Newsletter No 15

Date: 29 August 2025

 

Fifty-three trillion dollars

Sometimes a big number can be illuminating so here’s a really big one: US$52.9 trillion.

According to Forbes magazine, this is the combined value of the sales of the world’s 2,000 biggest listed companies. It’s equivalent to nearly half the value of world GDP.

(I can’t judge how robust the Forbes estimate is, but it is clear that this ballpark is absolutely huge.)

There’s a lot of talk in economic circles at the moment about state-led capitalism, the return of industrial strategy to the West, geopolitical competition and so on.

The Forbes number reminds us that even though the relationships between powerful states and multinationals are evolving, the latter are the keystone institutions of world trade and investment and that isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.

 

The UN and corporate power

Fifty years ago, the United Nations housed a hub of ambitious thinking about corporate power in the form of the UN Commission for Transnational Corporations (UNCTNC) and its research arm.

Starting in 1975, the UNCTNC’s work reflected broad discontent in the global South at the injustices of the world economy. Its aim was to try and ensure that multinationals played a constructive rather than a harmful part in national development, seen very much as a sovereign process led by states.

As Matti Ylönen has described for Critical Takes, the UNCTNC was slowly killed off in the neoliberal era. Now I think there’s a case for reviving the commission.

The case is that there needs to be a global space, to which all governments have access (as well as labour and civil society organisations), where corporate power can be considered as a structural problem in its own right and not just as an aspect of other problems.

 

Interesting takes in other places

SOMO has published this argument, authored by Audrey Gaughran, Michelle Meagher and Meghna Abraham, that civil society needs to move beyond campaigning for incremental changes to the economic status quo and think much more radically about how to “end, or rather transcend” capitalism.

They note that:

“Much of the work on the regulation of companies, for example, has tended to accept the existence of massive multinationals and merely try to deal with their impacts on society. Too little work seeks to limit or remove their power. Or we make strong calls for meaningful change, but do not work out, in sufficient depth, how to get there. It is almost as if we accept that our ideas are not going to happen, so why spend time on the details? Again, there are important exceptions. Just not enough of them.”

I was very encouraged to read this because the founding premise of of Critical Takes is precisely that we need to think in terms of transforming corporate power as a structural problem and not only in terms of trying to curb abusive corporate behaviour, because the nature and scale of the former make the latter very hard to do.

What might that transformation look like in practice, and whose voices need to be part of the conversation? I’ve sketched out an approach to those questions in So, what should we do about corporate power? It’s only eight pages long and I hope you can read it, if you haven’t already.

 

Coming up on Critical Takes … well, what would you suggest?

Usually in this part of the newsletter I preview articles or interviews which are due to be published shortly on Critical Takes. For a change, I’d like to hand this one over to you.

What would you like to see published on Critical Takes? Which issues need more coverage? Whose voices and perspectives are missing?

All suggestions are very much welcome! You can reach me on the “editor” email address or via social media.

Till next month, good luck with your work.

Diarmid