Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works

Canada is ruled by an organized minority of the 1%, a class of corporate owners, managers and bankers who amass wealth by controlling the large corporations at the core of the economy. But corporate power also reaches into civil society and politics in many ways that greatly constrain democracy.

In Organizing the 1%, William K. Carroll and J.P. Sapinski provide a unique, evidence-based perspective on corporate power in Canada and illustrate the various ways it directs and shapes economic, political and cultural life.

A highly accessible introduction to Marxist political economy, Carroll and Sapinski delve into the capitalist economic system at the root of corporate wealth and power and analyze the ways the capitalist class dominates over contemporary Canadian society. The authors illustrate how corporate power perpetuates inequality and injustice. They follow the development of corporate power through Canadian history, from its roots in settler-colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, to the concentration of capital into giant corporations in the late nineteenth century. More recently, capitalist globalization and the consolidation of a market-driven neoliberal regime have dramatically enhanced corporate power while exacerbating social and economic inequalities. The result is our current oligarchic order, where power is concentrated in a few corporations that are controlled by the super-wealthy and organized into a cohesive corporate elite.

Finally, Carroll and Sapinski offer possibilities for placing corporate power where it actually belongs: in the dustbin of history.

<p>William K. Carroll is a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria and a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC and the Institute for Studies & Innovation in Community-University Engagement (UVic).</p>

J. P. Sapinski is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Université de Moncton. He is interested in how the structures of capitalism and corporate power mediate the social metabolism between human societies and the ecosphere, and how we can transform this relationship to make it just and sustainable. He is currently advancing projects on the carbon extractive industry in Canada, on fossil fuel divestment in universities, and on climate geoengineering, in which he develops a broad critique of ecological modernization and green capitalist perspectives. His work was published in Environmental Sociology, Global Networks, International Sociology, Critical Sociology, and the Journal of World-Systems Research.