Departing in September 1971 from our city of Vancouver, Canada, the first ever “Greenpeace” crew sailed through wild seas to protest nuclear weapons testing off the coast of Alaska. Very few Vancouverites know their serene city of rain and mountains inspired Greenpeace. This is hardly surprising, however, as today Vancouver plays only a small part in global activism. Indeed, many local environmentalists lament its seeming apathy toward the escalating global environmental crisis. Where is the passion and courage of the 1970s? Why are Vancouverites not protesting inequality and injustice and ecological decay? The answer, we think, is revealing of the changing nature of global activism: “they are protesting in Vancouver,” just like people are doing all over the world.
Look at just the first two weeks of 2013. Vancouver saw at least a thousand people come together to oppose a proposal to construct a “Northern Gateway” pipeline from the oil fields of Alberta to the shores of northern British Columbia. And the city and the surrounding region saw a host of protests by Idle No More, a grassroots movement that emerged in 2012 to advocate for indigenous rights and demand better treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada.
Demonstrators in Vancouver were not acting alone. During these same two weeks, Idle No More protestors were rallying across Canada, blocking roads and train tracks and border crossings to the US, as well as marching through shopping malls and down highways. Other activists across Canada also came together in January 2013 to oppose government plans to expand oil and gas production, cut services for the poor, and subsidize corporate growth. And similar protests were occurring across the rest of the world, too.
Nothing was particularly unusual about the extent of civil unrest during January 2013. The following month, for example, tens of thousands of activists amassed in Washington, DC, to oppose plans for a Keystone XL pipeline to connect Alberta’s oil fields with refineries and consumers in the United States. Anti-capitalist and anti-globalization protests have been common across most of the world since at least the beginning of the global economic downturn in 2007, with states able to contain, but never completely extinguish, brush-fires of unrest.1
Within just a few months, Occupy Wall Street alone spread from New York in September 2011 to as many as 1,000 cities and towns worldwide. Since then protests have continued to rage even as states stamped out the Occupy movement. Just listing the issues drawing out millions of irate demonstrators in 2012 and 2013 could fill a book: capitalism and power politics in Spain; nuclear power in Japan and India; austerity measures in Greece; coal-fired power in the UK; electoral fraud in Russia and Mexico; college tuition hikes in Canada and Britain; corporate mining in Peru; a spike in gasoline prices in Nigeria; poor government services in South Africa; and environmental pollution in China.
Beverly Bell and her “Other Worlds” colleagues see this mounting resistance to state and corporate power coming together into an “historically unparalleled” “unity of movements.” Through social media, grassroots activists worldwide are increasingly cooperating and coordinating with one another, identifying not only with a cause but also, as Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber argue, as “part of the same global upsurge” against injustice and inequality. As was common in the 1970s, some of these activists are once again calling for a new world economic order. For Bell and many others, indicative of the growing unity across social movements is One Billion Rising, an annual one-day “revolution” to “end violence against women” – what organizers emphasize is a “wind” and a “catalyst” for global transformation, and not a “new organization.” The first of these revolutions was on February 14, 2013: a day of dances and marches for women’s rights in just about every country, with about 5,000 organizations joining in support.2
At first glance so much social resistance may seem at odds with our claim that activism is being corporatized. Yet we are not asserting that protest will fade or disappear anytime soon. Social unrest might well increase as NGOs and consumer activism sideline more radical activists and ideas, and as counter-movements to corporatized activism emerge.
Crucially, however, in this concluding chapter we are arguing that the corporatization of activism is reinforcing the capacity of the world order to suppress and subsume social unrest and counter-movements. Corporatized NGOs and consumer activism stabilize and legitimize the structures of this world order, pulling anti-capitalist and anti-globalization activists into the mainstream, taming some, disillusioning others. Militarized police and intelligence agencies deal with those unwilling to moderate. The effect is to weaken grassroots activism and further enhance corporate power. This explains why so many people are now “seeing” signs of a “global uprising” yet the world order remains so immune to demands from below for systemic reforms.
“The Protester” was Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2011. Journalist Paul Mason, author of Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere, sees 2011 as a watershed year: “Something real and important was unleashed in 2011, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution.” The “radical manifesto” What We Are Fighting For concurs, arguing that “the age of austerity has brought a new generation of protesters on to the streets,” with “millions” now audacious enough “to dream of a different society.” The following year Canadian activist Judy Rebick thought protest action picked up even more: “I think we will look back at 2012 as the year that everything changed.”3
But how world-shaking were the 2011 and 2012 protests, really? Celebrating protest as “change” might well signal that nothing has changed. Certainly, as we said, social unrest remains commonplace and is arguably even heating up. And everywhere we are seeing grassroots critiques of capitalism – as well as countless proposals for alternatives, from radical localism to simple living to a new world socialism. Like others, we also see the social unrest in 2011 and 2012 as noteworthy, rousing debate, forging intellectual networks, and even, here and there, gaining some political ground (e.g., the political left in Greece in 2012). Yet, looking in the cold light of day at actual outcomes, it is clear that corporatized activism today is doing far more to uphold the world order than mass protests and grassroots activism are doing to transform it.
Corporatization robs activism of its radicalism. Multiple crosscutting forces, as chapters 3 to 5 detailed, have caused the corporatization of activism to gain traction over the past half-century. Increased state surveillance and violent crackdowns on dissent since 2001 have raised the personal stakes for activists. Deepening privatization of social life since the end of World War II has weakened the historical underpinnings of more radical forces of change. And, since the 1980s, increasing NGO fundraising and institutional needs have steadily channeled activist energies into supporting market “solutions,” from cause marketing to for-profit certification. The past decade has seen the process of corporatization accelerate, as NGOs such as Amnesty International and WWF join forces with multinational retailers and manufacturers to co-brand consumer products. Activism of this kind is legitimizing capitalism and delegitimizing alternatives, helping to explain, along with the securitization of activism and the privatization of social life, why flickers of protest such as Occupy Wall Street are going out so quickly.
States are treating confrontational activism, as we saw in chapter 3, as a potential terrorist threat. Yet even moderate activists are being watched and tracked. Email traffic and Internet sites are being hacked; demonstrators are being kettled and filmed; facial recognition software is being used to charge demonstrators with vandalism or rioting or trespassing – or sometimes with “conspiracy.” Police and state intelligence agencies are even deploying (or at least allowing) agents provocateurs.
Mark Kennedy of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, for example, spent seven years living undercover as an outspoken activist (under the alias Mark Stone). Nicknamed “Flash” for always having cash handy, he infiltrated more than a dozen anarchist, racist, and environmental groups, organizing and financing protests, and travelling to over twenty countries to spy and report back, before quitting in 2010 and fleeing overseas. “We’re not talking about someone sitting at the back of the meeting taking notes – he was in the thick of it,” said Danny Chivers, an activist charged with conspiring to sabotage a coal-fired power station in Nottingham (following a Kennedy tip-off).4 Not surprisingly, arrests and fear and suspicion are deterring protests from spreading; so are the fines and legal costs of breaking new or “resurrected” city bylaws and national statutes to restrict public assembly.
The ongoing privatization of social life and erosion of the infrastructure of dissent further stifle the spread of radical activism. Over the course of the last hundred years, wars, migration, and economic upheaval have shredded the tapestry of community and daily life. Suburbanization and TVs and computers have helped to cocoon individuals and families inside homes and automobiles. Economic globalization since 1980 has caused community life to disintegrate even further, with market and monetary pressures reaching even the most far-flung villages of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Political economist David McNally explains well the consequences for labor activism of policies to crush unions, close factories, deregulate economies, and restructure communities. “[W]orkers,” he writes, “were literally dispossessed of their cultural resources… . sites that sustained memories were obliterated; infrastructures of dissent collapsed.”5
Economic globalization has charred the icons and relics of every culture and every community. Well before the 1980s, self-identities and personal relationships were already in severe turbulence from past generations living through industrialization, colonialism, religious extremism, and world wars.6 Consumerism first began to dislodge non-economic value systems back in the 1700s, a process that has steadily gained force since then as the politics of more and more states have come to prioritize economic growth. The supremacy of markets today, however, gives consumerism unparalleled influence.
The consumption of more brands and more luxury is now a defining characteristic of self-identity and personal relationships. Without a doubt, political and religious and class identities remain powerful global forces. And, certainly, feelings of alienation or unhappiness (among many others) help to explain why people act (or don’t act). Ever more, however, consumerism seems to trump the others, especially for personal decision-making, but even in some respects for the setting of national goals (e.g., in China, India, and Brazil, among many other countries).7
Activists cannot escape the creed of consumerism. For those with strong consumer identities, looking to the market for justice and morality makes good sense – to seek change as individuals but not sacrifice lifestyles. Few well-off activists feel comfortable attacking “economic prosperity” or calling for “less” consumption, especially less consumption for “others.” Selling “causes” to these others seems rational, especially for those who feel too busy or overworked or stressed out to participate in an identity-based social movement.
This marketing and branding of causes displaces radicalism. Some activists still call for a revamping of the world order. But such calls come almost exclusively from the fringes of global activism. Within corporatized NGOs, both large and small, relying on corporate sponsorship and on markets as a “solution” is increasingly taking precedence. Accompanying this is a belief in pragmatism and incrementalism as a sensible path forward. As chapter 2 showed, this is producing much good: protecting some rights for some people, raising funds to research some diseases affecting some people, getting some food to some of the world’s starving people. The power of corporatized NGOs to produce small benefits within the confines of the world system even seems to be rising. At the same time, however, these NGO “gains” are treating the symptoms, and not the causes, of global problems, legitimizing consumerism and capitalism.
This does not mean that the radicalism on the edges of global activism cannot boil over to scald the mainstream. Over the past decade, mass protests have toppled governments and disrupted countless international meetings – and, as we have said, this will surely continue in the decades to come. But the past few decades also confirm the resilience of today’s world order, and the corporatization of activism is only adding to its capacity to ward off challenges by marginalizing and depoliticizing radical protests and overshadowing grassroots agitation.
What is more, any radical activism soon faces a vicious paradox: campaigning over the long haul requires organization, yet organizing in such an all-embracing world order quickly takes one onto a path of deradicalization. The fast decline of the Occupy movement from 2011 to 2012 is a good example of what this Catch-22 can do to radicalism. Occupy activists worldwide, as we saw in chapter 3, were harried, rounded up, and jailed in 2011. Security agencies, veiled by anti-terrorism powers, hacked into cell phones and Internet sites. Militarized police attacked and ripped down protest camps.
Occupy activists tried to fight back without centralizing leadership or organizing into a more rigid structure. But, in such an unsparing security climate, maintaining principles of direct democracy and full accountability to the grassroots also left the movement vulnerable. Time was on the side of states, and, as months passed, retaining, let alone increasing, the number of protestors at rallies and in camps became harder and harder. Already in October 2011 activist and writer Slavoj Zˇizˇek was urging protestors in Zuccotti Park to strategize and organize, warning: “remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives.”8
Looking back, journalist Thomas Frank sees the resistance to restructuring the movement into a formal organization as a reason for its failure. Occupy activists, he writes in the MIT journal The Baffler, fell into a “cult of participation,” where the adventure of protesting took precedence over any strategy for lasting influence. One sign, he argues, was the inability of Occupy activists to articulate clear and realistic demands, reflecting the media and public pressures toward corporatization. Others also see the decline of Occupy as rooted in a resistance to long-term planning, goal-setting, and institution-building, along with a near obsession with procedures, public dialogue, summit protests, and what Panitch, Albo and Chibber call “the micro-politics of meetings.”9
As consumerism strengthens, as states suppress dissent, and as activism corporatizes and deradicalizes, we see little chance of a global grassroots uprising able to transform the world order. This does not mean, however, that community activism is powerless – quite the contrary; but, even among grassroots activists, corporatization is causing much turbulence.
Grassroots activism ebbs and flows across every social and environmental cause. The institutionalization of activism since the 1970s, however, has shifted the volunteer base, funding sources, media profile, and level of public support for community advocacy. Domestically, funding for groups with more political goals, including small local ones, has gone down as states redirect financing from advocacy groups to service providers (at the same time as cutting social services) and “cooperative civil society stakeholders.” Internationally, country donors and development agencies have also been redeploying increasingly scarce funds to support corporatized NGOs, partly, as chapter 5 told in detail, to leverage “aid” to meet international commitments and development goals, and partly to pursue broader strategies to open markets, liberalize trade, promote foreign investment, and, ultimately, fuel world economic growth.
In this way states and business are increasingly bringing NGOs into the mainstream of global development and politics. At the same time other forms of activism are localizing and depoliticizing under the pressures of economic globalization and the corporatization of activism. Kitchen-table activists can still accomplish a great deal within a local setting; yet, concurrently, the capacity of the vast majority of grassroots activists to resist business funding and challenge corporate interests is declining under these pressures.
Grassroots activists have no choice but to work in a setting where activism is corporatizing. Just as with NGO activists, the securitization of dissent, the privatization of social life, and the institutionalization of advocacy all frame and limit the options of community volunteers and local movements. As chapter 3 showed, states and business push aside demanding and intransigent groups and tend to dismiss (or consult perfunctorily) groups without much capacity for branding or marketing products. Meanwhile, as more and more NGOs draw closer to corporations, pressure is mounting on grass-roots groups to support NGO–corporate partnerships and market solutions. This trend is particularly strong in places such as Canada, where the federal government is increasingly tying overseas development assistance for community groups to working through NGO–corporate partnerships. Similarly, the UK’s Department for International Development is moving toward “strategic collaboration” with corporations, including through “the Girl Hub” partnership with Nike.10
The interlacing of corporate and NGO interests is shifting the discourse of global activism. Organizations such as WWF do not shy away from justifying their partnerships with companies such as Coca-Cola. “We could spend 50 years lobbying 75 national governments,” explains the former president of WWF Canada. “Or these folks at Coke could make a decision … and the whole global supply chain changes overnight. And that in a nutshell is why we’re in a partnership.”11 Activists who oppose such partnerships are left to feel unreasonable and impracticable – out-of-touch idealists who don’t know how to get things done in today’s political climate.
Such pragmatism and partnerships, as chapters 2 and 5 explored, have nudged NGOs worldwide toward supporting market-friendly strategies, tactics, and goals. At the same time, resources, support, and credibility are shifting toward more system-conforming activism, as states steer civic engagement, as NGOs grow in power and size, and as NGO branding captures the imagination of consumers. In this context, public support for activism backed by governments and business tends to increase, while more critical groups, always facing a possible charge of extremism, tend to lose public support (although support within a small constituency may remain strong, and may even strengthen, as followers see the group as “standing its ground”).
At times this deepening of corporatization can divide grass-roots movements, sending more controversial groups adrift. One example, among thousands we could pick from, is queer activism in Toronto since 2010. Corporate sponsorship has helped to turn Toronto’s Pride festival into one of the world’s biggest, lasting ten days, extending over twenty-two city blocks, and drawing up to a million people to “celebrate and demonstrate.” Controversy hit Toronto’s Pride festival after Queers against Israeli Apartheid applied to participate in the 2010 Pride parade. With about thirty-five members, this Toronto-based activist group formed to advocate for queer rights in Palestine, as well as support movements fighting what it calls the Israeli “occupation of Palestine.” At first, Pride Toronto, the NGO in charge of the festival, rejected a request by Queers against Israeli Apartheid to join the 2010 parade, but it later relented and agreed to let them march, deciding inclusivity and free speech should prevail.12
Pro-Israeli groups were enraged. So, too, was Toronto City Council, which saw Queers against Israeli Apartheid as racist and discriminatory. Shortly after the 2010 parade, the council voted to revoke city funding unless each parade group complied with the city’s anti-discrimination policy (impossible for Queers against Israeli Apartheid). Pride Toronto is “a partner with the city,” said Councilor Giorgio Mammoliti. “They gotta start acting like a partner with the city. Council doesn’t fund any organization that promotes hatred. If they continue the hatred, that cheque will not be forthcoming.”13
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were lost in corporate sponsorships. Basically bankrupt, Pride Toronto let go staff and trimmed back activities. Then, amid allegations of financial misconduct, the executive director of Pride Toronto, Tracey Sandilands, resigned just before a January 2011 general meeting, where members railed at the board of directors for their incompetence. The controversy for Pride Toronto and the Pride festival did not go away. Queers against Israeli Apartheid chose not to march in the 2011 Pride parade but, following a ruling by a dispute resolution panel, Pride Toronto once again allowed the group to march in the 2012 parade.14
The sponsorship and funding crisis at Pride Toronto rippled across the queer activist community in 2011. A similar controversy struck New York’s Greenwich Village LGBT Community Center in 2011 when it barred pro-Palestinian queer organizations (including Queers against Israeli Apartheid), angering long-time activists and organizers and triggering a counter effort to “open” the center.15 Personal and professional politics coat this dispute. But clearly at play too are the growing tensions and divisions among local queer activists over the corporatization of festivals and parades and centers.
Similar stories could be told across every social movement. Festivals and parades and outdoor dances require money and permits and public enthusiasm. Communities of activists must organize year in and year out to pull off these events. Seeing economic benefits, and looking for cost-savings, governments are promoting partnerships between community groups and business. At the same time, corporate, media, and government discourses are casting left-wing, and to a lesser degree right-wing, advocacy groups as threats to prosperity and public safety. The consequence for global activism is far-reaching: NGO partnerships with states and corporations are pulling resources toward “professional” activists and system-conforming activism, stigmatizing and excluding those who rebel and polarizing and deradicalizing local movements.
Many community groups and grassroots movements reject the top-down management of “rich” NGOs and instead organize across more informal and nonhierarchical “social forums” and “networks,” building consensus and moving forward around a principle of “open space.” The idea of organizing “horizontally,” as Teivo Teivainen explains, is “to take … seriously the idea that democratic change needs to be generated through democratic forms of action,” while organizing in open space captures the idea that no single cause or movement should “have strategic priority” and no organization should “have leadership over the others.”16
Open space organizing has been gaining followers since 2001. This date is not a coincidence. The rejection of hierarchy among grassroots activists is partly a reaction to the securitization of activism since 2001. Activist Naomi Klein, author of the bestseller No Logo, could already see these processes at work back in 2002. “The systematic police targeting of protest ‘leaders,’” she writes, “goes a long way towards explaining the deep suspicion of traditional hierarchies that exists” among grassroots activists.17 Open space organizing is also partly a reaction to the centralizing of NGO decision-making since the 1970s, as grassroots movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, avoid institutionalizing hierarchical decision-making, even, as some activists are now lamenting, at the cost of any long-term influence.
Anti-globalization and anti-corporate activists are some of the strongest critics of the institutionalization of activism. Many of these activists, as was true for the Occupy movement, insist on empowering frontline protestors in strategizing, planning, and decision-making. As a result, instigators and initiators of meetings and protests have come and gone since the 1990s, and today it is reasonable to describe anti-globalization activism (along with the overlapping global justice and anti-capitalist movements) as a “movement of movements” – still with verve and latent power, but without much structure or unity.18
The University of Miami’s Ruth Reitan celebrates the diversity and flexibility of anti-globalization activism. For her, the complexity and hegemony of global capitalism demand this. Although her language is dressed up, her point is plain: activists need “multiple and flexible approaches to resist, engage, and ultimately decapitate and replace the Janus-head of neoliberal globalization, connected to the much larger and longer-tailed monster of capitalism feeding off other hierarchies of oppression.”19 Many scholars and activists agree. Klein, for example, does not see the decentralization of advocacy as “a source of incoherence and fragmentation.” Instead, for her, “it is a reasonable, even ingenious adaptation both to pre-existing fragmentation within progressive networks and to changes in the broader culture.”20
But what really is the power and influence of the “movement of movements”? Do the facts really suggest that mobilizing the grassroots in this way can ever slow globalization? Or replace capitalism? Or achieve peace and justice? Many activists certainly think so. But our analysis suggests that this is unlikely, and getting unlikelier with each passing year – that, as the corporatization of activism intensifies, and as social movements decentralize and localize, the overall power of grassroots activism to influence the global political economy is declining.
Take the World Social Forum, which every year holds an annual summit of community activists and indigenous peoples. The first gathering was in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001; the 2013 gathering was in Tunis, Tunisia. The World Social Forum, according to its website, “is neither a group nor an organization.” Instead, it “is an open meeting place where social movements, networks, NGOs, and other civil society organizations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, to debate ideas democratically, formulate proposals, share their experiences freely, and network for effective action.” Tens of thousands of activists and indigenous peoples gather each year. This is definitely an impressive organizational feat for such a diverse group, and the World Social Forum is a base for many friendships, alliances, and learning.21
The World Social Forum was founded to counter the World Economic Forum. But to claim it actually does this would exaggerate its influence immensely. The World Economic Forum, which each year brings together about 2,500 top business executives, political leaders, journalists, and scholars in Davos, Switzerland, is the brain trust of today’s world economic order. In contrast, the World Social Forum struggles to develop a consensus for, let alone coordinate, action programs, joint declarations, or any lasting agenda – with at least some activists, in the words of sociologist Jackie Smith, seeing “a wasted opportunity.”22
At the fifth World Social Forum in Porto Alegre a group of prominent activists, including many of its cofounders, proposed a “Porto Alegre Manifesto” to “challenge” the “Washington Consensus” underpinning economic globalization. Many signed the manifesto, but it did little to forge consensus among the 50,000 activists in attendance. As Smith notes, to go beyond the forum’s current charter of principles and need for “decentralized coordination and networking” would require less emphasis on grassroots autonomy and open space organizing to enable it “to make collective statements and take collective actions” – a philosophical shift that many, if not most, who attend the World Social Forum oppose on principle.23
Grassroots activists everywhere have long resisted any moves to coordinate campaigns, prioritize causes, or unite into formal (especially hierarchical) organizations able to lobby and fundraise. The corporatization of activism is politicizing this debate further. Advocates of more coordinated strategies and tactics are finding allies among large NGOs and within the community at large. Meanwhile, the voices calling for more inclusive and open and democratic organizational forms are growing louder as they struggle to resist the corporatized activism engulfing them. Like those involved in the World Social Forum, these activists do not want to form an “organization” but insist on autonomous, decentralized, and horizontal processes. Yet this also tends to remove them from conventional politics, with increasingly corporatized NGOs now representing the grassroots in government meetings and corporate boardrooms.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let us reiterate: bold and creative community groups are constantly forming to protest inequality, abuse, and exploitation. Every new “issue” prompts a host of new groups. But more groups does not equal more influence. Just getting together and “visioning” takes great effort, and when this extends to a global stage this is often all community groups can manage to pull off. Since 2001 police and intelligence agencies, moreover, have been eyeing even the tiniest groups like hawks, checking to see if these might be terrorist fronts, fining and arresting “troublemakers,” and pushing more radical activists underground where they wield little political influence.
Consumer activism and the individualization of responsibility, as chapter 4 discusses, further complicate any grassroots efforts to sustain a consensus for collective action. Historical structures of support for coalitions and affinities among marginalized groups, as Alan Sears says, are also now weaker, leaving groups both more vulnerable to state and corporate pressures and less able to sustain collective action. Sears still thinks exploited and marginalized communities can (and do) find a way to “fight back,” but, as he makes clear, a stronger base for dissent will be necessary first.24
The corporatization of activism, however, is making it harder and harder to imagine, as the World Social Forum has been doing since 2001, that “another world is possible.” Corporatization is isolating and dividing grassroots activism. And, even more unnerving for those who are hoping to slow economic globalization, the corporatization of activism is adding to the power of multinational corporations.
Corporations are welcoming NGOs into the “private governance” of business practices. Doing so serves many corporate interests. Among governments, citizens, and consumers it lends legitimacy to corporate social responsibility as “good” governance. This helps to allay fears that the mostly voluntary and self-governing programs of corporate social responsibility are little more than the greenwashing of business as usual. Including NGOs in corporate governance allows firms to seem (and to some extent to become) more sensitive to public concerns. And it helps to mute calls from both critics and states for stricter and more binding regulation of business.
The past decade has seen multinational companies go even further to seek out NGOs as partners to co-brand and co-market products. Partnering with NGOs is proving highly profitable for companies. To some extent, as with offering them a seat at the private governance table, it shields them from criticism (and the risk and potential reputational damage of a targeted NGO campaign). Even more importantly, however, it is providing brand companies with pivotal business and competitive advantages. It is helping them win over consumers and launch new markets. It is contributing to product innovation and creative advertising. And it is allowing firms to position their brands as forces of good, building consumer trust and protecting brand value.25
The revenue turnover of the world’s top companies, although not a measure of influence, does shock and awe in its sheer scale. Royal Dutch Shell sat at the top of the Global Fortune 500 in fiscal year 2012 (ending January 31), with close to US$485 billion in revenue. In second place was Exxon Mobil, at US$453 billion, followed by Walmart, at US$447 billion. Exxon Mobil raked in profits of US$41 billion, Royal Dutch Shell US$31 billion, and Walmart close to US$16 billion. Walmart alone now has 10,000 or so outlets and employs 2.2 million people; only the American and Chinese militaries have bigger workforces. Sixty-five companies on the 2012 Global Fortune 500 list turned over more than US$100 billion in revenue. And most of these companies, which have been experiencing phenomenal growth over the past three decades, are continuing to grow quickly (Walmart’s sales revenue in 1979, for example, was about US$1 billion).26
Such money gives multinational corporations great power. Market economies need high sales turnover to keep growing; and politicians need these economies to keep expanding to prove baseline competence to voters and financial backers. Activists and scholars have long attacked multinational corporations as modern-day pirates “plundering” the world. David Korten, a former business professor at Harvard, is one of the most vocal critics, authoring, among many other works, the 1995 bestseller When Corporations Rule the World. Hundreds of others further expose the environmental and human rights abuses of corporations, including law professor Joel Bakan, activist Naomi Klein, and scholar-activist Susan George (president of the Transnational Institute).27
Government bailouts of banks and business during the 2008 global financial crisis further enraged scholar-critics and frontline activists. Why did bailouts and business stimulus packages take precedence over those who lost life savings and homes and jobs? Even Harvard University business professors were asking tough questions and calling for stricter controls. “The role of business needs to change,” declared professors Joseph Bower, Herman Leonard, and Lynn Sharp Paine in Capitalism at Risk. Business must “start seeing itself as a leader in protecting and improving the system that gives it life” and acting “as activists for good government and more effective institutions.”28
Mistrust of big business swelled in the wake of the financial crisis. Partnerships and co-branding with NGOs are helping firms to weather such crises, renew confidence, and continue to increase sales and profits. The growth of the world’s top companies shows no signs of slowing down. Before the financial crisis, for example, Walmart’s revenue turnover ranked first on the 2007 Global Fortune 500 list, at US$351 billion, followed by Exxon Mobil at US$347 billion and Royal Dutch Shell at US$319 billion. Such revenues were extraordinary at the time. Yet the combined revenue of these three companies was US$368 billion higher in fiscal year 2012. Of course, partnerships with NGOs explain only a part of the resilience and fast growth of such corporations. Even British Petroleum, facing lawsuits and the wrath of environmentalists after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, held on to the fourth spot on the 2012 Global Fortune 500 list, with a revenue turnover of US$386 billion (and profits of US$25.7 billion) – US$112 billion more than its revenue in fiscal year 2007 (ending 31 January).29
Cause marketing and corporate–NGO partnerships, as we saw in chapter 2, are helping to position multinational oil and pharmaceutical corporations, and even more so brand manufacturers and retailers, as champions of sustainability. Initiatives such as the UN Global Compact and Fair Labor Association also enhance the image of corporations as responsible and caring “global citizens.” Harvard professor John Ruggie, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights from 2005 to 2011, sees much value in global compacts and guiding principles as a way to promote corporate responsibility. Endorsed unanimously by the United Nations in 2011, businesses and governments and international organizations worldwide are now implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Steps forward may well be halting and sluggish, but, for Ruggie, even for the tough issue of advancing human rights, the progress from corporate responsibility principles is already real – and building.30
Most world leaders clearly agree with Ruggie. But far more scholars and grassroots activists are deeply suspicious of where these codes and principles and compacts are taking the world. Queen’s University professor Susanne Soederberg, for example, sees the UN Global Compact as “a highly exclusionary, corporate-led attempt to legitimate and thus reproduce the growing social power of” multinational corporations “by discrediting the drive to tame corporate behaviour through legally binding codes.”31
Global codes and principles, as Ruggie believes, may well do some good for individuals and communities. But these also serve to reinforce voluntary corporate self-regulation as a “creative” and “pragmatic” solution for improving the environmental and human rights records of multinational corporations. The same is true for private governance mechanisms such as fair trade or fair labor or eco-labeling. Political scientist Claire Cutler sees grave dangers in the very “notion of private governance”: it “turns conventional understanding of constitutionalism and governance on its head,” she argues, “by transforming, if not perverting, the very essence of ‘government’.”32
American CEO Warren Buffett was the world’s fourth richest person at the beginning of 2013, with a net worth of US$53.5 billion. Back in 2008 he topped the Forbes list of billionaires, but by March 2013 Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates, and Amancio Ortega were well ahead, at US$73 billion, US$67 billion, and US$57 respectively. Time magazine still ranked Buffett in 2012 as the fifteenth most powerful person in the world, in rather callous language declaring him as one of the seventy-one individuals out of 7.1 billion who “matter the most.” Gates ranked as the fourth most powerful (just ahead of Pope Benedict XVI) and Helu as the eleventh. Other businessmen in Time magazine’s top thirty most powerful people were Michael Duke, CEO of Walmart; Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google; Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil; Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook; Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon trailed this corporate pack, coming in as the world’s thirtieth most powerful person.33
The extraordinary concentration of wealth and power among a handful of CEOs is now a defining feature of world politics. Deep inequalities of wealth and freedom now layer the world. Critics point to the dreadful living and working conditions of billions of people – many of whom live in constant fear of their own governments. Even the World Bank puts the number of people existing on less than US$1.25 a day at over 1.2 billion and those on less than US$2 a day at 2.4 billion. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Buffett once reflected. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”34
Activists know the rich are winning. This is not stopping millions of them from continuing to wage war against big business, even in the face of harsh security crackdowns since 2001. Even in Europe and North America, as we saw with the Occupy movement of 2011, hundreds of thousands of people remain willing to take to the streets to protest the injustices of globalization and capitalism. Such protest flares in the West, moreover, account for a fraction of the worldwide resistance to corporations.
But celebrating this resistance cannot change the fact that many activists are now defecting to the winning side. Activists at the helm of branded NGOs are leading the way. But many community activists, too, are now relying on corporate sponsorships to finance parades and festivals. At the same time, more and more ordinary citizens now prefer to act as consumer activists, shopping alone for a fair and decent world.
Big business is greeting moderate NGOs and consumer activists with open arms. And, as corporate executives realize the business value of partnerships and co-branding and cause marketing, more and more companies are pursuing NGO partners and aiming products at consumer activists. To a certain extent partnerships with business are benefiting NGOs. Influence within boardrooms is rising; funding to pay staff and run programs is stabilizing. To a limited extent as well, schemes such as fair trade and eco-labeling are benefiting farmers and workers and ecosystems. Advances are modest and conformist – but also tangible. We don’t dispute the value of these gains.
Still, our hope is that Protest Inc. will serve as a warning shot across the bows of corporatizing activism, moving along conversations among activists about strategy and encouraging a re-evaluation of public policies that stifle grassroots activism. Achieving current gains is requiring activist organizations to conform with, rather than work to transform, global capitalism. And the resulting compromises and pragmatism are legitimating a world order where the health of corporations and economies is what “matters the most.”