by Bollier, D. (2023). ‘Thomas Linzey on Nature’s Rights and Self-Owning Land’. Frontiers of Commoning podcast, Episode 40.

19. Schlager, E. and Ostrom, E. (1992). ‘Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis’. Land Economics, 68(3), pp. 249-262.

Contents

1. Corporate money in politics

   1. Problems

   2. Super PACs

   3. Dark money

2. The revolving door

   1. Problems

   2. The ‘vampire squid’: Goldman Sachs

   3. Warmongering & surveillance

3. Conclusion

‘[O]ur political system [...] is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery’ - Thomas Pogge

This is one of a series of articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

I’ve argued that anti-capitalists should reject state communism as a route to a post-capitalist world. I then looked at how states and corporations have been united since the birth of corporations, how corporations set the agenda for politicians, and how corporations get what they want via pestering and manipulation. This article covers bribery, money and the ‘revolving door’.

OK, I can’t honestly say that the practices below are bribery in the legal sense, because they’re not illegal (although they should be). But providing money and jobs for influence and favourable decisions – you decide what to call it. Not all politicians will respond positively, but enough will to skew things in a corporate direction.

Corporate money in politics

Ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations pour massive sums into political parties and election campaigns, creating dependency and expectations of favourable treatment. US election spending has exploded in recent years, from around $8 billion in 2016 to $15 billion in 2024. The vast majority of that money was spent on advertising (mostly TV ads –– hence the sound-bite politics we have today) and campaign consulting. Advertising, marketing and PR firms have moved into politics, bringing the same techniques they use to sell fizzy drinks and laundry liquid.

Political funding can buy access and influence, which can translate into favourable legislation, tax breaks, contracts or government support; but it can also help get to the front of the queue for bailouts or to avoid prosecution in case of corruption. Corporations often give to both main parties. Among corporate PACs (see below) making at least five contributions in one election cycle studied, 94% gave to candidates from both parties. The message is clear: give us what we want or we’ll fund your opponent more and you less.

Election funding used to be public and subject to limits. Candidates who accepted public funds had to stick to spending limits, while candidates who opted out could raise and spend much more, privately. In 2008, Obama became the first major-party presidential nominee to reject public financing for a general election, allowing him to raise hundreds of millions privately. Since then, the major presidential candidates have generally opted out.

Corporate funding is growing, and very profitable it is, too. Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent around $6 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. In return, they received over $4 trillion in federal support (encompassing contracts, loans, subsidies and other forms of state benefits) – equivalent to $760 for every $1 spent on political influence. That’s some return. In the 2024 UK general election, political parties and campaigners spent a record £94 million, nearly 80% more than at the 2015 election. The sums involved are far smaller than in the US, but the direction is the same, and the record is unlikely to stand for long.

Politicians need expensive political consultants or they’re going nowhere. And those consultants tell them that they need to spend, spend, spend. The Johns Hopkins political science professor Adam Sheingate details this phenomenon in Building a Business of Politics (‘Most of the key decisions in contemporary campaigns are now in the hands of consultants’, and ‘The definition of public problems, the framing of issues, and the formation of interest all rely on the services of a professional political class’). Donors don’t take you seriously until you have a decent consultant.

Thomas Ferguson’s 1995 work, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, is an influential resource on the subject. He argues that political change is not primarily voter-driven, but investment-driven. Major parties function as the centre-left and centre-right wings of a single ‘property party’.

As the flow of money into politics grows, its sources are becoming increasingly concentrated. According to Transparency International, ‘In 2015, only 1 per cent of private donations came from companies and individuals giving £1 million or more; by 2024, this had risen to over a third. At this rate over half of all political contributions could soon come from just a dozen or so individuals, who would account for less than 0.00002% of those eligible to donate’. Chris Harborne’s recent £45 million in donations to Reform UK would take someone on the average UK wage approximately 1,200 years to match.

Similar things happen at the local level. For example, a company such as Tesco can offer financial contributions towards local infrastructure or other community needs as part of securing planning permission for a new supermarket.

Problems

Let’s look at the problems that this causes for democracy, ideas and debating.

First, it reduces the scope of debates. Corporate political funding is often less about getting what they want and more about stopping what they don’t want. So for example, if a policy is bad for corporate profits but popular with the public (e.g. gambling limits), corporates can help keep it off the agenda, by diverting funds away from the party that adopts it. Then it’s a balancing act between parties chasing votes with popular policies, but not annoying their corporate donors too much. That can shift political debate more towards issues that don’t trouble corporations, because they don’t affect profits (e.g. around identity politics or abortion rights), and ideas that challenge corporate profits are suppressed.

Second, it also suppresses more radical ideas. The more money required to obtain political favours, the wealthier the donors must be. Wealthier donors have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo that gave them their wealth. This favours pro-corporate candidates and puts radical candidates at a disadvantage.

Third, it takes politicians away from ideas and debating altogether. Consultants are about winning, not ideas. So they will try to attack opponents’ characters, or focus on aspects of their candidate’s life that will appeal to target voters. This cynical approach has nothing to do with policies or ideas, and it means that candidates spend much more time fundraising, campaigning and mudslinging than thinking, debating and legislating.

Another huge and related conflict of interest is that politicians can own shares in companies that could be affected by the legislation and government decisions they’re involved with. Incredibly (to me, at least), although members of Congress generally have to disclose their financial interests, and are prohibited from using non-public information gained via their office for private profit, they’re not prohibited from owning stocks that could be affected by their legislative activities, and they aren’t generally required to recuse themselves from votes because of those holdings.

With the huge problems that are heading our way, we need incorruptible leaders to think deeply about the issues and debate ideas (including radical ideas) meticulously and conscientiously. Corporate money in politics gets in the way of this.

Super PACs

It gets worse. Let’s have a quick look at super PACs (political action committees), and the 2010 legal case that led to them: Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission (FEC), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that limitations on political spending violated the First Amendment (free speech). Free speech was of course all about ‘we the people’, not about corporations. But after corporates obtained personhood, it now applies to them too.

Unlike conventional PACs, super PACs have no limits on how much they can raise and spend, but are not allowed to contribute to or be directly connected with politicians and political parties – although they can support or oppose policies or politicians/parties via TV or media ads or social media. Because they must be isolated from candidates, consultants have to sit between them. The result is unlimited contributions from corporations and billionaires, and more lucrative work for consultants.

So if a billionaire wants to give money directly to a candidate there are strict limits, but they can now give hundreds of millions to a super PAC which can spend the money helping that same candidate, and the law treats it as independent political speech.

Apart from even more corporate money in politics, downsides include huge negative advertising campaigns aimed at individuals that their opponents can disavow. It can also spark spending arms races. If your opponent is raising and spending $100 million, there will be a strong incentive for you to try to match it. All in all, it creates more conduits from concentrated wealth to our governance processes, puts the power to influence policy into fewer and fewer hands, and makes politics even nastier than it already is.

Some candidates (AOC, for example) don’t take super PAC money, but it can put them at a huge disadvantage against their rivals.

Dark money

Dark money is political spending where the identity of the original donors is not publicly disclosed. ‘Dark’ sounds shady or illegal, but it’s not. It increased significantly in the US after the rise of super PACs. They’re obliged to disclose the sources of their funding, but those sources don’t necessarily have to divulge where the funds originally came from. There may be several layers to this funding, and the more layers, the more difficult it is to discover the original source.

Dark money prevents voters from knowing who’s trying to influence them with ads, and it can hide conflicts of interest. So for example, if there’s a $100 million advertising campaign against proposed environmental legislation, the public might think very differently about it if they knew the money came from a million citizens giving $100 each, than if all of it came from an oil company. This lack of transparency means that voters can’t judge the legitimacy or otherwise of political influence.

In the UK 67% of people believe that private donations should be either banned or capped at £50,000. But who’s going to impose the cap or the ban? In a truly democratic system, there would be no private money in the political system at all – it’s obviously going to end up giving more influence, and ultimately control, to those with more money. But we can’t expect the recipients of corporate money to vote to ban it, or even reduce it. And sure enough, the UK government recently increased political spending limits by 80% (apparently, to keep up with inflation!), and political donation reporting thresholds by 50%, so we’re moving in the wrong direction.

If you want to learn more about corporate money in politics, Open Secrets is your starting point.

The revolving door

The ‘revolving door’ is the movement of personnel between government departments, regulatory bodies and the corporate sector. Politicians and civil servants leave public office to take highly-paid jobs in the industries they once regulated, while corporate executives are appointed to senior government positions. This creates a conflict of interest where officials regulate industries they plan to work for later, and corporate representatives are part of policy-making and regulation.

The same networks of people run both the state and the corporate sector, whose interests become perfectly aligned, leaving citizens and even legislators out of the picture, because they don’t really understand how the world ultimately works.

For some, this could be seen as bribery, but the bigger players are much more interested in implementing their agendas through government than in cushy jobs or inflated salaries – they have more than enough money already. But rather than continually trying to influence government from outside, corporations can place their own people inside it. However, when the door revolves the other way, and a politician accepts a corporate job, it can involve a huge increase in salary. Incredibly, around half of all US senators and one third of congress members take corporate jobs on retirement, including with lobby firms.

Although mainly a Western phenomenon, the door revolves in Western vassal states too. Many West Asian oil monarchies have energy ministers (‘their excellencies’) who are or have been CEOs of energy companies (although these tend to be state-owned in that part of the world), like Saudi Arabia’s Khalid al-Falih, who went from CEO of Saudi Aramco to Minister of Energy, while Qatar’s Saad al-Kaabi has simultaneously served as Energy Minister and CEO of QatarEnergy.

There are many more examples globally, involving corporations and their associated institutions. A particularly striking statistic is that in 2012, 20% of finance ministers in the 47 African countries receiving World Bank assistance had previously worked for the World Bank or IMF. Peter Lawrence argues that this creates a revolving door through which corporate-friendly policies are imported into national governments. And although the centre-left in the UK have come to believe that the EU is some sort of paragon of virtue, in fact it’s a pit of vipers just like all its national governments. Again, too many examples to mention, but a classic of the genre was former EU president Jose Manuel Barroso, who later joined Goldman Sachs (see below) as a non-executive chairman.

Problems

The main criticisms are about conflicts of interest – corporate vs public. Rather than exposing these conflicts, we’ve moved in the direction of making the corporate interest appear as if it is the public interest, using all the techniques I outlined previously. The worldviews at the top of the corporate and political worlds merge; so where’s the oversight? Not in the executive branch, which is more-and-more corporate, and not in the legislature, where members can’t really regulate things they don’t completely understand, especially with much better-informed corporate elites constantly pressuring, pestering, bribing and threatening them.

Researchers found that firms hiring senior officials from economy ministries receive significantly higher volumes of government loans in subsequent years (Trevor Incerti, How firms, bureaucrats and ministries benefit from the revolving door: evidence from Japan, American Political Science Review, 2025). But individuals don’t need to be corrupt. They just interpret their regulatory role through the lens of the industry culture they absorbed and will return to. Yes, if they make decisions that are favourable to a particular industry, they’ll have better prospects of getting a lucrative job in that industry later. But that’s for small fish. Bigger fish have an agenda, an ideology. They want to make sure that governments don’t get any ideas about legislating in ways that harm the corporate sector as a whole. That’s not seen as corruption if it doesn’t benefit a particular corporation or individual.

Here’s more on possibly the biggest fish (or maybe squid) of all:

The ‘vampire squid’: Goldman Sachs

Let’s have a look at how just one corporation makes use of the revolving door: Goldman Sachs, subject of the now famous 2010 vampire squid article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. It’s a similar story with many other giant banks, but the GS story is truly remarkable. I’m not sure that any other corporation has ever had such global political influence. Here are some well-known examples (although there are many more):

Robert Rubin spent 26 years at Goldman and became one of its two senior partners in 1990. He then went into the Clinton administration, becoming chairman of the National Economic Council and subsequently US treasury secretary.

Hank Paulson became Goldman’s sole chairman and CEO in 1999. In 2006 he left GS to become US treasury secretary under George W Bush, where he played a central role in organising the bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis.

Mark Carney worked at Goldman Sachs from 1990 to 2004, becoming a managing director in 2002. He subsequently became governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and prime minister of Canada.

Steven Mnuchin worked for GS for 17 years, eventually rising to CIO (Chief Information Officer). In February 2017, he became US treasury secretary, serving throughout Trump’s first presidency until January 2021.

Mario Draghi went from government to Goldman and back again. He was director-general of the Italian treasury until 2001, before becoming managing director of Goldman Sachs International in 2002, responsible for working with governments and government agencies as well as major European corporations. He became governor of the Bank of Italy in 2005, president of the European Central Bank in 2011 and prime minister of Italy in 2021.

Robert Zoellick revolved even more than Draghi. Between 1985 and 2013 he went from senior positions in the US treasury, state department and White House to senior GS advisor, deputy secretary of state, GS vice-chairman, president of the World Bank and then back to GS as chairman of its international advisors.

Joshua Bolten flitted between senior US government and GS positions before becoming White House chief of staff under George W Bush.

Stephen Friedman became co-chairman of GS with Robert Rubin in 1990, and then under George W Bush he became assistant to the president for economic policy, director of the National Economic Council, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (while still holding his GS position).

I’m getting bored with this now, but you get the idea. Look up other Goldman alumni like Gary Gensler, John Whitehead, Malcolm Turnbull (who became Australian prime minister), and dozens of others who went on to occupy some of the most powerful positions in government and international institutions.

None of them necessarily delivered any benefit directly to Goldman Sachs. In fact, ex vice-chairman of Goldman International, Bob Hormats, challenged anyone to find anything that any of these people had done in office that benefitted Goldman directly. But that’s not the point; it’s about allowing the banking sector to self-regulate, and preventing the state from doing anything to harm corporations.

For example, after the 2008 crash, Paulson oversaw the government’s $700 billion TARP bank bailout programme, including about $245 billion in capital injections in more than 700 banks. In my opinion, it would have been much better to have distributed that money to small businesses and allowed the banks to die, but that would have been anathema to Paulson, whose priority was to preserve the corporate financial system. And of course it doesn’t work the other way around – we’ll never get any handouts from the banks when they’re in profit — it’s always a case of ‘heads they win, tails we lose’.

One more: Rubin advocated for ending Glass-Steagall (separating commercial and investment banking) while treasury secretary. Citicorp merged with Travelers Group to form Citigroup in 1998, in anticipation of a change in the law, which indeed happened in 1999. That same year, Rubin left the Clinton administration and joined Citigroup as a senior executive, and made $126 million over the next 8 years. So yes, the revolving door helps make personal fortunes, but that’s still not the main point for these people, I don’t think. They want power, not money.

This is an ongoing story. Keep up to date by searching for banks and revolving door. And it’s not just the banks. The same story can be found in all sectors, and especially in oil and tech. But one particular revolving door is scarier than most.

Warmongering & surveillance

Palantir is a software company with deep roots in the US military and intelligence world. It has a strategic partnership with Israel’s ‘defence’ ministry, and NATO uses its Maven software for its Allied Command Operations. Its technology can make multiple, previously separate sources of information on individuals connected, interoperable and searchable, which hugely increases the state’s ability to surveil and track us. Palantir is a company for which war and surveillance is very, very profitable. So the last thing we’d want is for a revolving door to exist between this company and our public institutions and government, or for it to have access to everyone’s sensitive personal information, right?

Well, that’s not how the world works any more. The UK government awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to build the NHS’s federated data platform; so the company that built systems for ICE deportations and military/intelligence organisations has become deeply embedded in Britain’s health-data infrastructure. And of course the revolving door is in operation. Laurence Lee, for example, was a senior Ministry of Defence (MoD) official who helped write the military’s AI strategy, and subsequently joined Palantir. Investigations have identified this as part of a much broader movement of UK public officials into the company. As I write, Palantir has UK government contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds, across 10 departments, but mainly the MoD and NHS.

This is where the revolving door becomes an existential threat for humanity. As Jeffrey Sachs explains: ‘Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximise elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points.’ I think ‘American’ is misleading however, as the empire isn’t geographic, and has nothing to do with the American people; but the US state is certainly central to the empire, and he’s right that American foreign policy ensures almost permanent war, which is extremely profitable for the corporate sector – particularly banking, weaponry, tech and oil (the US has had only 17 war-free years in its 250-year history).

The revolving door swings both ways. As well as corporations employing government ministers and public officials, the state provides top jobs for corporate leaders. The scariest examples of this involve weapons manufacturers being given top defence jobs – and sometimes right at the top. It doesn’t matter which party is in power. Trump appointed Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, as US defence secretary, but Biden went further by giving the job to Lloyd Austin, an ex-Raytheon Technologies director. What chance is there of global peace with a revolving door between weapons manufacturers and the top of the US defence department?

Conclusion

There are many, many more examples of all the above, and the fact that it’s all legal should make people give up on the electoral system as a vehicle for the changes we need. But it doesn’t, unfortunately, which is why we need commons.

So far in this series, I’ve looked at how the communist state is not the way to challenge corporate dominance, and how ‘democratic’ states have been captured by corporate interests, via think tanks, the funding of education, media ownership, astroturfing, social connections, lobbying, regulatory capture, donations and the revolving door.

In the next article, I’ll look at how the corporate sector threatens and punishes governments in order to get its way, and I’ll summarise the ways that corporations capture states. After that, I’ll look at what corporations get in return from their captured states. I’ll argue that Western states are part of the corporate empire, and are therefore not at all a useful tool for challenging it.

There are many global emergencies. But Julian Jones of Water21 believes they all share a single neglected cause— and that the beginnings of solutions can be found close to home.

Climate, public health, flooding, drought, social inequality, displacement and economic instability. Presented separately, they leave us individually helpless. Yet a common failure runs through nearly all of them—and the beginnings of a solution is within our collective grasp. That failure is a lack of care. Not simply caring about something as sympathy or sentiment. I mean practical, active care: accepting responsibility for the people, places and resources that sustain us. I first began to understand this as a child in Stroud, through the metaphor—and practical reality—of our declining local rivers.

Meeting Harry

Like many people in Stroud, I was an incomer. Born near London, I arrived in the late 1960s, when smokestack industries, grime and deprivation were still very visible here. I came for a conventional private education. The education that mattered most, however, began when I started sneaking away from school to fish in the local river. One day, an angry older man ran towards me, shouting some fairly vile instructions to clear off. His name was Harry Tomlins. He was the maintenance foreman at a mill in Dudbridge. Harry had no greater claim to the fishing than I did, but he possessed two things I did not. He took responsibility for the river’s wellbeing, and he also depended upon it. The few trout still hanging on in the watercourse were an occasional but important addition to his family’s diet. I resolved to make friends with him. This was not easy. Years of sheet-metal work had badly damaged his hearing, and I learned to shout my words close to his ear. A high-pitched whistle could attract his attention from some distance away. We eventually became inseparable. During our first year of fishing together, Harry would accompany me and watch, but he never revealed the best places. Trust had to be earned. What he did share was knowledge of the river: how water moved through the mills and sluices; eventually where fish sheltered; how the channels should be maintained; and how one neglected problem would produce consequences far downstream. His knowledge had been passed on between generations and tested through direct experience. He applied it wherever he could, always with the wider community in mind. In another culture, such exacting environmental knowledge might have been revered. Harry would have been horrified by any suggestion that he was a mystic. There was no “woo” in his character—only competence, calmness and a weary recognition of the damage caused when those responsible for a place no longer understood it. He also noted this at the mill where he worked; which also failed.

The return of the salmon

Harry explained how salmon once travelled up from the Severn Estuary into our local waters. He believed their return should become a measure of the river’s recovery. For us, the salmon became something approaching a cult, although we appeared to be its only two members. Our creed was simple. We fished for food rather than amusement, and we should actively assist the recovery of a remarkable renewable source of protein that had once been abundant in British rivers. The salmon’s importance extended beyond food. Migrating fish transport marine nutrients into freshwater catchments. Their completed life cycle underpins the ecological relationships between soil, land, wildlife and river. Nearly four decades ago now, Harry was staying with his son beside a Scottish river. His entire family was all gathered there. That morning, he spotted a salmon. By evening, he had caught it and cooked it for their dinner. Harry then passed away.

It seemed an almost impossibly complete ending to his life: a river providing for a family once more, with Harry remaining in service until the end. The salmon have still not returned to our Stroud rivers. That quest remains unfulfilled.

Being in service

Harry described his approach as being “in service”—not only to the environment, but to other people. His lessons were rarely abstract. “If you see a large branch floating down the river,” he once told me, “don’t stand there watching it. Drag it out. There might be a sluice gate downstream that it could smash open and cause a flood. Jump in if needs be. You might get some useful firewood.” The lesson was not simply about a branch. It was about acting before responsibility needed to be passed to somebody else. Natural systems operate through such innumerable relationships and exchanges. Their abundance is not created by each element pursuing complete independence from everything around it. It arises through connection, reciprocity and obligation. Human communities could work in much the same way. Around the time Harry was educating me beside the river, thinkers around Stroud were articulating similar principles. The Reverend John Papworth (buried in Slad, 2020), Gloucester economist Leopold Kohr and E. F. Schumacher explored the limits of scale and centralisation. Schumacher’s ‘Small Is Beautiful’, published in 1973, questioned the assumption that bigger institutions and technologies were necessarily more efficient or humane. Much later, Nobel Prize winning US economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that communities best govern environmental resources—provided that appropriate local relationships, rules and responsibilities are allowed. Harry would not have described himself as an economist, environmentalist or political philosopher. He simply knew that somebody had to look after the river.

From protest to practical care

Today, protest has become one of our principal expressions of care. Protest gives voice to what is being ignored and allows people to resist destructive decisions. But protest alone does not restore a river, manage a farm, maintain a wetland or construct a community energy system. It must be accompanied by practical stewardship. Another remarkable Stroud incomer, the late Polly Higgins, 2015, made the eradication of ecocide her life’s work. She asked us to judge our actions against a “higher moral responsibility” to the living world. The difficulty is that environmental right and wrong cannot effectively be determined from slogans. It requires experience, evidence and close knowledge of place. Harry had all three.

Local energy and local wealth

The water mill Harry maintained had stopped using water power decades earlier. “If we are daft enough to ignore all this free river energy,” he told me, “we shall go bankrupt.” I have spent much of my working life specialising in water engineering, including small hydropower, through the not-for-profit organisation Water21. Small hydropower is not remotely the same as the enormous dams that displace communities and disrupt whole river systems. Properly designed community-scale schemes can generate energy while protecting—and if operated carefully, significantly improving—local river environments. The greater value comes when the means of production are owned locally. At Ynni Ogwen in North Wales, a community-owned 100kW hydro system supplied by Water21 began generating in 2017. Income from the scheme has funded solar panels on community buildings and an energy warden who assists households experiencing fuel poverty; the financial returns being multiplied many times over. That is renewable energy doing more than reducing emissions. Creating a continuing relationship between a natural resource, local employment, social welfare and growing community wealth.

Closer to home, the all metal 500kW wind turbine at Lynch Knoll near Nympsfield first generated electricity in December 1996. Its longevity demonstrates the value of renewable infrastructure designed to be maintained rather than rapidly discarded. Other than replacing wearing parts – it looks good for another 30 or more years of valuable power generation. The renewable potential of our rivers may be relatively modest. But the principle is immense: renewable resources can meet local needs while keeping a greater proportion of their economic value within the community.

Sewage is also a resource

Harry worried about public health as much as energy. We regularly fished by the former French Water Gardens at Stanley Downton, an early hydroponic farm through which the main sewer passed. Harry’s reaction was characteristically direct: “Are our authorities so daft they cannot see that places like this could deal safely with all that sewage nutrient—and grow something useful?” Wastewater does not cease to contain water and nutrients merely because we have decided to call it waste. Constructed wetlands, reed beds and other nature-based systems can treat polluted water while creating habitat, useful biomass energy and other benefits; at greatly reduced costs. I reached an agreement in principle with the chairman of the local water company in 1989 to explore such an approach. A wider scoping plan was eventually produced in 2003. It has still not been implemented. Since June 2025, water companies have been legally required to explain how nature-based solutions are being considered in their drainage and wastewater management plans. That is progress, but consideration is not yet delivery. We remain as a society committed to “flush and forget”: moving polluted water away, concentrating it elsewhere and then paying heavily to manage the consequences. I have failed—but not because the solutions failed. Measured against Harry’s simple test—the return of salmon to our river—I have failed. Many of the projects Water21 has worked on have demonstrated what is technically possible. But isolated projects do not transform an entire catchment, and one person cannot create the culture of responsibility that Harry represented. That is the point. The emergency cannot be resolved by heroic individuals, remote institutions or technological interventions imposed upon passive communities, worldwide. It requires us to recover the practical meaning of being in service—to our rivers, landscapes and each other. The solutions are not all distant, experimental or unaffordable. Many are already here: local renewable energy, community ownership, healthy soils, wetlands, restored watercourses and the recovery of nutrients presently treated as waste. What is missing is not knowledge.

It is the collective willingness to accept responsibility. Harry taught me that you do not wait for an authority to remove the dangerous branch. You step into the river. The emergency is here, now.

Julian Jones, www.water21.org.uk

This text started out as a thread on X, after which its author Dil Green padded it out to serve as a response to Ann Pettifor’s Substack post ‘It is Time to Storm the Gates of Private Power’. We believe that it can stand as an article in its own right, which is why we are posting it in lightly edited form below.

For clarity, despite my position that spending time trying to get nation-states (and indeed any institutions of equivalent scale) to address the omnicrisis is a (bad) waste of time, I do strongly believe that they should be addressing it, and that this would be the best way.

I just know they cannot – not in any useful, effective or timely way. And thus working as an activist will be a waste of your effort at the most crucial point in all of human history.

Nation-states will not be effective in addressing the omnicrisis which faces the whole of humanity and the whole of the biosphere.

To be specific around 'cannot' and 'could': nation-states could do many things – they still have significant control around money and policy, and could bring democratic legitimacy to tough choices.

They cannot, because the workings of nation-states have been systematically enmeshed into finance capital, and because many of the individuals with apparent agency within them – both elected and unelected – have been suborned by bribes and/or cowed by threats.

This systematic enmeshing and bribery could imaginably be unpicked, but this condition took at least a century to evolve (it was not a coordinated plan), and is now effectively a-human. The people who are its avatars – Trumps, Lagardes, Putins – are not it, not in control; they just deliver it (messily – it is a complete mess).

Neither is there a 'class' interest in control: the Musks, Bezos, Cooks, Nadellas, Buffets are entirely its creatures.

All these people have indeed made the choice to work at proving themselves efficient agents of some niche of the system – why they often seem like lizard people. They have personal power beyond our imagining, but they are not personally strong – there are thousands of others urgently striving to be more lizard-like.

Remove one of them and ten more appear, eager to prove themselves worthy.

They conspire but do not constitute a conspiracy. They plan but do not have a masterplan. They coordinate but also sabotage each other.

The important, but hard thing to understand – when the past shows us individuals used to have agency, when the media continually tells us that they do have agency – is that these individuals are functionally interchangeable, personally irrelevant, despite the reality that they do important work for the system – that it needs them.

What the above means is that almost everyone who wants to change things at the nation-state layer is acting against their own aims.

I mean this literally.

Because this a-human system has no mind, no consciousness, no centre, only the kind of path dependency a Complex Adaptive System has – naively put, a will to survive (more accurately, an observable ability to act so as to ensure that its future is as compatible with its past as it can be) - this system is functionally able to learn, to adapt, to change itself.

In large part it finds out how to do this from its opposers – it needs and uses them.

There is one opposition group who believe that they ‘get’ (even own) the argument I just made (though they use other terms), and thus that they are beyond it.

These people believe that, by opposing it, they can ‘progress’ the system towards a more humane version: that, to put it crudely, ‘the only way out is through’ - that the system must be transformed by opposition, that no other historical path is possible.

This is wrong in two ways. Firstly, the idea that there is only one pathway for history is nonsense. But they will fight to the death over this and it's hard to prove because it's an ideology, so that it's handy that the second wrongness is incontrovertible and obvious: we don't have time.

Changing a system the scale of global finance capitalism, which has no centre, no class-consciousness – a system which actively and violently fights back while you are trying to change it, a system which adapts as if it were an evolving virus, a system which finds ways to adopt versions of the demands made on it by its opponents in ways which appease and co-opt them while strengthening itself… this is hard. Very, very hard.

Even if it's possible, even if you are happy to suffer (for millions of others to suffer, too), this takes historical time.

Which we ain't got. It's too late. Stage 4 cancer.

This historical path – the path of finance capitalism – is a self-terminating one (and big enough to delete civilisation with it, not to mention deal an enormous blow to the health of the biosphere).

No reform that could make a difference is achievable in time through any believable activist pathway.

Nation-states are fatally enmeshed in this historical path.

So meaningful, purposeful, wise action must not waste time or effort on any of that.

It must instead devote itself to another historical path which, far from being novel, is already present: the path which acts through life-like processes: the processes which delivered this species, which delivers our bodies, our minds; the systemic path which is also a-human, also a mess, also has no-one in control - but which, over more than 3 billion years, has proven not to be self-terminating, but to be self-expanding.

These are syntropic processes, where aspects of the system coordinate their actions to deliver emergent outcomes which grow the whole system in a viable way.

The system which, in human cultures, uses the pattern we know as commoning.

A pattern which is recognisable to all of us because, despite the powerful self-branding efforts of the finance system, it is still how human society functions.

The system upon which finance capitalism is most accurately (and I mean this quite technically) described as a cancer; using all the mechanics but seeking only to grow itself, ignoring the reality that in taking specific advantage of the syntropic mode – in which the main system operates for its cancerous growth – will kill its own environment and thus itself.

Yes, you are recognising this story: it is – directly – the story which Garret Hardin set out in his Tragedy of the Commons essay.

Every accusation is, of course, a confession: Hardin was an aspirant lizard, and his piece described anti-commons behaviour, claiming it was inevitable – to make an argument for privatisation (more food for the cancer). It's worth saying here that his tendentious claim has been definitively demolished by Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom, in great detail, with countless real-world examples plus theory to back it up.

From this perspective, the commoning mode path of history is the base environment which the cancerous mode lives on, not the ‘only path of historical progress’.

Thus our task is neither to fight the cancer (this only helps it evolve), nor to struggle to make it birth some new, healthier mode, but to simply step aside from it, and realise two things.

First, that commoning is already the way society works, where we spend most of our daily life coordinating our actions with other people so as to expand the scope of possibility.

That we are not 'all capitalists now'. Even in the corporate world, without people coordinating in a commoning mode (without institutional framing – indeed very often in spite of institutional framing), no meeting, no conversation, no project would work out.

That we have been conditioned to put our commoning mode into service of capitalism – or alternately to confine it to non-commercial activity.

That commoning is what comes naturally to humans.

And second, that we don't need to 'fight' the cancer (even if it were effective, we would have to fight all the forces the system can buy, plus all the aspirant lizards too - who are not truly evil, but, mostly, have just made poor choices in their attempt to live within an inhuman system: some sort of civil war or revolution would likely be needed; probably many of them - a terrible cost, destructively worsening the omnicrisis as a side effect).

We don't need to fight it, because we understand it. It is insanely complex – both internally and in its relations with human society – but its energy source, and its deep need, is incredibly simple, and incredibly dumb.

To survive, it has to continually increase the number of $ symbols in the system, on the basis of debt.

Knowing this, we can simply, carefully and deliberately starve it out; deny it what it needs most: people borrowing money (yes, simply that), for it to begin to wither and die.

We can design and grow commoning institutions which directly and specifically achieve this aim (more and more people borrowing less and less money) in entirely ethical and straightforward ways, through commoning – with all human participants in these commons getting a better deal from participation than they get from the system; where the only loser from the change is the finance system – where the change isn't weird or culty, doesn't need martyrs or saints.

These commons work in ways which (crucially) don't look to the system like an attack – indeed they are designed to look constructive at the overt (human-engaging) layers of the system. The intent here is to look 'normal' – to present any novelty as an incremental tweak to what is there which is designed for 'normal' people, not for radicals or special interest groups.

They can work in ways which can spread rapidly, both in numbers and impact, and which, by the time the system reacts at a deep level, will have real political strength and weight, and which will have transferred local infrastructure into commons control.

At some tipping point, the withering of the finance capital system will become a collapse, a realisation that all the $ signs in the world are just numbers in a database, and that they have lost credibility as claims on the value that humans build together.

It will be scary, as tipping points always are, but in and of itself the deletion of the power of the $ sign will do nothing to our ability to grow food, deliver energy and clean water, make things, use technology.

The only job the $ does (and does badly) is to act as a means of coordinating all those activities.

But through building and strengthening the cultural habits of commoning, through the development of the institutional forms of the new commons described already (and many more), we will find that we have already built a superior, more humane, more sustainable way of coordinating, and that it already covers the basics.

I could paint a rosy picture, but looking this far forward, who knows how it will really go?

And in any case, the system as a cancer is not our only problem.

Right at the top of this article I called it an omnicrisis, and the finance system is just the cause; it has already set the whole system of life on course for a violent and chaotic 'correction'.

Make no mistake: the system of life (which James Lovelock christened ‘Gaia’) will not be passive while a human artificial system acts in such a way as to materially degrade it. The finance system will be ended in any case, and relatively soon, by climate chaos.

My answer – and I hope to help you toward this – is because none of us are fine, right now, and things are getting worse.

Even if the worst comes true, it will take decades for climate chaos to really look as if our whole civilisation will be destroyed. Decades which we cannot describe in anything but the most hand-wavy way.

Decades we and our children and grandchildren will have to live through.

Decades which might even see some new way through.

It is very definitely worth making an effort for a medium term future where – locally at least (for commoning is first and foremost a local phenomenon, though it can encompass the new kinds of digitally enabled locality with ease) – things are getting better.

Where the yoke of debt-bondage and wage-slavery is easing off, where resilience of local infrastructure is increasingly in our own hands, where community has a material dimension to it as well as a purely social one (which is what keeps communities together in times of stress).

And when the effort required is mostly being willing to talk to our neighbours and colleagues more, about more substantive matters (not entirely a pleasure – new social muscles will need to be built), and the risks are being reduced by pioneers such as Stroud Commons (and many others), why would you not?

When the alternatives are:

• Choice A: giving your life up to an endless struggle against an inhuman system which is dying anyway, and which will kill you without noticing, where winning looks like being co-opted.

• Choice B: ignoring environmental degradation and deterioration of civil society and public infrastructure, accompanied by mounting inequality. Putting your head down and getting smaller every day.

Why would you not choose C: Commoning?

Oh! there is another option:

Choice L: becoming a lizard and saying everything is great - but inevitably becoming a Loser anyway.

It’s time to wind this short piece up with a simple, clear statement; a Call to Action:

The action we need to take is to build commons, and, in the process, recover our birthright: the experience of living in material community as we discover that most of our daily life is – has always been – commoning.

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At its heart, Growing the Commons exists to promote, support, and strengthen the Commons: a diverse ecosystem of community-driven systems, tools, and practices for producing, governing, and sustaining life’s essentials.

This is how Michel described the intentions of the team behind this Substack exactly a year ago.

With 70 posts published so far, and close to a 1000 subscribers without doing any marketing1, we hope to have contributed to that, and want to continue to do so.

Here are some selected articles from the past year:

In the final series to New tools for growing the commons, and how I discovered them, Dave describes what a commons town might be like. To me, this is an inspiring image of what we are working towards. Especially as building, fostering and protecting commons in real life – which is what GtC members also do – can be slow and uncomfortable work at times, and not without its setbacks.

Dil reminds us that we won’t solve the crises of our times within the paradigm of capitalism; we need to transcend it. Otto points out how agroecological commons can be much more than the basis of food sovereignty and takes an in-depth look at foraging, and Simon looks at how to curate a knowledge commons. Another highlight is Matthew and Michel’s post about Collaborative Finance that originated on our wiki, while a post by me asks if we have applied market logic in too many places.

Last but not least, stay tuned for Dave’s series A Commoner’s Manifesto, in which he tries to persuade anti-capitalists that communist revolution, the electoral system and protest don’t challenge corporate power, and lays out commons models that might. He is planning to bring out this series as a book.

And if you are in the UK, please meet us at the Festival of Commoning in Stroud, October 2-3.

What have been your favourite topics and posts? What would you like to see more of? Please let us know in the comments.

Want to contribute?

When Growing the Commons started out, our first few posts invited people to join our team. We’d like to repeat that invitation now.

Please contact us if you want to contribute to our substack and/or our wiki.

Below is an anecdote from Otto about their experience joining Growing the Commons.

I’m someone who has things to say, and who feels the desperate need to do something that comes from growing up in the 21st century, watching my future get sacrificed to the god of “economic growth”.

However, I am not a person who jumped at the idea of having my own blog, website, social media profile, what-have-you. Plenty of reasons. I’m busy, I’m appalled by the weird parasocial relationships people have to online personalities, I take a while to put thoughts together coherently.

This drive to action, to yell from the rooftops, doesn’t mix well with an aversion to the lifestyle of an online personality.

Maybe you’re like me.

I have found a lot of value in writing for Growing the Commons. Connecting with like-minded folks and hearing updates from their projects has been emboldening – reducing the feeling of spinning my wheels, without taking my foot off the gas. I am wary of “defusing” activities, well aware that goal-less protests and therapy and other such things can nudge someone away from action. Contributing to Growing the Commons is not such an activity. If anything, I feel more supported to move forward with the projects I had been stuck with.

It has been great to work alongside other people and contribute flexibly based on what I have the time and inspiration for.

This is a guest post by Matthew Slater, sharing valuable lessons from his personal experience as a developer working with, and for, communities. It was originally published on the author’s personal blog on 17th August 2026, and has been lightly edited here.

In my travels I’ve met many activist software developers like myself, overflowing with energy and idealism for communities in general, but no community in particular. Many of them were creating a new kind of platform that addressed the concerns of the moment – privacy, security, sovereignty, serverless architecture etc. I don’t mean they were collaborating; I mean each was building their own platform. Once the platform was ready they embarked on a quest for users, or, which is harder, whole communities of users ready and able to migrate to the latest platform. After a few years they run out of physical or spiritual resources, and move on. It seemed to me a predictable waste of developer years, but more tragically, a lost opportunity for the communities they wanted to help.

So this post is about software for communities. Here, by community I mean any group of neighbours or idealists coordinating online. Sometimes communities cluster together under the same banner, like time banks or transition towns, and I’m calling that a movement. Movements are interesting because they are comprised of basically independent chapters who need to communicate within and between each other. I’ve written lots more about that on my blog.

Most real-world communities live on Whatsapp. It has a few features, but they go a long way – filesharing, groups, conference calls, reactions, polls. The main advantage of Whatsapp is that everyone already has it installed and they know how to use it. Upgrading to something is hard because it involves getting people to install an app, create accounts, make a separate box in their head for community stuff; so to be worth the pain, any proposed alternative has to promise a lot! That’s why some groups deliberate for years, get nowhere, and then make a poor choice.

The first choice such groups need to make is about how much responsibility they can take for their software, including ongoing costs. I see this as a spectrum ranging from:

• Smaller groups with little or no knowledge should be thinking about paying for Software as a service (SaaS). There are many reasons not to do this, but without technical ability, all you can do is throw money at the problem.

• Groups which have limited technical capacity might consider installing an open source package. This is cheaper because you only pay the cost of renting server space, and there are many opportunities to configure your data or tweak the software. Plus your data remains private.

• Larger groups with more specific needs, more users, more resources, maybe even more software engineers have the possibility of building their own software, and this is a minefield. A professional project has a project manager, documentation, automated testing, and a budget of tens or hundreds of thousands, but at the grassroots, those things are luxuries and the budget may be zero. In that case everything depends on the developer, their rigour, their knowledge and their multi-year commitment. The developer is irreplaceable: if they stop, the software stagnates forever.

So far, I’ve introduced you to the developer who needs a community to validate their software and their existence, and to the community who needs a developer. It’s a tragedy that these partners who are made for each other rarely find each other. It’s a mystery what obstructs their union.

Having spent years in both roles, I’d like to offer my perspectives, and then a solution.

During the Covid lockdown, thousands of street-level mutual aid groups appeared on Whatsapp. They had no formal structure, no subscription fees, no governance, and they withered away as the lockdown eased. Many people experienced community for the first time. They had no idea that Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) had been doing just that since the early 90s, and continue to do it now. Indeed, LETS are rarely mentioned in discussions about local community building. But to my mind, these groups are the nearest thing in the Western world to formalised, mutual aid networks. LETS is making a life and an economy out of mutual aid. Thousands of self-organised independent local groups who rarely seek government or grant funding, don’t express ambitions beyond their immediate scope, and consequently rarely appear on the radar.

I converted my wiki into a LETS trading platform but couldn’t get anyone to use it, even after months of working fruitlessly with a national umbrella organisation. I determined to find a community that was willing to work with me on their software to fulfil my dream of writing software that was actually used! I was lucky to catch my local group in Geneva at the right moment. I built a super platform, and then, with the Chairman, founded Community Forge as a Swiss association, and we approached other groups in the network. While they offered me long periods of hospitality, I put together a hosting platform to manage lots of sites. They found people to offer technical support and the network grew to around 300 communities at its peak. It wasn’t the quality of the software that drew them, so much as the fact that we came from within the network, we had their values, and the software at least worked! To this day we have never done marketing or tried to impress the public which is why the public facing website is such a mess!

For several years I was keeping the software up to date, sustaining the hosting platform, and nomading – meeting other people in the movement, offering this great platform already used by hundreds of groups. Several individual groups adopted the free services I offered, but, critically for this story, over a decade I was unable to convince any other movement to use the platform and put resources into it. My only real success therefore, as an activist/developer, was when I worked inside a movement.

I wanted Community Forge to be the seed of a software commons that would reduce the cost of software for any one network, bring the development and maintenance inside the movement, and build standards and tools for interoperability, especially for trade and exchange! But this progressive, outward-looking, collaborative approach simply didn’t land. The LETS networks in the UK, Netherlands, Flemish Belgium, the German-speaking regions, Australia, and New Zealand all looked inward for their software. Timebank networks had more money. I hung out with leaders in the UK, the USA, Israel and Spain. Some of them had tens or hundreds of thousands budgets, but they usually ended up hiring web design companies to design and build them a website, from scratch. Sorry to say I wasn’t impressed with the results, but that’s a rant for another time!

The point is, because I wasn’t just meeting these people at conferences but actually visiting them at their homes and in their communities, I came to understand how these kinds of groups and organisations make critical decisions.

Many grassroots groups depend absolutely on a single IT volunteer, and their abilities and knowledge. Many of them have zero budget. Many of them are not being begged by their comrades to improve software. Many have become conservative by having had bad experiences in the past.

It is easy for web developers to forget that flesh-and-blood communities regard software as an auxiliary, not as an intermediary and not as critical infrastructure. They might not be alive to the boons good software can bestow, but they intuitively understand that installing a new social network alongside all their other bits and pieces is going to create another silo which will add more friction and overhead to their existing infrastructure. A new login for everyone, new communication channels in which to lose things, issues around duplicate files and versioning problems, synchronisation problems. Migrations can be especially traumatic because they never go as planned, and all the extra work falls on one person.

More than once I’ve been asked (as co-founder, and sole developer of Community Forge) if any of the communities we serve would like to test someone else’s software for them. Someone, in fact, who built the software for nobody in particular. Sorry if I sound jealous, but the idea is laughable. Many of those groups have actively participated in the development and the story of our software package Hamlets; they want all the features they are used to, they have nothing to gain from testing software which wasn’t made for them. How can the new software be better than the old if the provider hasn’t even asked me what it does? Is there a budget for a one-off migration, and possible migration back? Don’t they care that we are 12 years into the current upgrade, and 5 years beyond the deadline? The quality or the narrative of a software package doesn’t really come into the equation because we only have capacity to move incrementally from where we are.

We are not being held back because we are unable to locate existing platforms that meet our needs. We are being held back because we lack in-house development capacity.

In my continued attempts to produce software that would serve humanity (and my ego), I decided to distill my accounting methodology into a protocol that could be used in any social networking context. Thus was born the Credit Commons Protocol for recursive mutual credit accounting. Working in the abstract, unencumbered by technical debt and real users, building a perfect machine in my mind was a lot of fun for me. But ‘more abstract’ was also harder to explain, and further from anybody’s immediate concerns. It was so theoretically advanced I couldn’t even interest the International Reciprocal Trade Association with it [the main association of professional barter exchanges, or business-oriented mutual credit networks], and I confess that the regular LETS and timebanks people – even if they thought accounting-as-a-service between groups was a neat idea, even if it meant they had less software to maintain – didn’t mention it to their developers.

So I learned the same lesson even harder – building software that nobody is asking for is (almost certainly) a waste of time. The LETS movement, and many other radical grassroots organisations grounded in place and community and family, are not spending much time thinking about global infrastructure for a global uprising. Perhaps it is right that 90% of their attention should go on local and internal preoccupations. These small and emerging groups need less bright ideas and more engineers on the inside. They need heroes who will work hard for little or no money, who will stick around for many years and keep the infrastructure standing. That’s not going to change.

What needs to change, therefore, is the developers, who are writing software for nobody in particular. I’m speaking first of all to myself because everything I ever built for no-one in particular is being used by no-one in particular. Much of what I built for real groups with real needs is still serving them 15 years later. If we want to be of service, we need to step out of the blissful platonic space of perfect software architecture unencumbered by users and migration, find a cause or a local group, roll up our sleeves, and start putting out dumpster fires and tackling technical debt.

Only then will we be in a position to help build the new systems.

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Afterword

While writing this I noticed a correlation. I voiced my frustration at these inward-looking local communities who fail to engage with my global vision, but I also admired them for their resilience, independence, and longevity.

While LETS seem to have fallen by the wayside a couple of decades ago, nothing has replaced them. The word community now refers to the teenagers with outrageous web handles who cluster around a memecoin [a type of speculative cryptocurrency], conniving to make the number go up. Compared to this and most other communities being talked about, the LETS are still next-level because they have formal structure, staying power and what they permanently facilitate – exchange – is the very foundation of what it means to be social.

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This is the fourth article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic. States must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

The old dilemma of “guns or butter” takes on new complexity in a post-growth context. In a world transitioning away from endless growth, the hope would be to drastically scale back militarism and invest in human and ecological well-being. After all, armies are themselves huge drivers of ecological ruin. The US military, for example, is one of history’s largest carbon polluters, emitting more greenhouse gases than many entire countries.

A key tenet of a post-growth vision is that true security comes not from arms, but from meeting people’s basic needs and protecting planetary life-support systems.

“What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security... The overriding goal must be human security, providing food, water, and a safe environment, not just military terms” - Mikhail Gorbachev.

A sustainable society would thus prioritise feeding and sheltering its people over building tanks and jets. But what happens when other actors refuse to beat their swords into ploughshares? What if some great powers remain expansionist, heavily armed, and growth-obsessed? As climate breakdown intensifies, we see tit-for-tat geopolitical rivalries take centre stage. Major powers like the United States, China, and Russia are doubling down on military might and resource competition.

The European Union, often considered a champion of sustainability, has, not entirely unreasonably, responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US’ recent withdrawal of aid (and even hostility) by ramping up military spending and aid itself to shore up its defences. Even more recently, we see new imperialism taking shape via the US’ actions in Venezuela and Iran, with an invasion of Taiwan by China also on the table in the near future.

In such a context, any community that unilaterally disarms or significantly diverts resources to social welfare may, with reason, worry about appearing weak. The powers who cling to growth also maintain the strongest militaries, and their rivalry pressures others to do the same, siphoning funds from green investment to defence budgets and propping up the status quo.

How can a post-growth enclave, or even network, survive, let alone thrive, if faced with a predatory neighbour? Must it keep a standing army, and if so, can that ever be ecologically sustainable? Or is there a path to non-provocative defence, where military capacity is minimal and purely for deterrence? These are challenging questions with no easy answers. What is clear is that security and survival cannot be taken for granted during a post-growth transition.

History offers precedent for how competing powers can be forced towards cooperative governance when the costs of competition become unbearable. The Danube river, Europe’s second longest, drains a basin of approximately 817,000 square kilometres across 18 countries. In the 19th century, the Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg Empires pursued competing interests over Danube navigation, turning the river into an artery of imperial rivalry (1).

The anti-Russian alliance in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 aimed in part to break Russia’s exclusive control over the Maritime Danube. The allied victory led to the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which declared the Danube-Black Sea Delta free and open to commercial vessels of all nations and laid the foundations for the Danube Commission, one of the oldest international organisations (2).

All signatories agreed that internationalisation was the proper solution for the nations living along its banks.

The Danube case is instructive because it did not require the parties to become allies, or to share an ideology, or even to trust one another. It required only that the attritional costs of competition, the trade disruption, the military expenditure, the cascading instability, become high enough to make cooperative governance the rational choice.

This is a precedent for defence through interdependence rather than domination. The stronger the material ties between communities, the more costly it becomes for any single actor to attack one node without damaging the whole network. This has echoes in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which was set up after World War II primarily to make it impossible for one country to gather the resources for war without others knowing.

Some thinkers in the degrowth movement have begun to confront the security question more directly. Alexander Dunlap, for instance, criticises degrowth advocates for neglecting the need for “combative self-defence” against the forces of growth and capital (3). He argues that a diversity of tactics, including direct action and community defence, may be necessary to protect both people and ecosystems from aggressive exploitation.

In practical terms, post-growth regions might need to develop forms of civilian-based defence and resilience. Networks of local militias or civil defence units (much like Rojava’s own community defence forces) that can deter invasion or sabotage without building the kind of massive, high-tech military that requires an endless economic churn.

Simultaneously, a post-growth society must wage peace on the ideological front. Challenging the narratives used to justify militarism (for example, that military expansion is “good for jobs” or that “glory” comes from dominance). Redirecting the talents of the arms industry towards renewable energy and infrastructure for resilience is one way to transition the guns workforce to butter without mass unemployment. Ultimately, the goal is a world where this is an obsolete dichotomy.

Achieving this in the context of our existing political institutions is daunting, and maybe even impossible in the time we have left to meet any of our global decarbonisation commitments.

Notes

1. Hardi, T. (2012). Danube Developments against the Backdrop of History and Geopolitics. Der Donauraum, 52. See also Ardeleanu, C. (2020). The European Commission of the Danube, 1856-1948: An Experiment in International Administration, Balkan Studies Library, Volume 27. Leiden: Brill.

2. Gyurcsík, I. (ed.) (2019). Danube Commission 70. Budapest: Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade.

3. Dunlap, A. (2020). Recognizing the “De” in Degrowth. Undisciplined Environments, 2 December.

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‘Real lobbying reform must end the practice of corporate lobbyists writing our laws.’ - Marty Meehan

This is one of a series of articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

I’ve argued that anti-capitalists should reject state communism as the route to a post-capitalist world, and that community-based, commons solutions are more likely to succeed. In fact I’m arguing that corporations have captured and now control the states that created them, so that a post-capitalist world can’t be built via a ‘democratic’ state either.

I looked at how states and corporations have been united since the birth of corporations, and how corporations set the agenda and lay the groundwork for getting politicians to implement the policies that benefit them. This article is about how corporations add more pressure to get what they want, via pestering and manipulation. Next I’ll look at bribery, money and the ‘revolving’ door, and then at threats and punishment.

I want to argue that corporate dominance wouldn’t be possible without states, and that their dominance has allowed them to capture and control the states that created them. Later posts will look at how states respond to this pressure to ensure that corporations retain their size and power.

Introduction

Here’s how corporations add pressure on governments with a range of techniques, in ascending order of nastiness:

• Pestering (lobbying)

• Manipulation (regulatory capture)

• Bribery (with money and jobs)

• Threats (of capital flight, investor strike, the wrath of global institutions, credit rating agency downgrades, or violence)

• Punishment (actually doing those things)

Now, we’ve all done a bit of pestering and manipulation, and maybe even had a go at mild bribery or threats, but can we all agree that bribing elected officials or using violence against opponents shouldn’t be tolerated? It’s only because we’re so familiar with these techniques in the political world that we don’t see them as too bad. Just like witch-burning back in the day, we become accustomed to terrible things. Outsiders would be horrified, but it just washes over us. That’s why I want to label these things for what they are. Apart from the violence, they’re not breaking the law when they do any of this; it’s all perfectly legal, which isn’t surprising once you understand how corporations have captured the legislative process. From a corporate perspective, these aren’t bugs in corporate capitalism – they’re features.

Pestering: the lobby industry

Lobbying is the attempt to influence government decisions on behalf of particular interests. Lobby firms can be large in their own right – Ballard Partners, for example, has an annual revenue of over $80 million – but are tiny compared to their corporate clients, and aren’t household names. Their value is in their employees, who have close connections to politicians. In fact they’re often former senior government officials and political insiders themselves. Lobbyists can represent trade unions, NGOs or citizens’ groups too, but corporations and their collective organisations make up the vast majority of lobbying clients and spending.

The line between the lobby industry and think tanks is often blurry, and they frequently overlap. But they’re different, in that think tanks generate the policy ideas and produce research to support them, while lobbyists use their connections and direct communication with lawmakers to try to get those ideas adopted, or to suppress ideas their clients don’t want. They usually have specific, tangible outcomes in mind. Industry lobbyists regularly remove or weaken regulatory provisions that would harm corporate profits.

Their three main activities are:

1. Direct communication with legislators, their staff, and other government employees to advocate for or against specific legislation, providing detailed data, analysis, and arguments to try to change policymakers’ position on an issue.

2. Funnelling campaign funds from their clients to politicians that can buy access and create relationships – intended to gain influence.

3. Mobilising public support and building broad coalitions with other organisations, which creates political pressure that’s hard for policymakers to ignore.

They can also:

• Testify at legislative hearings to present their clients’ position.

• Second staff to politicians’ offices at their own cost.

• Organise client roundtables, putting clients in rooms with lawmakers to shape policy.

• Offer politicians jobs when they leave office (see ‘The revolving door’).

• Write policy documents that politicians can adopt verbatim. Here’s just one (egregious) example: just 3 years after the 2008 financial crash, in which derivatives trading played a major part, Citigroup’s lobbyists wrote a draft bill to weaken new regulations around derivatives trading. Of the 85 lines in the bill adopted by the House Financial Services Committee, 70 of them were lifted verbatim from the lobbyists’ draft. This bill was eventually passed by attaching it to a must-pass government funding bill in 2014, bypassing the usual legislative process.

How big / influential is the lobby industry? Companies spend over $4 billion annually on lobbying in the US, around £2 billion in the UK. There are many times more lobbyists than there are politicians. In the US, the financial services industry alone employs 3000 lobbyists – 5 for every congressperson. Research on one campaign showed that for every dollar spent, corporations received $220 back in tax savings. That’s some investment – a 21,900% return, in fact. And it’s not just national politicians who are lobbied. The EU is lobbied relentlessly too.

UK corporations are not required to declare their engagement on policies, how much they spend on lobbying, or which legislation they are targeting. And, if this wasn’t enough, there’s undercover, secret lobbying too, known by insiders as ‘stealth lobbying’ (not that it’s easy to collect data on lobbying generally).

I find it amusing (although painful) that a lot of good people on the left and right propose that the way to stop all of this is for lobbied, captured governments to reform the system by passing legislation. Isn’t the absurd irony of that obvious? Lobbying regulation isn’t fit for purpose, but it’s not the opaque nature of corporate lobbying or lack of regulation that’s the problem. It would still be wrong if it were completely transparent and well-regulated.

Putting a case to your elected representatives is not a problem in itself. It’s the money and power of corporations behind the lobbying that’s problematic and that corrupts democracy. In a different system, say a commons ‘partner state’ (more in later articles), based ultimately on local assemblies, lobbyists wouldn’t have direct access to policymakers (but could still try to influence the choice of experts to present to the assembly). But without professional politicians, and with the composition of assemblies constantly changing, they wouldn’t really have anyone to approach with job offers or wads of cash, and there would be no political campaigning for votes. The answer isn’t to attempt to make corporate influence cleaner, more transparent or more tightly regulated. It’s to make concentrated corporate power politically ineffective.

In a section on lobbying I really can’t leave out ALEC, in the US, although it’s much more than a lobby organisation. It has corporate members that sit on its task forces to draft model pro-corporate bills that it distributes to states and asks them to modify and adopt. It calls itself nonpartisan, but in reality it’s a corporate tool, as explained by the Center for Media and Democracy. It’s also involved in moves to re-write the US constitution to make it more pro-corporate.

Manipulation: regulatory capture

Regulatory capture is a scenario in which a government agency that’s supposed to regulate an industry ends up acting in the interests of that industry rather than in the public interest. Most rules around business and daily life are developed by regulators and public authorities rather than directly by elected representatives. For corporations, influencing these officials is often more practical and effective than focusing solely on politicians.

The term was first popularised by economist George Stigler. He developed the theory partly from his analysis of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the US agency established to regulate US railroads. He argued that, over time, it came to serve the interests of the railroad companies rather than the public. Stigler’s work in the 1970s helped establish regulatory capture as an important concept in the economics of regulation.

Its mechanisms are the same as at the state level, just aimed at government agencies rather than politicians. For example:

1. Lobbying: corporations advocate for the rules that benefit them. Unlike legislative lobbyists (see above) who must register (under the Lobbying Disclosure Act in the US, and the Lobbying Act in the UK), those who target regulatory agencies are often not required to register. This allows their campaigns to operate under the radar. In the US, twice as much is spent on lobbying regulators than lobbying politicians.

2. The revolving door: regulators leave to work for the industries they regulated, or industry executives become regulators. More on the revolving door in the next article.

3. Shared cultures and social connections of regulators and regulated: similar backgrounds and frequent interactions between regulators and industry can make regulators more sympathetic to industry concerns.

4. Structural dependence: for a regulatory agency to do its job, it needs immense amounts of data and expertise about the industry it oversees. The only practical source for this is the industry itself. Regulators often have no choice but to rely on unverifiable data and self-reporting from the corporations themselves. In many cases, independent sources of data just don’t exist.

Corporate capture of regulators doesn’t necessarily mean weaker or fewer regulations. Often capture leads to more or stronger regulation, but designed in ways that benefit corporations that can afford compliance costs, lawyers, reporting requirements, certification systems etc. Small competitors often can’t, so regulation can become a barrier to entry into the market for small businesses.

Wikipedia has a large list of historical examples of regulatory capture, so I don’t need to list more here. But I would like to recommend the movie Inside Job, about the 2008 financial crash, because it’s so entertaining (watch it for free here). Icelandic regulators were interviewed about their contacts with privatised banks holding assets around ten times the size of the Icelandic economy, lending money for schemes, many of which went bad, and lots of people lost all their savings. They said that when they visited banks, 20 lawyers were waiting to greet 2 regulators, primed to answer their questions. The regulators who pushed hard were offered jobs. One third of Icelandic regulators accepted.

Because of their shared culture, regulators aren’t conditioned to question ‘normal’ corporate behaviour, only obvious corruption. What I’m arguing is that perfectly legal corporate attempts to gain influence are extremely detrimental to democracy, nature and society.

Regulators accept the fundamental structure of large corporations and a market dominated by such entities as the baseline reality that they’re there to manage, not to challenge. These assumptions are rarely questioned. Their reforms are therefore geared towards enabling corporations to function on as even a keel as possible. Their goal becomes mainly stability, which often involves suppressing smaller, more efficient, decentralised alternatives that might disrupt the status quo.

As and when the commons grows to challenge corporations, regulators may well see this as problematic and regulate against it, as it’s in direct opposition to everything they’ve learnt about how an economy should operate – i.e. growth, oligopoly and wealth concentration.

Conclusion

I looked at how states and corporations have been united since the birth of corporations, and how corporations set the agenda and lay the groundwork for getting politicians to implement the policies that benefit them. Now I’m looking at how corporations add more pressure to get what they want. Above, I looked at pestering (lobbying) and manipulation (regulatory capture). Next I’ll look at bribery, money and jobs (the ‘revolving door’), and then at threats and punishment. After that I’ll move on to what corporations get in return from their partner states.

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By Amrit Sachar and Louise Romain, Festival Organisers

When we last wrote about the Festival of Commoning in July, the programme was still taking shape. It has now been published, and I am excited to give you a glimpse of what our programme team has created, with 17 contributors and 8 venues.

In the two days of programme, this year’s theme ‘Common Ground: Healing Divides’ will take you through innovative, grassroots projects from around the world, exploring neighbourhood organising, cooperative economies, land, food, energy, housing, democracy and governance.

Tickets now on sale here

£99 for standard ticket

£150 for pay-it-forward

Solidarity pricing: £25 for supported tickets

Different ways of participating through multiple venues

The Festival has been deliberately organised to invite people to participate in a variety of ways, engaging their minds, hearts and hands.

Head

• At Lansdown Hall, the programme will be the closest to a conventional conference format, with talks, presentations and conversations exploring larger questions around commoning. These sessions will be video-recorded and made available for free, online after the Festival. Lansdown Hall has limited capacity (150 people).

Heart

• At St Laurence Church, sessions are more immersive, experiential and interactive, with greater emphasis on participation and discussion. There is no capacity limitation here but these sessions will not be recorded.

Hands-on

• These sessions are field trips and practical experiences, visiting projects, meeting the people involved and learning through doing.

  • On Friday afternoon, visit Stroud Common’s brand new Climbing Commons: a community bouldering facility at half the price of conventional facilities. Hear Chik Shimasaki tell the story of how we turned it from an idea into a reality, and how the project was developed using the Stroud Commons finance model. He will answer all your questions and you’ll get a go at climbing too! Spaces limited, booking advised.

  • On Saturday morning, a joint session held by Common Soil and Landmatch England will explore Commoning Land through practical experience. Get your hands in the soil and explore big questions together: Can (re)-commoning our food system address the meta-crises?

  • On Saturday afternoon, the Trinity Rooms Community Kitchen will host Cooking for Community. Come help make a meal for 100+ festival contributors and participants, and learn what it takes to run a successful community cafe and to create hearty, healthy meals for hundreds of people. Spaces limited, booking advised.

Come to these sessions:

Neighbourhoods and community organising

• Transforming Neighbourhoods: Meet two grassroots groups: East Marsh United, from Grimsby, and Positive Carrickfergus, a Northern Irish Community Interest Company. They are transforming their neighbourhoods addressing the issues that matter to their communities most: from a community-owned greengrocer to community-led housing – sprinkled with art and music events that make a place a truly great place to live.

• From the Ground Up: In this interactive session, we will hear from Jaqui and Lou of Paganhill Community Hub, a community hub based at The Octagon in Stroud. Following a short film, they will share their experiences of building community, supporting local people, and applying asset-based community development principles that focus on people’s strengths, skills and relationships.

• Assembly Culture: Finding common ground in a polarised world: ​Join the Humanity Project to hear how neighbourhood assemblies help communities across the UK build trust, share power and drive change together by finding common ground in times of polarisation. Through listening, deliberating, and storytelling, neighbours rediscover their collective agency.

• Cooperative Networks: Join members of Cecosesola, Venezuela’s pioneering cooperative network, for a session featuring a short pre-recorded presentation followed by a live Q&A. Discover how their non-hierarchical, community-led approach has built resilience, provided affordable essential services, and adapted to decades of economic and social challenges.

Energy and economic infrastructure

• Community energy: Taking control of our renewable abundance: Who owns our energy? And who currently profits? Join Flick Monk (Platform), Jess Farr (Stroud Area Community Energy Network ) and Iris Partridge (ResNet) to explore how the community energy movement is putting communities in control of our renewable resources, why that’s good for people and our planet, and how you can join the radical movement of energy commoning.

• Finance and economic commons: A new commons movement is developing, with new and revamped financial and economic tools, that can federate and form the basis of a new economy, owned by communities, rather than by banks and corporations. Dave Darby from Stroud Commons will explain the basic ideas, and their inventors will be present to answer questions.

Conflict resolution and decision-making

• Rehearsing the Future: Community Imagining as Practice. A deep dive into creative participation methodologies from Town Anywhere, a large scale time travel community visioning process. Ruth Ben Tovim will share about the conditions that enable people to come together across differences, work and make decisions collectively, and build trust, agency and a sense of belonging quickly. Imagination is an essential social skill for bridging divides and navigating uncertain futures.

• Conflict, Collaboration & Collective Power: Joining together for the common good. Conflict can divide us at every level, from difficulties with those we work or live beside, all the way up to huge social and political tensions. It can also offer a path of joining together to become something more than we can be alone. Run by Paul Kahawatte at Navigate, this session will look at some practical ways we can prepare for and engage with tensions, disagreements and difficulties, in order to work together, more powerfully, for a better future. Spaces limited, booking advised.

In addition to all this, we also have a session hosted by the Heavens Valley Community Benefit Society on ‘Tending our Common Land’, an evening celebration organised by Black Ark Media at the Stroud Brewery. Make sure to check out the programme for further details!

We have worked hard to create solidarity ticket prices from £25 for supported tickets, to £99 for standard tickets, and £150 for pay-it-forward tickets. We would be grateful if you’re able to buy your tickets in advance: Tickets are on sale here.

If you need accommodation, have a look here which includes the option to pitch a tent, roll out a sleeping bag in Trinity Rooms and cheap rooms in Hill House.

The Festival is built collaboratively by people who care about creating welcoming, inclusive and community-led spaces. We need the participation of many hands to make this a fantastic, smooth and well organised experience for all. If you’ve got time over the 2nd and 3rd of October, and in the weeks leading up to it, please consider applying to be a volunteer. Fill in the volunteering form or email festivalofcommoningstroud@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading!

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Contents

1. Think tanks

2. Corporate infiltration of education

3. Ownership of mass media

4. Astroturfing

5. Social connections and shared values

6. Conclusion
   

‘We can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. We cannot have both’ – US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1933)

This is one of a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

In the previous article I showed how states were involved (and essential) in the formation of corporations, and how they’ve been entwined ever since.

This article covers the various ways that corporations set the political agenda, including what is and isn’t thinkable (i.e. what’s in the ‘Overton Window’). The next is about the more aggressive ways in which corporations have captured states.

I want to argue that corporate dominance wouldn’t be possible without states, and that their dominance has allowed them to capture and control the states that created them. But first, let’s look at the tools and strategies that corporations use to set the agenda and control what can and can’t be discussed.

Think tanks

A think tank is an organisation that conducts research and provides advice, with the aim of influencing policy. In the UK, ‘Tufton Street’ is a term used to describe the ecosystem of right-wing think tanks centred on said street, on Parliament’s doorstep. Examples include:

• The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

• The Adam Smith Institute

• The Taxpayers’ Alliance

• The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

• Civitas

• Policy Exchange

• The Centre for Policy Studies

There are also global, corporate-funded, highly-influential think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations; and some don’t call themselves think tanks at all, like the Pacific Legal Foundation in the US, which exists to defend corporations against environmental, health and workers’ rights activism. Many call themselves ‘free-market’ think tanks, but I argue that if they’re promoting corporate interests, then they’re nothing of the sort.

Think tanks are infamous because of the way they translate corporate interests into policies that help subservient politicians gain office. I’ve underestimated their influence in the past, but I was wrong, which is why I’ve listed them first here. We now have right-wing activists boasting that the IEA ‘incubated’ a British prime minister.

This is how think tanks operate:

1. Corporations and billionaires fund them and give them their agenda.

2. They combine public opinion and corporate agendas to deliver voter-friendly policies.

3. Corporate media promote their policies and influence the public.

4. Political parties adopt the policies because they know they’re voter-friendly.

5. Just to be sure, politicians appoint think tank staff as special advisors.

6. The politicians get elected and implement corporate-friendly policies.

Here’s more detail on those steps:

1. Corporations and billionaires fund them and give them their agenda

Most critics focus on ‘Dark Money’ – political spending meant to influence elections or public opinion, where the original source of the funds is hidden from the public. Because the donor’s identity is shielded, wealthy individuals, corporations, or even foreign entities can spend large sums of money to influence politics without public accountability.

But I’d argue that it doesn’t matter if the source of funding is opaque or transparent – it’s still a vehicle for corporations to get their way.

See Who Funds You for how transparent think tanks are about where they get their funding. More here.

2. They combine public opinion and corporate agendas to deliver voter-friendly policies

Think tanks conduct research to understand the public mood, build a case for their agenda, and ultimately give politicians the confidence to act. They don’t have to push for policies that benefit particular corporations – just for policies that create and maintain a corporate-friendly environment. Conclusions of studies and drafts are often discussed with donors, whose opinions help shape the final report.

3. Corporate media promote their policies and influence the public

If public opinion doesn’t match the corporate agenda, corporate media, including social media, are used to tweak public opinion, helping shift the Overton Window towards their preferred policies. Think tank staff are interviewed in the media, including, of course, the state broadcaster in the UK, and presented as if they’re impartial. News outlets constantly use them as sources of information in articles and editorials.

It’s a very cosy relationship, as revealed by the head of the Adam Smith Institute: ‘Every Saturday, in a wine bar in Leicester Square, staff from the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs would sit down with Conservative researchers and leader writers and columnists from the Times and Telegraph to plan “strategy for the week ahead” and “co-ordinate our activities to make us more effective collectively”. The Daily Mail weighed in to help the lobbyists refine their arguments and ensure there was a supportive article on its leader page every time they published a report.’

4. Political parties adopt them because they know they’re voter-friendly

Think tanks that deliver policies that please corporate donors (securing fundraising) and can be sold to the public as popular (securing votes) gives politicians a ‘win-win’. For example, a tax cut for an industry becomes ‘job creation’, and a deregulation bill becomes ‘cutting red tape to lower prices’. When a politician cites a think tank study, they’re not admitting to helping a donor; they’re claiming to be following expert evidence.

Because think tanks have already done the research, written the policy papers, drafted the legal language and tested the public messaging, adopting the policy requires almost zero effort from the politician’s staff. When a bill is that easy to pass, raises that much money and pleases that many voters, saying ‘no’ becomes a politically risky choice. Politicians aren’t being duped. They’re fully aware of the game. They willingly adopt these policies because the system has aligned their survival instincts perfectly with corporate interests.

5. Just to be sure, politicians appoint think tank staff as special advisors

This is extremely common. George Monbiot used Liz Truss as an example. Her chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, was formerly chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance; her interim press secretary, Alex Wild, was research director at the same organisation; her health advisor, Caroline Elsom, was senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies; her political secretary, Sophie Jarvis, was head of government affairs at the Adam Smith Institute. More examples in the FT and UCL about this.

6. Sure enough, the policies are voter-friendly, so they get elected and implement them

And they throw in a few more corporate-friendly policies too, like making corporate donations to think tanks tax-exempt if they’re registered charities, as many are (e.g. the IEA), but I guess it’s allowing the IEA to be registered as an unbiased ‘educational’ charity that’s the problem here. Corporations can then write off their donations to think tanks as charitable contributions on their taxes. And of course they make sure that there’s no legal requirement for think tanks to reveal their funders.

Corporate infiltration of education

The various ways that corporations influence state policies, as outlined in this article, also apply to the education system. States comply in shaping curricula and rules so that kids are compelled to wear a uniform, turn up on time, do as they’re told and accept the status quo. That way, it can be ensured that the education system produces passive consumers and reliable corporate employees who won’t rock the boat.

There are more direct ways that corporations infiltrate education. Funding is the obvious one. Corporate funding of university departments helps tailor research for corporate profit (or worse: militarisation and corporate profit) rather than the public good, and to shape student opinion and what’s seen as ‘common sense’. See here and here, and there are many more that you can easily find.

In the UK, universities are ranked according to what percentage of their graduates are in professional and corporate managerial positions with high salaries one year after graduating – amplifying the idea that the purpose of the education system is to produce successful capitalists. We’ll look at the ‘revolving door’ between corporate and state employment (including academia) soon.

It happens outside higher education too. Corporations provide education packages for schools on their topics of interest – for example, analysing NAFTA – but the materials provided will be pro-NAFTA. Packages contain some good stuff, maybe on recycling or fuel efficiency, but never any discussion of how an excellent public transit system might be better than over-reliance on the private car. The materials will probably be accurate, but biased; a prime example is the financial literacy programme provided by the Council for Economic Education, that is ‘primarily focused on measuring students’ grasp of neoclassical economics’. No wonder: have a look at their funders.

Packages often contain corporate advertising aimed at children. Corporations provide equipment for the school, but only if the school makes sure the kids watch the advertising – during lessons! They also pressure schools to install vending machines full of unhealthy fizzy drinks and sweets. See it in action in this policy for Chicago schools.

Ownership of mass media

As with most sectors of the economy, ownership of media outlets is becoming concentrated in a few mega-corporations, and radical alternatives to corporate control get almost no coverage in that media, for reasons that should be obvious. Apart from the fact that mainstream media is owned by corporations, it’s also funded by corporate advertising, and of course they’re not going to publish content that’s inimical to their own and their advertisers’ interests.

Specific corporations often fund sponsored content in the mainstream press to push on a particular issue that’s important to them, but mainly, it’s about shaping public opinion on what’s ‘common sense’, generally.

But ignoring alternatives is just the first stage. As Gandhi (maybe) said, ‘first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win’. In that case, when the corporate media is attacking commons, we’ll hopefully be well on the way to winning (we can but hope).

Jeremy Corbyn (ex-leader of UK Labour Party) knows about the media’s attack phase. This was the only genuinely anti-corporate potential prime minister in my lifetime, with a lifelong commitment to anti-racism, and yet even some of my right-on friends believed the corporate and zionist lobbies’ BS about his purported antisemitism. Zack Polanski (Green Party leader for England & Wales) will receive similar treatment, although at least they won’t be able to use the antisemitism approach with him (as he’s Jewish).

This corporate stranglehold had a counterweight: the arrival of social media meant that independent journalists, grassroots organisers, dissident economists and the rest of us heretics could bypass the big boys, reaching audiences that sometimes rivalled mainstream media. That window is now closing, if not already shut. The platforms – themselves corporations funded by the same advertising oligopolies – have transitioned from ‘open town squares’ to algorithmic gatekeepers. Their censorship isn’t about overt bans (although that happens); it’s about shadow suppression: demoting posts with ‘unverified’ corporate-critical content, reducing reach for anti-capitalist hashtags, and demonetising creators who deviate from corporate orthodoxy. On the same day, a misleading pro-corporate post about tax cuts might stay up, while a factual post about a case of corporate price-gouging is flagged as ‘misinformation’ because an advertiser complained. Worse, platforms outsource content moderation to AI and third-party contractors with no political accountability, causing activists to self-censor to avoid penalties. The result is that radical alternatives are algorithmically buried before they can even reach the ‘laughing’ phase. The corporate media doesn’t need to attack what 95% of users never see.

Newspapers and private TV stations will pull stories with a negative slant on the corporate sector (although they’ll often expose individual corporations), and push stories that give a positive slant to the worldview of corporate advertisers, because their livelihood depends on it. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model describes how the business model of the corporate media is not delivering news to the public, but delivering the public to advertisers.

Researching and understanding political issues today is expensive in terms of time and energy. Most people generally can’t afford this time and energy (especially if they’re working more than one job to make ends meet), and so can easily be swayed by ads designed by consultants with lots of time, energy and resources. It becomes just another consumer choice and habit – choosing political parties the way we choose breakfast cereals. And sure enough, data shows that politicians attach virtually no weight to the views of people with low (or even middle) incomes.

Electable parties in the West have become brands, with policies that are generally socially progressive and economically neoliberal. This is in the interests of corporate investors. Socially progressive policies have no impact on their profits, but veering away from neoliberal economic policies does. It’s all about return on investment in the end. If $x investment helps deliver legislation that makes you $2x, that’s just good business sense in a corporate world.

Astroturfing

This one seems somehow sneakier and nastier than the other approaches, but it isn’t really – it’s just less subtle. Astroturfing is a play on the word grassroots. It’s a plastic, pretend, sterile, corporate version of grassroots activism and opinion, in the same way that Astroturf is a plastic, pretend, sterile, corporate version of grass.

The aim is to manipulate the public into believing that there’s mainstream support for proposals, ideas or candidates, when in fact, the support is manufactured. The intention is to affect public opinion, voting intention and therefore government policy. This is done in various ways:

1. Paying people to write pro-corporate letters to the press.

2. Planting paid corporate stooges in public meetings, posing as concerned citizens.

3. Hiring freelance gig-workers (usually in poor countries) to like, dislike and share posts to support or oppose specific policies or opinions on social media.

4. Releasing swarms of bots / automated accounts to do the same thing.

5. Creating fake social media accounts (‘sockpuppets’) to post on behalf of corporate campaigns.

6. Flooding politicians’ phones and inboxes with manufactured outrage.

7. Founding and funding ‘citizens’ groups to ostensibly campaign for the environment, but with very different aims – for example, to remove legislation that prevents drilling for oil or building supermarkets in green areas.

PR and digital marketing firms are usually hired by corporations or super-wealthy individuals to carry out this work, but foreign governments and intelligence agencies sometimes join in too.

The fake grassroots hirelings don’t need to know or care about the actual agenda, and neither do the PR companies. They’re just doing paid work. The agenda comes from the sponsor – usually corporate, with enough secrecy and deniability built in to avoid blame if the astroturfing is exposed.

There are now many more public relations employees than journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, giving corporations unprecedented capacity to shape public narratives. AI is, of course, making many of these techniques cheaper, faster and harder to detect.

Examples include PR firm Freshwater Strategy gathering business sector support for a group called Australians for Natural Gas, an astroturf group set up by gas company Tamboran Resources; and PR firm Burson-Marsteller creating the National Smokers’ Alliance, which placed advertisements and paid young activists to campaign for ‘civil liberties’ on behalf of Philip Morris.

PR Watch do a good job of exposing many more; and Wikipedia covers it well – including one example in a Shakespeare play!

Social connections and shared values

This is connected to the ‘revolving door’ between corporate and political jobs that I’ll cover in an upcoming article. Here I just want to talk about the similarities and connections between political and corporate elites, which create groupthink and render some ideas and approaches unthinkable and taboo.

Backgrounds

C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956) is the classic starting point on the similar social and educational backgrounds of elites. He argued that in the US the leaders of the corporate, political, and military worlds formed overlapping elite circles. His argument was not that they created formal organisations or secret conspiracies, but that they shared similar educational backgrounds, social networks, clubs, institutions and assumptions about society and power.

Pierre Bourdieu (in Distinction, 1979) developed a more detailed explanation of how elite groups reproduce themselves. His argument was that elite interactions transmit cultural habits (including manners and confidence), vocabulary, networks, credentials and familiarity with institutions of power, which generate a similar worldview, sense of competence and understanding of what counts as ‘serious’ policy.

US and UK studies have outlined the similar routes via private schools and elite universities to corporate and political leadership. For example, in the UK, Eton College has educated numerous prime ministers, cabinet ministers, financiers and CEOs, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have long been recruiting grounds for both politics and business. In the US, similar networks exist around Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities.

Friendships

These institutions foster lifelong personal networks and friendships that are maintained and expanded via dinner parties, shared holidays, charity galas, sporting events, exclusive clubs, alumni associations and family connections. Elite groups also tend to cluster geographically, in neighbourhoods close to centres of political and financial power. Georgetown, Washington DC is a hotspot for elites in the US, for example.

In those circles, antipathy towards corporate power would be career suicide – although anyone who might hold those views wouldn’t get to be in those circles in the first place. Representatives of small businesses, NGOs, unions or citizens’ groups are not part of these networks and don’t have the ear of politicians in the way that corporate CEOs and majority shareholders do. They (and we) just don’t have the same levels of wealth that brings these elites together. When was the last time you had a former prime minister holiday on your luxury yacht?

Conferences and events

Possibly the best-known coming-together of corporate and political elites is the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, although there are many others, including the more secretive Bilderberg Meeting and the apparently drunken, wacky Bohemian Grove. As well as corporate leaders, Davos is attended by IMF and World Bank heads, prime ministers, presidents and senior military officials.

In Superclass, David Rothkopf writes about his experiences at Davos, mixing with global corporate CEOs, politicians, bankers, media moguls and military leaders. He sees them as a dominant class with no loyalty to any particular country, who run the world for their own benefit (and therefore the benefit of corporations). But there was no condemnation – quite the opposite. There was a lot of toadying, and talk of states as a counterbalance to corporate power, rather than the other side of the same coin. He considers corporate capitalism a given, and so the reformist solutions he outlines require these turkeys to vote for Christmas.

More on how the shared experiences of elites narrow the range of acceptable thought can be found in Colin Crouch’s Coping with Post-Democracy, Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void and G. William Domhoff’s The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century.

Conspiracy?

Politics has become more about managing systems than debating alternatives. Alternatives aren’t generally understood or desired. In elite circles, you don’t have to ask if someone believes that unions or redistribution of wealth are good ideas. It’s just assumed that they’re not. Their money, friendships, interests, comfort, lifestyles, status and legitimacy all depend on support for the corporate status quo. And underneath the elites is a wannabe-elite layer of compliant middle class professionals who realise that their comfort and status depends on the status quo, and they defend it accordingly.

But is there conspiracy? Of course there is. Anyone who’s been part of any organisation knows that there’s corruption and conspiracy everywhere. Are the people who manage to claw their way to the top of corporate or state hierarchies likely to be different? No, I’d suggest that they’re likely to be worse, if you think about the qualities required to get them there. But conspiracy isn’t central to maintaining the corporate order. It can be done without explicit coordination. Don’t think of it in terms of corporate leaders bribing politicians to implement beneficial legislation, or doing anything that might put them in jail unnecessarily. Why would they, when everyone knows what sort of things need to happen to maintain the environment that produces elites?

Conclusion

In the last article we looked at how states formed corporations, and how states and corporations have been hand-in-glove ever since. In this article we looked at the various ways that corporations set the policy agenda and the limits to what can be discussed, and in the next we’ll look at the more direct ways that corporations capture and control states. After that, we’ll look more at what corporations get in return from compliant states.

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This is the third article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic. States must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

Even if internal inequalities are managed, a post-growth community must survive in a hostile environment in the short and medium terms in order to scale. Today’s world is dominated by nation states vying over sovereignty and great powers jockeying for resources and influence. The question then becomes, how does a sustainable experiment hold its own amid the realpolitik.

I, among many others exploring novel forms of alternative political economy over the last two decades, have been inspired by the experience of Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous region in northern Syria. Amid Syria’s civil war, the Kurds and their allies carved out a self-governed zone that rejected both Assad’s dictatorship and fundamentalism. What made Rojava particularly special was its embrace of decentralised governance (known as Democratic Confederalism), direct democracy, and feminist and ecological principles synthesised by Abdullah Öcalan. By 2017, an estimated 5 million people – Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Yazidis and others – were living under Rojava’s system of communes and councils. Its constitution enshrined gender equality, ethnic inclusivity and grassroots decision-making, striving toward a post-state society beyond ethnic nationalism. It could be argued that Rojava attempted a form of post-Westphalian governance on a local scale, rejecting the nation state in favour of a confederation of communities, because the alternative did not represent their beliefs, interests, nor respect their lives.

Importantly, this revolution in regional governance was coupled with an ethic of ecological sustainability and cooperative economy, quite the departure from growth-driven development. The outcome was that citizens of Rojava broadly enjoyed a better quality of life than citizens in neighbouring states using traditional methods of development.

Rojava was a glimpse of a post-Westphalian future, with multi-ethnic coexistence, autonomy, and communal care for people and land.

Its decentralised structure proved resilient in several ways. Power distributed among neighbourhood communes created very strong social cohesion. During times of war against ISIS, Rojava’s model of ‘everyday democracy’ at the grassroots contributed directly to security. Communities, with intimate local knowledge, were able to root out extremist cells and maintain order from below. Women played leading roles in both civil society and defence, famously organising women’s protection units that not only fought ISIS but also transformed norms. This empowerment of previously marginalised groups built a powerful collective stake in the system that made it worth fighting for.

Moreover, Rojava carried ideological power on the world stage. By demonstrating a workable alternative to authoritarianism and fundamentalism it posed a threat to surrounding regimes by example. The success showed that ordinary people could govern themselves without a nation state, patriarchy or profit, an open challenge to the ideological hegemony of both dictators and imperialists.

Ultimately, however, Rojava also exposed the security gaps facing any progressive polity in a world of states. Despite its internal cohesion, Rojava had to navigate reliance on external actors. Its militias, the YPG and YPJ, received air support from the United States to defeat ISIS, tying them to great-power calculus.

When ISIS was defeated in 2017-2018, the Kurdish-led forces found themselves largely abandoned by Western allies and their agreements of necessity. Turkey, fearing a Kurdish autonomous region on its border and emboldened by global indifference, launched an invasion. In early 2018, Turkish forces and their proxies invaded the Rojava canton of Afrin, eventually occupying the territory. They carried out documented war crimes and ethnic cleansing, driving out hundreds of thousands of Kurdish inhabitants.

The world’s major powers largely looked the other way. Turkey is a NATO member and an important regional player. Rojava’s lack of formal statehood meant it had no protection under international law, no seat at negotiation tables, and no patron once it outlived its usefulness in the fight against ISIS. The harsh moral is that even the most enlightened communal society can be crushed by conventional force if it stands alone in the world as it exists now.

As of early this year, Rojava’s self-organised and semi-independent status no longer exists in a meaningful sense. The new Syrian government has begun the process of absorbing Rojava’s governance apparatus into its own, largely permitted by the US’ ambivalence towards its former ally, having previously described their partnership as “temporary, tactical and transactional”. Its survival up to now is a testament to resilience and solidarity, but its struggle is a reminder that security remains a precondition for sustaining progress.

There is also a second lesson that Rojava teaches about strategic positioning. Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the “adjacent possible” describes how complex systems evolve not by leaping to optimal states but by exploring neighbouring configurations that are reachable from where they currently stand.(1) Biological evolution works this way. So do technological revolutions. And so, arguably, do political transitions.

This is consistent with Ilya Prigogine’s own analysis - “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order”.

Rojava was not an adjacent possible, but it was an attempt to build a fundamentally different society at the point of highest impediment, surrounded by hostile state actors with overwhelming military superiority.

This suggests a different strategic orientation for post-growth experimentation. Rather than building at the sites of greatest resistance, alternatives should be tested and refined in adjacent landscapes where the same problems exist at lower intensity. Community energy projects in small towns, commons land and housing stewardship in peri-urban areas, or citizens assemblies in cities with sympathetic administrations. These are strategic rehearsals over compromises, for now. The knowledge, institutions, and relational infrastructure built in these spaces can be transferred, adapted, and scaled as conditions shift.

Frank Geels’ multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions also offers a useful way of thinking about this.(2) Transitions happen when niche innovations build momentum at the margins while the dominant regime destabilises under landscape pressures (climate breakdown, resource constraints, legitimacy crises). The niches do not need to overthrow the regime head-on, but they do need to be ready when the dominant regime breaks, and connected enough to one another to fill the gap.

This is consistent with Milton Friedman’s famous “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable”.

In The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott documents how decentralised, “illegible” communities across Southeast Asia resisted state absorption for centuries through dispersal, mobility, and the deliberate cultivation of social forms that states find difficult to penetrate or administer.(3) Seeing Like a State extends this, showing how centralised governance repeatedly fails when it cannot read or accommodate local complexity.(4)

The implication for post-growth enclaves is that survival may depend less on military parity and more on becoming the kind of community that is costly to absorb and difficult to govern from outside.

The conclusion from this section is that any future post-growth enclaves will face similar exposure unless the broader geopolitical context shifts in their favour. Decentralised autonomy can flourish against the odds, but without a way to deter aggressors they will be strangled. A sustainable transition must be complex, and ready to keep the political option for scaling ready until “the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable”.

Notes

1. Kauffman, S. (2000). Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Kauffman, S. (1995). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Geels, F.W. (2011). The multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions: Responses to seven criticisms. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 1(1), pp. 24-40.

3. Scott, J.C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

4. Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Contents

1. Introduction

2. The birth of the state-corporate double act

3. The long, slow track of peasant dispossession, building factory workforces and corporate consolidation

4. The short, direct track of state-chartered mega-corporations

5. The rise of corporate power

6. Conclusion

‘The publicly traded limited liability corporation is a pathological organisational form that must join monarchy as an extinct institutional species’ – David Korten

This is one of a series of articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

In previous articles (see here), I argued that anti-capitalists should reject state communism as the route to a post-capitalist world, and that community-based, commons solutions are more likely to succeed.

Now I want to argue that corporate dominance wouldn’t be possible without states, and that their dominance has allowed them to capture and control the states that created them, so that a post-capitalist world can’t be built via a ‘democratic’ state either, because ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (she was talking about feminism, but the same principle applies here).

In this post I look at how states and corporations have been united since the birth of corporations. In the next 2 posts I’ll look at how corporations set the agenda and control states. Later posts will look at how those captured states ensure that corporations retain their size and power.

Introduction

In the West, people cling to the idea of democracy (power resides with ‘the people’). But power has been bought, which means that what we have now is plutocracy (power resides with money). I’m going to talk about the ways that plutocracy arises and is maintained, none of which require conspiracy (although I’m sure they happen), and all of which can be confirmed quickly with an online search. None of them require laws to be broken (although again, it happens sometimes). It’s all done within the normal operations of capitalism. It’s not about bad individuals or companies either; if they die or fail, they’ll be replaced very quickly. The problems are systemic, and the state is captured slowly and under the radar, not in a one-off spectacular event. States and corporations have been entwined since corporations were first formed, so that now we have a system in which corporate influence is not just readily accepted by the political class – it’s encouraged and requested. They’re accomplices; their status depends on it.

I’ll write mainly about what’s happening in the US political system. Similar things happen everywhere, but without the global ramifications of what happens within the US hegemon in a unipolar world. That will change later this century, but it’s the case right now.

Plutocracy is not a new phenomenon. Centralised states have always been and always will be controlled by the wealthiest and most powerful in society. This was already bad news for the ordinary citizens of ancient Sumeria and medieval Europe – but at a time of such massive damage to the biosphere, inability to shift the status quo due to the power of money is now an existential threat to our species.

In the 1980s, Reagan, Thatcher, Deng and Gorbachev (and then Yeltsin) were singing the praises of the free market, rather than Keynesianism and the stagflation and recessions of the 70s. But what they were really talking about was capitalism, which I want to argue is anything but a free market, because capitalism concentrates wealth, which is then used to buy power and skew the market.

What I’m not saying is that the corporate sector is a monolithic actor. Amazon and Walmart might be looking for regulatory barriers to entry for smaller competitors; Blackrock and Vanguard want liquidity and volatility; extractive corporations (e.g. oil and mining) want deregulation; tech platforms want privacy laws weakened or removed etc. These agendas often conflict. What I’m talking about is the use of the state by the corporate sector to maintain an environment that gives advantages to giantism and restricts competition from small businesses, non-profits, co-ops and commons.

In the past, wealth concentrated in monarchies, the landowning class and the church, but today it’s with the majority shareholders of corporations (not ‘banks and corporations’, because banks are corporations). Let’s look at how corporations came to be, how they concentrated wealth, and how that concentrated wealth buys power today.

The birth of the state-corporate double act

There were two overlapping tracks in the formation of corporations, and both were state-driven. One track saw the British state pushing people off the land over many centuries, and later into the new urban factories, some of which then slowly developed into large corporations. The other track was much more direct – the chartering of giant corporations like the East India Companies by states, uniting the aristocratic and merchant classes under state power.

The long, slow track of peasant dispossession, building factory workforces and corporate consolidation

First, states saw to it that the rural poor were no longer able to support themselves from the land (see my previous post, What Marx got right, from a commons perspective, especially the Transition from feudalism to capitalism section). The state implemented enclosure acts, to allow the nobility to capture common land, all the way back to the Statute of Merton in 1235, initially for wool production, and peaking in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when removing peasants’ ability to feed themselves from common land effectively pushed them into urban areas to provide the workforce for the new industrial factories. Acts criminalising vagrancy made it illegal to be idle or homeless, which had the same effect.

These new factories weren’t joint-stock companies or corporations – they were overwhelmingly sole proprietorships or private partnerships owned by wealthy individuals or families.

Politicians were mainly landed gentry until the Reform Act of 1832 broke their monopoly on power and gave industrialists a foothold that helped them become the political elite later in the century. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s family became wealthy through northern textile factories. Industrialists and state elites were more than allies or co-conspirators – they were the same people.

In the late 19^th century, after decades of accumulating immense private wealth, the most successful private factories outgrew the capital of single owners or small partnerships, and became consolidated into giant public corporations. For example, the Dowlais Ironworks – a partnership in south Wales – was the largest steel producer in the UK, that eventually became the multinational GKN.

The legal roots of these corporations can be traced back to the limited partnerships of Renaissance Florence, which separated active directors from passive investors. The latter were allowed to remain anonymous, and their liability became limited to the amount invested. Wealthy nobles, who traditionally looked down on commerce, could then invest without losing social status, and with much less risk. This led to the formation of the joint-stock company with publicly-traded shares that anyone (including foreigners) could buy, which generated the massive capital for, and spread the risk of, the extremely hazardous colonial incursions of that time. This transformed investment in these proto-corporations from an elite hobby into a global engine of early capitalism, and the aristocratic and merchant classes were finally united.

But the joint-stock companies weren’t corporations, in that they weren’t separate entities from their members – so the company couldn’t own property in its own name, and shareholders could be individually responsible for the company’s debts. This changed with the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 in the UK, which made incorporation easily available through a simple registration process. This legislation paved the way for the modern corporation, where the joint-stock principle and separate legal entity are standard features.

The short, direct track of state-chartered mega-corporations

The British and Dutch East India Companies were joint-stock companies founded by super-wealthy merchants embedded in the British and Dutch states, which chartered them as two of the earliest true mega-corporations (the British in 1600, the Dutch in 1602 – along with the world’s first public stock market for corporate shares, in Amsterdam). They weren’t the first, but they were by far the biggest.

The first governor of the British East India Company was an MP, although of course this was before 1688, when parliament became the dominant decision-making institution of the state, rather than the monarch. Company officials were embedded in the machinery of the state. The landed gentry invested in these charters to protect and enhance their wealth and power.

The Crown granted these companies exclusive monopolies over industries and geographical areas, and provided them with direct military and legislative support; and the companies served the state’s strategic interests. They didn’t create value – they extracted it. This all guaranteed maximum returns for the new elites and prevented competition from small, local businesses. Things are still much the same today.

The first corporations didn’t concentrate wealth. It was already concentrated in the people who formed them, who then made sure it remained concentrated in corporations, as the power of monarchs, landowners and the ancien régime waned.

William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy is a wonderful source of information on the founding and violent rise of the British East India Company, focusing on the characters involved; Wallerstein’s Historical Capitalism contains a great overview of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and capitalism’s subsequent expansion; and Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World contains a lot of good stuff on the birth and rise of corporations.

The rise of corporate power

European states developed their economies, cultures and legal frameworks to benefit their corporations and to extract as much wealth as possible from their colonies, in order to grow the wealth and military power that would be needed in the huge wars for global dominance that were to follow. The centralised power of states and the monopoly power of corporations reinforced each other and produced the giant state-corporate double acts that remain in power today.

With charters and state backing, corporations went completely global – and their main activities were colonial extraction everywhere. British chartered companies were fleecing other colonies too, not just India. Colonies, including America, had to provide raw materials for British industry, but they weren’t allowed to make finished goods themselves. As you might have heard, the Americans revolted, to say the least. Things were looking bad for corporations in America. The American economy initially revolved around family farms and small, local businesses, and Americans were driven by community, freedom (for some) and democracy (for some), all of which were being destroyed by corporations.

There were big struggles by the American people against corporations in the early years of the US. Around the same time, Adam Smith was railing against them too, in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Smith is often wheeled out by the right, but he distrusted and disliked corporations as much as he distrusted and disliked states. Actually, he believed that states exist to tax the public to subsidise corporations and to intervene in the market on their behalf – which is exactly what I want to argue.

Smith favoured the ‘invisible hand’ only in terms of small businesses with owner-managers embedded in their communities, not giant companies owned by the super-wealthy and given state subsidies from the beginning. Railways, for example, couldn’t have happened without state subsidies. The same now goes for the aviation and fossil fuel industries (and others). More about ‘corporate welfare’ in upcoming articles.

Corporations embarked on a campaign of purchasing democracy, so that citizens’ rights were diluted and corporate rights enhanced, until the state granted them legal ‘personhood’ at the end of the 19^th century. This, together with the limited liability that they already had, transformed them from aristocratic ventures into mass-investment vehicles. The state didn’t just enable corporations; it created the legal conditions for their dominance. Corporations merged and acquired each other to increase in size to eventually become the behemoths they are today.

Although corporations obtained personhood, they received state benefits that real persons don’t have; and unlike real people, they don’t die, so they’re able to amass wealth indefinitely, and ride out bad times or periods when conditions might not be ideal, and certain governments might be legislating against them. If you’re immortal, it won’t be long before circumstances change and a corporate-friendly government is returned to power.

Private ownership of the economy, as distributists point out, wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it were in the hands of millions of people, with a level playing-field. But that’s not how capitalism works. The means of production and exchange, the giant ‘feudal’ tech platforms and essential infrastructure have all been concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of insanely-rich people – the majority shareholders of the world’s biggest corporations.

Corporate tentacles now reach our High Streets via local branches, our homes via TV and internet advertising, our finances via mortgage and credit card debt, and our minds via branding. They suck money from individuals and communities to ensure that wealth and power remain concentrated, and they make us feel grateful for it, because ‘they bring jobs and choice’ (although small businesses provide more jobs, and the kind of choice they mean is generally between things like different kinds of fizzy drinks and fast food).

Conclusion

Don’t think that our modern, corporate landscape and culture is somehow natural or inevitable. It’s not – it was initiated and has been carefully cultivated by those with wealth and power over the last four centuries. But it doesn’t have to stay this way – and nature will eventually show us that it can’t. Those of us wanting to build commons are faced with a Network of Global Corporate Control. Not the most fertile ground for commons, but hey, it makes for an interesting (and necessary) challenge. We won’t defeat them by fighting them at the national or global scales, which are already captured. But they haven’t entirely captured communities and individuals yet, so we can fight them at the local and personal levels, and federate to compete with them at the national and global scales.

In this post I’ve talked about how the state-corporate relationship began, and has developed. In the next two posts I’ll look at how corporations now set the agenda to shape what’s thinkable, and then the various ways that corporations put pressure on governments to ensure that they get their way, so that the state remains a tool for maintaining the size and power of transnational corporations.

In an age defined by division, inequality, and a deep-seated sense of isolation, the concept of “commoning” feels less like an archaic tradition and more like a radical, necessary blueprint for the future. It’s a powerful idea that reclaims the principle that some things – land, resources, community – should be ours to share, protect, and manage together. This October, the town of Stroud in the UK will become a vibrant hub for this idea, hosting the Festival of Commoning 2026 under the fitting theme, “Common Ground: Healing Divides.”

The third annual Festival of Commoning will take place across Stroud on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026.

This year’s theme is Common Ground: Healing Divides. We will celebrate stories from people and projects who use commoning practices to foster belonging, mutual care, resilience, and shared power in the face of growing societal division, polarisation, inequality, isolation and exclusion.

This year we’re creating more spaces for people to connect with each other, learn new collaborative skills, and get out and about to see commoning projects already making an impact in and around Stroud.

The festival is being organised by a group of volunteers, local to Stroud, connecting to and drawing on the global commoning movement. It is a festival for doers, organisers and people who want to common, providing an opportunity to come together, share our stories, inspire one another and learn new skills.

See the line up so far here.
And buy your tickets here.

Understanding commoning: a philosophy of shared stewardship

Before diving into the festival itself, it’s worth understanding the philosophy that underpins it. Commoning isn’t just about sharing resources. It’s a dynamic social practice. It involves a community coming together to manage resources – land, housing, digital platforms, a local park, or a community kitchen – collectively and for the common good. The ethos is often summed up in three powerful principles: “Own it together, Make it affordable, Keep it forever.” This stands in stark contrast to the extractive logic of privatisation and the neglect of public goods.

Commoning is an act of resistance against the forces that isolate us. When we common, we reject the idea that we’re all just consumers or individuals in competition. Instead, we embrace our identity as citizens and neighbours with shared responsibilities and mutual care. The Festival of Commoning 2026 is a celebration of this spirit, exploring how these practices can foster belonging, mutual care, resilience and shared power in a world that often feels fragmented.

The three pillars of commoning: Head, Heart, and Hands

This year’s festival has a holistic approach, structured around three core elements: Head, Heart, and Hands. This framework ensures that participants engage with commoning on every level, from intellectual understanding to emotional connection and practical application.

The Head is for inspiration and learning. This is where attendees will hear the stories of commoning projects from across the UK and the world. It’s a chance to learn about their origins, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the secrets to their success. By listening to these narratives, participants can gather the knowledge and confidence to apply similar principles in their own communities. Storytelling is a powerful tool: it humanises complex issues and shows that change is not only possible but is already happening.

The Heart focuses on connection and participatory learning. Through workshops, participants will have the chance to experience commoning practices first-hand, discuss core themes with fellow enthusiasts, and deepen their knowledge and skills. This element fosters the mutual care and shared power that are central to the commoning ethos, building the human connections that are the bedrock of any strong community. There will be plenty of time for participants to connect and inspire each other, recognising that the most important contributors are the people who attend.

The Hands are where the festival’s ethos really comes to life. It’s about getting out and getting stuck into real-world commoning projects. In and around Stroud, attendees can contribute to tangible efforts that embody the principles they’re learning about. These hands-on experiences are not just about volunteering; they’re a powerful demonstration of how commoning can create immediate, positive change.

The specific projects available this year highlight the diversity of commoning in practice:

• Conservation at The Heavens: This is a story of community power. The Heavens is a stunning piece of land near Stroud that was saved from potential development by a community land buy-out. By helping with conservation efforts there, participants are literally contributing to a project that has been secured for the common good forever. It is a direct example of the principle “Keep it forever” in action, protecting both nature and public access.

• Harvesting at Common Soil: This community-supported agriculture (CSA) project is a direct challenge to the industrial food system. By harvesting vegetables at Common Soil, participants see how communities can take control of their own food production. CSAs like this build resilience by shortening supply chains, promoting sustainable farming, and ensuring access to fresh, affordable produce for everyone.

• Cooking with Reclaimed Food at the Trinity Rooms: This project tackles the twin problems of food waste and food poverty. By cooking up a feast with reclaimed food at the Trinity Rooms, the festival participants will engage in an act of practical solidarity, transforming surplus into nourishment and community. It is a perfect example of how commoning can turn a problem (waste) into a solution (a shared meal).

  

A festival rooted in the community

Stroud is a town with a thriving culture of community action and social enterprise. The festival’s social events for 2026 encapsulate this spirit and are an integral part of the commoning experience.

The weekend kicks off on Friday night with a community meal at The Long Table. This is more than just a dinner; it’s a powerful example of commoning in action. As a pay-what-you-can restaurant, The Long Table ensures everyone can eat together, regardless of their financial situation. Founded by baker Tom Herbert, it operates on a model of dignity and inclusion, creating a space where conversations can flourish between people from entirely different walks of life. The very act of sitting at a long table together breaks down barriers and fosters the kind of mutual understanding that is essential for healing social divides.

The evening then moves on to Stroud Brewery to celebrate the beginning of Black History Month. This is a brilliant gesture that ties the local festival to broader cultural and historical conversations, acknowledging that the struggle for common ground is intrinsically linked to the fight for racial justice and equality. The festival will culminate on Saturday with another community meal and music at the Trinity Rooms, further solidifying the bonds formed over the weekend and highlighting the venues in Stroud that are themselves community hubs.

Commoning as a beacon of hope

The Festival couldn’t be more timely. We live in an era of unprecedented wealth alongside extreme poverty, hyper-connectivity alongside profound loneliness, and global awareness alongside tribal conflict. The ‘divides’ mentioned in the festival’s theme are everywhere – economic, social, political, and environmental. For many, the future feels precarious, marked by anxiety around the destruction of nature, housing crises, and a sense that the systems governing our lives are failing us.

In this context, the Festival of Commoning offers a practical and hopeful alternative. It doesn’t offer quick fixes but shows that another world is possible. It demonstrates that people can come together to create affordable housing, protect green spaces, manage local economies, and build support networks. It shifts the focus from what we lack to what we can build together. It replaces despair with agency. For anyone feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world or unsure how to make a difference, this festival offers a clear and inspiring path forward. It’s a place to build resilience, share power, and create belonging, proving that the best way to heal divides is to build commons together.

See the line up so far here.
And buy your tickets here.

The problem of land

There is a very persistent problem in many of our lives, and this same problem is an issue that needs grappling with when trying to create new commons. This problem is access to land. Most people don’t own land, but instead rent it, which comes with restrictions on usage and a sense of impermanence. At the same time, both owners and renters can completely lack access to land that is usable for subsistence.

My own living arrangements are a good example. Being a tenant restricts my ability to make adjustments that would help me store more food. My plight is shared by other tenants in many ways: it can be difficult to invest in a space you could be evicted from or priced out of next year. You may also face prohibitions on putting holes in the walls, preventing you from putting up shelving. More importantly, I have no outdoor space I could use for any purpose whatsoever. The outdoor space around me is either privately owned by its occupants, or by a landlord that lives in another town, or is owned and managed by the council. There’s a tiny community garden which doesn’t really have space for my own use, and the waiting list for allotments is immense. Where, exactly, am I supposed to cultivate the land?

People around the world face a disconnection from the land in ways both quite similar and very different to what I experience. The land problem is massive. Unable to meet our own needs directly by working the earth, we are reliant on buying stuff with money earned from jobs – jobs where most of the work we do benefits our bosses, where the exhaustion and commutes disconnect us from our community, and where we may endure moral injury doing things we think are bad in order to keep food on the table. Reclaiming the means of subsistence is central to movements like the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and to books like Chris Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age (we’ve interviewed Chris: click here).

Our disconnection from the land has consequences on both the individual and the landscape scale. People who cannot work the land for subsistence are forced to rely on their ability to purchase goods, which may be lacking. In Feed Us With Trees, Elspeth Hay details the health impacts of the Karuk First Nation losing access to their subsistence landscape: in a community previously considered to have minimal rates of heart disease and high blood pressure, modern-day Karuk now suffer these problems three times higher than the U.S.A. average. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’ World Hunger notes that tenant farmers and landworkers are disinclined from pursuing sustainability, as they don’t know if they’ll be evicted in the next year. Alex Heffron highlights that in order to get funding, many farmers have to use unsustainable techniques, as funders are in it for profit and consider “unconventional” agriculture a risk.

As communities that want to make a living off the land and reconnect with the seasons and food-celebration, we are wrestling against developers with far more purchasing power than us. Where might there be space for us?

An untapped resource?

Where, exactly, am I supposed to cultivate the land? And – where might there be space for us? I’ve thought about these questions a lot as of late, being a part of the online community for the Poor Proles’ Almanac, where others share their agroecology exploits. The community is varied, with some folks being owners of properties with outdoor space, and others, like me, having no space whatsoever. Some people discuss foraging, others guerilla gardening, and one person has an impressive indoor growing setup that can support small trees. We discuss what it would take to localise our food system, and to practice agroecology, in places and cultures that might well be interpreted as hostile.

Where I live – and in many towns and lower-density parts of cities – there are many yards and gardens. Some yards and gardens are owned, some are rented. Some are connected to council housing. Not everybody who has access to a yard or garden (rented or owned) works that land. They might not be interested. They might be too busy. They might be elderly or disabled and struggle with maintenance tasks. They might not have the money for equipment or labour that would make their yard or garden manageable.

This felt like a niche left unused. Surely, at least some of the folks with yards and gardens left unused would be interested in someone working that land?

Turns out: yes! And also, others had already started up community projects along similar lines.

The Black Radish

The first example I learned of was The Black Radish, a community supported agriculture (CSA) project in Minneapolis. I learned about The Black Radish from an article on the news outlet Civil Eats. Their model is that they have two farmers that do most of the work. They have people sign up to “donate” their yard or garden – it’s so popular that there’s a waiting list. In exchange, they get the equivalent to a free CSA membership and someone doing their garden work for 9 months a year. The farmers get access to land and water in exchange. Food that doesn’t get taken by CSA members is donated.

When I’ve brought up The Black Radish in conversation, some folks remark that they may have heard of some other similar projects (though they are nonspecific, and do not recall). If you know of any, please pop in to the comments below or make a post on the farming and smallholding forum section we have.

Neighbourhood farms

The Black Radish isn’t the only existing example of using yards and gardens as farmland. A member of the Poor Proles’ Almanac’s online forum wrote to me about a successful project he had been involved in:

“We got corporate donors to provide the tools and materials needed to install growing space in participants’ yards [and gardens], and got the city to subsidise water for anyone in the program, so it was basically free to join and once we got enough folks signed up on a street we’d schedule a workshop. The only requirement of the program was to share at least 50% of the harvest with neighbors. We launched this in an area where nearly everybody was using amphetamines or needle drugs and it was really cool to see people reduce their drug use in favor of gardening and community.”

This model of a neighbourhood farm uses short-term outside support in the form of tools and knowledge to create long-term resilience. Tried and proven to work in neighbourhoods that would usually be written off, it is a powerful example of what else can be tried. The Black Radish model reduces the labour required from the yard- and garden-providers by leaning heavily on a group of farmers. This neighbourhood farm instead considers farm labour to be a benefit, a way for people to contribute meaningfully to their community. As I wrote in my post about mental health, a sense of contribution can make a massive difference to someone’s wellbeing.

Urban farm networking

The same online Prole who told me about this project also told me about an idea he has been mulling over, which he would be excited to get feedback on:

“I’ve been working off and on for a design for a distributed farm based around a web application where growers could track their crops and harvests, and the only centralised part would be collection and redistribution. [...] My hypothesis is that every food gardener tends to produce excess of something, so if we pool all the excess and redistribute it people will benefit.”

This is a third model, one which resembles a scaled-up version of a community project I have benefitted from. There are folks with allotments who pool their excess and donate it. This “virtual farm” envisions this on a larger scale, possibly linking the produce of Black Radish model and neighbourhood farm model projects. After all, why can’t these exist in tandem?

These models not only address the material needs of both the farmers and the residents, but do the culture-shifting work of de-commodifying food – entrusting members to “take what they need”, donating the rest for free, and knitting people back in with food systems. Gunnar Rundgren calls this “relationship food” and a pathway that is more resistant to commercialisation than selling anonymised food to supermarkets. It reactivates subsistence as a link between people and our landscape.

Moving forward with these ideas

Why can’t The Black Radish model or the neighbourhood farm model be used elsewhere? Of course, there will be differences, depending on law, landscape, and community. The Black Radish got its start when its farmers turned their own front garden into a farm, which was a good way to get their neighbours excited about the idea. As someone without any garden to speak of, I cannot simply follow the same steps.

So: I am going to try out this idea in my own community. Regardless of successes or failures, I will record the way things develop, how the shape of the land and its peoples alter the trajectory of the project. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

This is the second article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic. States must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters” – Antonio Gramsci.

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Under conditions of growing inequality, attempts to impose ecological limits can morph into explosive social conflict. We have already seen warning signs. France’s gilets jaunes erupted when a fuel tax was perceived as unfairly burdening the rural poor. People will not support sustainability policies that they feel trample on their livelihoods or entrench privilege. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen describe this resistance as a defence of the “imperial mode of living”, the observation that consumption patterns in the Global North are structurally dependent on cheap labour and resources from the Global South, and that this dependency is so deeply embedded in everyday life that people defend it unconsciously, even when it is destroying the conditions of their own future.¹ The backlash is not irrational; it is a predictable consequence of asking people to give up material comforts that the entire structure of modern life has taught them to treat as normal.

More ominously, these grievances create fertile ground for reactionary movements, precisely the forces that would derail a sustainable transition. Today we see the emergence of eco-fascists and hard-right nationalists who twist environmental narratives to serve xenophobic or authoritarian agendas.

These tendencies come from distinct but converging directions. Derrick Jensen, co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, approaches from the radical environmentalist left but has drawn sharp criticism for using essentialist conceptions of the “natural” to peddle transphobic talking points about who should be involved, and more dangerously “in” with, an ecological transition. Separately, far-right figures like Keith Woods describe disaffected and alienated former leftists as their primary targets for recruitment, coat-tailing onto legitimate ecological grievances while redirecting blame toward immigrants and minority groups.

These groups offer scapegoats instead of solutions, and in a transitional period, these elements could gain traction by exploiting fear and frustration. Similarly, ultra-nationalists promise to put their nation’s survival first, often at the expense of global cooperation, and could rally even further support beyond their existing success if people feel threatened by scarcity or decline.

If progressive governments attempt bold climate and redistribution policies, powerful industry lobbies can be expected to respond, whether through lobbying, capital strikes, or funding misinformation on a scale far beyond their practice for the last 50 years (see: Dark Money by Jane Mayer).

Social justice, therefore, is a core security requirement for sustainability. As the United Nations’ poverty rapporteur warned, we risk a kind of “climate apartheid” where the wealthy buy their way out of crisis while the rest suffer – a scenario that would all but guarantee social breakdown and authoritarian backlash.

Recent research confirms that high economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic erosion and backsliding. Feelings of being “left behind” make populations susceptible to anti-democratic strongmen who promise order or revival.

This suggests something important about the sequencing of transition itself. Systems undergoing fundamental change are fragile. They are susceptible to shocks, backlash, and cascading institutional failure. The resilience literature, particularly the work of Carl Folke and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, distinguishes between systems that can absorb disturbance while maintaining function and those that are brittle and prone to collapse.² Brian Walker and David Salt make a similar point, arguing that managing for resilience requires maintaining the diversity and redundancy of institutional and ecological functions, especially during periods of transformation.³

Applied to the political economy of transition, this means that before any post-growth society can build the virtuous feedback loops of cooperative economics, community energy, and regenerative agriculture, it must first stabilise its institutional foundations. It must invest in shock absorbers. For example, wage support for workers leaving carbon-intensive industries, core funding for community anchor institutions facing insolvency, or emergency adaptation funding for the most vulnerable housing stock.

These investments may not produce immediate positive-sum outcomes, and they may not be mutually reinforcing in the way that a mature regenerative economy would be, but they preserve agency, buy time, and hold space for more ambitious structural change. They prevent the permanent exit of key civic actors from the transition landscape.

The transition management literature, particularly the work of Jan Rotmans and Derk Loorbach at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, describes this as the pre-development phase of systemic change, the period where experimentation is possible precisely because existing institutions are buffered against collapse.⁴ If we skip this phase, the transition will likely be captured by those with the resources to weather the storm, which is to say, the very actors whose interests are served by the status quo.

To avoid this fate, post-growth transitions must aggressively prioritise equality and inclusion at every step. This means policies like wealth redistribution, guaranteed basic services, and just transitions for workers, ensuring that the burdens of changing the economy fall on those most able to bear them (and most responsible) while the benefits of a greener society, clean air, community life, economic security, are broadly shared.

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Notes

1. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2021). The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. London: Verso.

2. Folke, C. (2006). ‘Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses’. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), pp. 253-267. See also Folke, C. et al. (2010). ‘Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability’. Ecology and Society, 15(4).

3. Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press.

4. Rotmans, J. and Loorbach, D. (2009). ‘Complexity and transition management’. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 13(2), pp. 184-196. See also Loorbach, D. (2010). ‘Transition Management for Sustainable Development: A Prescriptive, Complexity-Based Governance Framework’. Governance, 23(1), pp. 161-183.

This is the first article in a new 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic. States must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Post-growth political economy, security, commons, alternative finance, and the governance of planetary futures.

Here’s a list of articles in the series (links to articles as they’re published):

1. Deconstructing Growth

2. On Inequality

3. Security Gaps and Lessons from Rojava

4. Guns or Butter

5. From Leviathan to Gaia

6. Beyond Fossil Finance

7. Notes on Techno-Libertarianism

8. Pillars of a Different Vision

Introduction

In the shadow of escalating great power politics, the idea of wellbeing-oriented local and planetary economic governance systems emerges as a radical yet increasingly convincing alternative to the existing global economic order. One that, to many, offers freely the most powerful force known to humanity. Hope. Hope in the face of declining living standards, hope when a nice place to live is a pipe-dream. To others it represents a regressive Malthusian distraction to the progress we have defined ourselves by for the last two hundred years (at least in the West), an insult to our ability to adapt and overcome. The roughly 2.7 degrees of global warming that our current and woefully inadequate emissions trajectories have us on may make clear which is the reasonable approach.

This challenges entrenched Westphalian state-society relations. The current geopolitical system, rooted in a relentless pursuit of accumulation, power, economic growth, energy security and militarism, is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of sustainable long-term resource management, conservation, and the delivery of an increased quality of life for Earth’s population of nearly 10 billion by 2050. Current growth-led trajectories don’t have global poverty alleviation rates consistent with a minimum, but still much too low, daily income of $5 per day being met for 207 years.¹

At the heart of this lies the link between a nation’s military-industrial complex and its economy, itself a product of realist conceptions that nation-states are first and foremost concerned with security, power, and survival in the anarchy of international relations. The relentless drive for economic expansion, often justified as a means to build national security and maintain influence, has led to an insatiable consumption of biophysical resources. This trajectory is increasingly at odds with the urgent need to address the looming threat of ecological systems collapse due to overconsumption.

This is a paradox. Our shared future demands we reduce growth, but doing so under a shadow of competitive geopolitics seems to undermine the very security needed to make that transition viable.

This provocation serves to explore the very real fear that no nation-state can commit to significant reductions in resource use and consumption without fundamentally undermining the structures that underpin their military and economic strength, and in turn, national security. And that even if attempted, capitalist forces in the global and national economies respectively would ferociously respond with economically destructive actions such as capital flight and investment strike. Karl Polanyi described this dynamic in 1944. When society attempts to protect itself from the destructive consequences of unregulated markets, markets push back. He called it the “double movement”.² We have seen it play out repeatedly across two centuries of industrial capitalism, and there is no reason to believe a post-growth transition would be spared.

This deadlock represents, I think, the most formidable barrier to the realisation of a hypothetically remedial a-growth (or even any truly-sustainable) political transition that advocates for a deliberate downscaling of production and consumption to achieve ecological and social sustainability.

This series will explore these topics, and some potential solutions, using the following structure.

1. Deconstructing Growth

2. On Inequality

3. Security Gaps and Lessons from Rojava

4. Guns or Butter

5. From Leviathan to Gaia

6. Beyond Fossil Finance

7. Notes on Techno-Libertarianism

8. Pillars of a Different Vision

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Deconstructing Growth

Infinities are powerful ideas. When discussing human nature, human potential and capacity for improvement, we often describe them as endless, boundless, or infinite. Thus, infinities are assumed and taken for granted in the systems we design – the economy included.

From the perspective of a physicist, modern notions of endless compound interest-led increases in value make very little sense. If exponential economic growth could continue indefinitely, it would need to be the most powerful force in the universe, because it would need to overcome some otherwise fundamental physical limits. Beyond thermodynamic barriers to growth, there are spatial and biophysical barriers to growth on a finite planet,³ and were this barrier to be overcome, an upper limit to potential growth and value via limits to theoretical productivity, expansion and value. Assuming we humans colonised and productively designed a Milky-Way-sized economy based on either material extraction or services over a conservative estimate of 100,000 years, physical limits, no matter the size, can never satisfy an exponential function of growth, with rather paltry estimates of annual return rates in such a scenario ranging from 0.075% to 0.1%, and if each individual person manages to produce a whopping googol dollars of 2020-equivalent value per year, 0.3%.⁴

These are important theoretical exercises in challenging ideas of anthropocentric infinities, and open the door to a potentially liberating acknowledgement of limits in wider social consciousness.

Growth is more than Simon Kuznets’ measure of a nation’s goods and services (GDP). It is an idea. It was not until the 1950s that growth as a basis of policy became dominant. It is a social process, maintained via a form of “dynamic stabilisation”; much as a bike finds stability in speed, modern economies must continuously expand in order to maintain their structure.

It is also a descriptive term for the material processes an economy with all its social metabolism facilitates. Complexity economics, as developed by Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, and the Santa Fe Institute tradition, gives us some of the tools to understand why this is so.⁵ Economies are not equilibrium machines that can be dialled up or down by adjusting policy levers; they are non-equilibrium, path-dependent systems in which growth emerges from interlocking feedback loops, institutional lock-ins, and self-reinforcing dynamics. The bike analogy works because the structure of the economy is inseparable from its momentum. You cannot stop pedalling and expect the thing to remain upright. A sustainable economic transition then requires both the political will to slow down and the structural redesign of the feedback dynamics that make expansion a precondition of stability. This has consequences for everything that follows in this series.

One dimension of this structural compulsion is the monetary system itself. The financial system creates money primarily as interest-bearing debt. When a bank extends a loan, it does not lend out existing deposits, It creates new purchasing power ex nihilo, as Jakab and Kumhof demonstrated for the Bank of England in 2015.⁶ That new money enters the economy carrying an obligation of principal plus interest being repaid. But the interest was never created. It must be earned by expanding economic activity. Growth, in this reading, is a structural consequence of how money is created, and not just a priority of policy. It then follows that a no-growth economy would under current monetary arrangements tend toward cascading default, as borrowers compete for a stock of money insufficient to service the aggregate debt.

Tim Jackson and Peter Victor explored this in 2015, modelling whether credit creation and interest-bearing debt produce an inherent growth imperative. They found that interest-bearing debt does not mechanically require growth in all conditions, but they concluded forcefully that monetary reform remains essential to a sustainable economy, given the system’s tendency to drive “unsustainable levels of public and private debt, increased price and fiscal instability, speculative behaviour in relation to environmental resources, greater inequality in incomes and in wealth, and a loss of sovereign control of the money system”.⁷

The problem runs deeper than even the mechanics of credit creation. The entire apparatus through which societies recognise, account for, and distribute value is calibrated for a growth economy. Robert Costanza estimated the annual value of global ecosystem services at $33 trillion in 1997, a figure that exceeded global GDP at the time.⁸ None of this appeared on any balance sheet. The institutional capacity for converting ecological and social value into something legible to markets, and therefore into something that can attract investment and sustain livelihoods does not exist at scale. Herman Daly spent decades arguing that conventional economics treats the economy as a closed system exchanging goods and money, ignoring the biophysical throughput of energy and matter on which all economic activity ultimately depends.⁹

A post-growth economy therefore requires different money as well as an alternative accounting infrastructure altogether, one capable of recognising forms of value that the current system ignores. You cannot exit the growth imperative without exiting, at least partially, the monetary and accounting systems that enforce it.

As a psychological, social, and material phenomenon, an alternative framework must focus on more than just removing GDP from policy circles. Transcending growth dictates the deconstruction of its philosophies, roles in wider power dynamics, and its ecological consequences.

Critiques of growth span ecological, socio-economic, cultural, anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-industrialist, anti-development, and green-growth dimensions.

Growth destroys the ecological foundations of human life. The prevailing circular flow model does not account for dependence on resources, energy or sinks. GDP is not necessary, and in many cases counterproductive, for net increases in human quality of life – what Herman Daly called “uneconomic growth” – the observation that beyond a certain income level, more growth brings more costs than benefits (the Easterlin Paradox).¹⁰ Costa Rica, with a GDP per capita more than five times lower than the US, consistently scores higher on the Happy Planet Index.

The endless pursuit of growth produces alienating ways of working, living, and relating to each other and nature, fuelled by David Graeber’s cultural critique “Bullshit Jobs”, where he challenges dominant conceptions of humans as homo economicus, seeing us instead as adaptable, socially dynamic communities who have thrived on cooperation.¹¹

There is a risk in this cultural critique, however, of treating growth as something purely imposed from above. Marshall Berman’s reading of modernity as a lived experience in All That is Solid Melts into Air complicates the picture. The same forces that alienate and exploit also liberate. The first generation to have electric light, the first woman in a family to attend university, the sense that tomorrow could be genuinely different from yesterday, are not false consciousness. They are real experiences of emancipation that billions of people alive today associate with economic development. A post-growth programme that dismisses this desire, treats it as propaganda or delusion, or does not adequately satiate the will for progress in new terms, will fail to persuade the people it needs most.

Continuing growth depends on continued exploitation and accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority at the expense of an overwhelming majority – what David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession”.¹² Nitzan and Bichler’s “Capital as Power” framework pushes this further. In their analysis, capital is not a productive input at all, but a quantification of organised power, and accumulation is fundamentally about differential advantage over others rather than absolute wealth creation. Dominant capital groups do not simply benefit from growth. They actively sabotage alternatives that threaten their relative position, what they call “strategic sabotage”.¹³

This maps onto the dynamics of capital flight and investment strike described earlier. Resistance to post-growth transitions is as much a defence of profit as it is a defence of the metric by which power itself is measured. It is based on gendered exploitation and devalues reproduction, and the vital care work on which any market economy depends. Both are overwhelmingly carried out by women (particularly in the Global South), and remain systemically sidelined. Depending on the method of calculation, this work represents between 30 to 70 percent of a country’s economic output.¹⁴

Modern industrial development, regardless of ownership model, has become authoritarian, alienating, and restrictive of self-determination. As Andre Gorz wrote in 1985, the fact that industrialism is common to capitalism and socialism illustrates the power and scope of the concept.¹⁵ From a global justice perspective, “growth” and “development” are 20th century inventions that create and maintain neo-colonial dependencies, reducing countries of the Global South to material suppliers without large value gains, reinforcing asymmetric power dynamics on which modern Global North quality of life depends. Immanuel Wallerstein’s “World-Systems theory” builds on this further, arguing that the global economy is not a collection of independent national economies at different stages of development. It is a single system with a core, a periphery, and a semi-periphery, in which the periphery is structurally required for the core to function. The promise that all nations can “develop” simultaneously is a contradiction in terms, because the system depends on unequal exchange to reproduce itself.¹⁶

And finally, “green-growth” in practice is built on a flawed understanding of long-term thermodynamic rebound effects. Brockway et al. find that there is little evidence or precedent for absolute decoupling of emissions and energy use from GDP growth, that global trends are going in the opposite direction, and that overlooked efficiency rebound effects may erode more than half of expected energy savings.¹⁷ Timothee Parrique’s “Decoupling Debunked” report similarly finds that decoupling at a rate consistent with Paris Agreement emissions trajectories seems unlikely, given the lack of accounting for the role economic growth plays in production, biophysical throughput, and associated emissions,¹⁸ and that even if decoupling did begin to happen, we could not in any scenario decouple fast enough to limit warming to Paris Agreement levels.

Growth provides the theoretical consent for certain kinds of limited and limiting profit-oriented politics. It is an emergent hegemonic structure and process shaped by intertwined dynamics of political economy, ideology, and militarisation. It is about power. Governments legitimise themselves by promising growth, corporations depend on it for profit, and superpowers treat GDP as a proxy for geopolitical clout. Decades of propaganda have made perpetual growth appear natural, necessary, even unquestionable – a common sense backed by institutions and ideas that mask its contradictions. As a result, the paradigm self-perpetuates, written into election platforms, development policies, and security strategies worldwide. Those sounding the alarm are dismissed as idealists.

Deconstructing growth means exposing it as a political construct. One that serves specific interests and is enforced through global institutions and military might. Nations use access to markets and resources (and the threat of force) to maintain growth at home, from colonial extraction to twin-deficit-fuelled U.S hegemony. Any serious attempt at any kind of truly sustainable transition, therefore, directly challenges entrenched power structures.

In short, moving beyond growth is inherently subversive. It strikes at the heart of a global system built on competition, accumulation, and the politics of progress. This is why a post-growth vision will be fiercely resisted by those who profit most from the status quo, unless we preempt and counter that resistance by building new systems that can survive this process.

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Notes

1. Woodward, D. (2015). ‘Incrementum ad Absurdum: Global Growth, Inequality and Poverty Eradication in a Carbon-Constrained World’. World Economic Review, 2015(4), pp. 43-62. The 207-year figure was popularised by Hickel, J. (2017). The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. London: Windmill Books. See also Hickel, J. (2015). ‘It will take 100 years for the world’s poorest people to earn $1.25 a day’. The Guardian, 30 March.

2. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

3. Daly, H.E. (1977). Steady-State Economics. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. See also Daly, H.E. (1992). Steady-State Economics (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Island Press.

4. Manheim, D. and Sandberg, A. (2021). ‘What is the Upper Limit of Value?’. Preprint, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. Available at: https://philarchive.org/archive/MANWIT-6

5. Arthur, W.B. (2015). Complexity and the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Beinhocker, E.D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. London: Random House Business.

6. Jakab, Z. and Kumhof, M. (2015). ‘Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds -- and why this matters’. Bank of England Working Paper No. 529.

7. Jackson, T. and Victor, P.A. (2015). ‘Does credit create a “growth imperative”? A quasi-stationary economy with interest-bearing debt’. Ecological Economics, 120, pp. 32-48.

8. Costanza, R. et al. (1997). ‘The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital’. Nature, 387, pp. 253-260.

9. Daly, H.E. (1999). Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon Press.

10. Easterlin, R. (1974). ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’, in David, P.A. and Reder, M.W. (eds.) Nations and Households in Economic Growth. New York: Academic Press.

11. Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Allen Lane.

12. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

13. Nitzan, J. and Bichler, S. (2009). Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. London: Routledge.

14. Schmelzer, M., Vansintjan, A. and Vetter, A. (2022). The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. London: Verso.

15. Gorz, A. (1985). Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work. London: Pluto Press.

16. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press.

17. Brockway, P.E., Sorrell, S., Semieniuk, G., Heun, M.K. and Court, V. (2021). ‘Energy effi ciency and economy-wide rebound eff ects: A review of the evidence and its implications’. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 141.

18. Parrique, T. et al. (2019). Decoupling Debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability. Brussels: European Environmental Bureau.