One of the more unremarked upon things about the wave of international sanctions which have hit the Russian economy in recent weeks is how many of them have come on the initiative not of western governments, but western corporations. As I write these words, Shell, one of the largest companies in the world, is announcing that it will stop buying Russian oil and, more than that, shut down all of its service stations in Russia.
Last week, Maersk, the world’s leading container shipping company, announced that it would no longer supply Russian ports. Then Mastercard and Visa announced that they would suspend services in Russia. Netflix followed suit. Then KPMG, and PriceWaterhouse, two of the world’s largest accounting firms. Apple announced it would no longer sell phones or computers in Russia. Samsung did the same. Google hit Russian news outlets with sanctions, preventing them from making money from ads. Google maps went so far as to shut off its traffic data, so that ordinary Russian commuters will no longer get warnings about traffic jams. Paypal will no longer support payments to Russia. This paragraph could really go on for another thousand words, just listing the corporate sanctions against the Russian state, and its people.
The point of this article is not a moral one: There are many of us, including this writer, who shed no tears over the sanctions inflicted on Russia. The invasion of Ukraine was an extraordinary act, and it has triggered an extraordinary response. The point, rather, is this: Isn’t it time to have a conversation about how powerful these companies have become?
There are no shortage of books and movies set in a dystopian future where mega conglomerates and corporations have replaced Governments as the main powers in the world, or the Universe. Quietly, there is a convincing argument that we have begun to live in one, without really even noticing.
The genius of a capitalist society has always been that it disconnected many important social and societal functions from Government. Government might regulate the supply chains, but it does not run them. Across much of the west, for example, even post offices are increasingly subordinate to Amazon’s delivery and shopping system. Major manufacturing and production depends on shipping companies. The economy runs on oil produced, transported, and refined by oil companies. As time has progressed, and the economy become more global, these companies have become superpowers in their own right.
And so it is that we now live in a world where a few companies, not a country, have the power to break a country economically. There are serious implications to that with which we have not even begun to come to terms.
Every company, after all, answers ultimately to its shareholders. Facebook is not a democratic entity. It is, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. Were its majority shareholder to decide tomorrow to shut down all services in Ireland, then he would have an absolute right to do so, and there would be no legal recourse to stop him. You cannot force somebody to sell something, after all.
There are those who will point out, of course, that companies have always been powerful, and this is true. The difference now, though, is that with the digitalisation and globalisation of the world, we now have countless companies who have truly global power. Power which, we have just discovered, they are willing and able to deploy for explicitly political goals.
The proliferation of this kind of power in the global economy is, objectively, a threat to human rights, liberty, and our way of life. It may not be an imminent threat, or even a serious one, but a threat it is. We have already seen, on too many occasions to itemise here, corporate power being directed at undesirable elements in individual countries: Think the post January 6th effort to effectively delete President Trump from the internet entirely. Not only was he banned from Twitter, and facebook, but forgotten now is that almost all payment services stopped processing donations to his campaign pages, and so on. If you wanted to exercise your democratic right to send him money, you no longer could.
Almost always, this kind of power is deployed – and changes societies – without actually being deployed at all. When people live in fear of cancellation, they do not do things that would get them cancelled. And thus, when you argue that corporate power is out of control, you often end up having to point to what’s not there, rather than what is. You look at the uniformity of elite opinion in the west and wonder whether it is real, or whether it is only one opinion that people feel secure expressing. Because, as we know, the threat of cancellation is real.
What we learned this week is that that power, when it is applied fully, and uniformly, can be devastating: Working together, some of the world’s most powerful corporations have come together to attempt the crippling of a country. Yes, it is unambiguously a deserved crippling, but that should still make us pause, and wonder whether having this kind of cultural and economic power in the hands of such a small, and unelected, group of corporate boards is a good thing. Or whether, in fact, we’re slowly drifting into a mega-corporation dystopia without really noticing.