When Corporations Rule the World

Summary

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the book that helped launch the anticorporate movement examines how much corporate control has grown and the new challenges for those who work for a more economically equitable society.

When Corporations Rule the World has become a modern classic. Korten's warnings about the growing global power of multinational corporations seem prophetic today. The book has become a bible of the anticorporate movement.

Korten illuminates how the convergence of ideological, political, and technological forces has led to an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in a handful of corporations and financial institutions, separating their interests from the human interest and leaving the market system blind to all but its own short-term financial gains. He documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere to serve narrow financial ends. He explains why human survival depends on a community-based, life-centered alternative beyond the outmoded strictures of communism and capitalism and suggests specific steps to achieve it.

This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new prologue and a new epilogue. The new prologue reflects on events since 1995 that relate to the expansion of corporate power, such as the growth of the global anticorporate movement, the global war on terror that began after 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, and more. The epilogue provides a look ahead at what is required for a future free of corporate domination.