Newsletter No 19

Date: 30 January 2026

 

Rethinking corporate power in a volatile world

It’s been an … interesting start to 2026 and offering predictions for this year seems unwise.

A growing number of people assume that the US stock market is a bubble which will burst at some point, or loudly subside at least. Since it’s by far the world’s biggest stock market, a crash would have impacts everywhere.

The most talked-about cause of a stock market collapse is investors concluding that the vast sums invested in AI are not going to pay off. Other possible triggers include problems in the ballooning market for private credit. There’s certainly a lot of risk around, intensified by Trump’s crude and brutal attempts to remake the world to his own liking.

A stock market crash would be unlikely to overwhelm the giants of US Big Tech, which have lucrative businesses outside AI. Even so, it would create a political moment to argue for alternatives to the current dominance of US corporate power and multinationals in general.

For some ideas about those alternatives, read on!

 

This month on Critical Takes

Jennifer Clapp, who is a professor at Waterloo University in Canada and the author of Titans of Industrial Agriculture, talked to Critical Takes about the problem of Big Agriculture which is that small numbers of global firms dominate the production of key inputs for farming from seeds and pesticides to fertilisers and farm machinery.

She also talks about the rise of “digital farming”, which risks putting even more power over farming into the hands of the biggest companies. As a start, those companies can't be allowed to become any more concentrated.

Zorka Milin, policy director of the FACT Coalition, explained the new opt-out for US multinationals from key parts of the OECD’s 15 per cent minimum corporate tax rate, known as Pillar Two.

It’s a lucid and nuanced explanation of a complex topic. In a nutshell, her take is that US bullying has weakened Pillar Two but it should survive and a "stock-take" in 2029 offers a chance to fix some of the problems.

 

What you said about Critical Takes

Before the holidays I asked what you all found useful about Critical Takes and what you’d like to see more of in 2026. I’m very grateful to everyone who responded!

Several people said Critical Takes is useful to them because it brings different strands of thinking about corporate power into one easily accessible place. That's gratifying for me because this is the primary purpose.of the platform.

There were suggestions for more coverage of the climate crisis, finance and the struggles of people confronted by corporate power around the world, all of which I hope to do in 2026. I also hope to look at some other big questions like the growing power of multinationals from China.

 

From the “what” to the “how”

In 2026 Critical Takes will pay more attention to the “how” of transforming corporate power and what more just and democratic alternatives to that power might look like.

That transformation will likely be measured in decades but looking across social media, you can see the potential for consensus to form in civil society around certain shorter-term goals which would vitally contribute to that long-term change. Based on what people are talking about online, I’d suggest that these shorter-term goals would include:

1. Promoting public alternatives to corporate dominance of the provision of vital public goods such as digital infrastructure, medicines and food.

Depending on where we are in the world, that could also include the supply of clean energy, water, transport, social care or other things. It could also include bringing privatised services back into public ownership.

2. Making the biggest corporations less powerful by obliging them divest parts of their businesses and loosening their proprietary grip over knowledge and data.  This could also extend to such measures as windfall profit taxes.

3. Promoting alternative types of commercial organisations such as companies with a social purpose, companies under democratic public ownership, co-operatives and so on, as well as more democratic forms of finance to reduce the space for rent-seeking mobile capital.

Such goals are interlinked and would not replace existing civil society campaigns in this field but could make them easier to win by incrementally hemming in and shrinking corporate power.

Of course a list like this only makes sense in combination with other reforms to our economic life, such as very rapidly reducing the world’s consumption of fossil fuels.

These goals could be adapted to the needs of different countries and implemented at different speeds, which is important because obviously the capacity of poorer and more vulnerable countries to put such reforms into effect will be more constrained than in the rich countries which are the home jurisdictions of multinationals. 

An important feature of these goals is that although they would rely on the power of states to be achieved, they don’t conflate “public” with “top-down state control”. The aim should be to reinforce democracy and justice worldwide, not to replace one set of leviathans with another.

There’s a lot to think about and do in 2026! I really feel that there needs to be a broader, more purposeful debate across civil society about how all such ideas might be fitted together into a common approach towards corporate power which reinforces everybody's work.

Critical Takes will play a modest part in trying to catalyse that debate in 2026. I hope you can all find your own ways to do the same.

Until next month, good luck with your work.

Diarmid