Biagio Quattrocchi, Vanessa Bilancetti , Francesco Silvi
23 January 2019
Paper
Rome’s municipality has accumulated enormous debt, creating an emergency used to close any sort of public space, both physical and discussion. The narrative regarding the debt has been used to attack what we call the city of solidarity – groups, associations, and occupied places that are working to build community as opposed to accumulating profit.
The rural communities in the Västernorrland county of Northern Sweden are not used to being in the national spotlight, but in 2017 their struggle to stop cutbacks in maternity and emergency care made national news. What are the lessons for all those involved in building counter-power in rural areas of the Global North?
Popular movements everywhere are on the rise at the same time as we face ever-greater corporate impunity and increasing state violence. In TNI's seventh flagship State of Power report, we examine today's social movements, their potential to build counter-power, and how we can best resist injustice as well as lay grounds for long-term transformation.
The Corporation is capitalism's preeminent institution, dominating our economy, distorting our politics and reshaping society. TNI's ninth flagship State of Power report delves deep into the changing nature of the corporation in a time of digitalisation and financialisation and asks how we might best confront its power and construct alternatives.
Despite causing the worst financial crisis in decades, the financial sector emerged even stronger. TNI's eighth flagship State of Power report examines through essays and infographics the varied dimensions and dynamics of financial power, and how popular movements might regain control over money and finance.
Let us introduce you to some of the fascinating people we work with to help you make sense of the world’s most complex challenges. In this podcast we share our research, explore alternatives to the status quo and give a platform to scholars and activists who are at the forefront of the fight against the current neoliberal order. We believe there are alternatives to this world and hope you do too.
Working on the State of Power 2018 was incredibly interesting and a rare privilege to create art work for such a wide variety of important causes across the world. In these times, the question of popular power or counter-power is riddled with uncertainty. This uncertainty sometimes comes from the lack of new ideas suitable for shaping these times, but more importantly, it derives from the unpredictable nature of the current crisis and tragedy.
I was approached last year by Nick Buxton of the Transnational Institute and asked if I could create a series of illustrations to accompany essays they were bringing out on the theme of Global Capital and Financial Power. I wanted to say yes, but the theme made me hesitate. The workings of the global financial world was not a subject I knew much about, or had felt inspired to address as an artist before.
The international bank transfer system, SWIFT, is a form of contemporary digital colonialism and surveillance capitalism as it is run by US firms and provides data to US government agencies. Drives by governments and philanthropists to increase use of digital money will only strengthen it further.
The Transnational Institute (TNI) in the Netherlands is issuing an open call for essays, accessible papers, infographics and artistic collaborations for its forthcoming State of Power report launched in late January 2020 to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos. The focus for our ninth annual edition is on 'The Corporation'.
In order to understand corporate power today, we need to understand their history and how they have always been a fundamental part of how the state has governed and continues to govern social life.
The financial sector does not just provide a lifeline to corporations, it is actively helping them expand and changing the very nature of the modern corporation.
Total says it is a French oil company but a closer examination shows this description is not true. The complexity obscures a bigger truth about corporations which is that they have turned into private sovereign powers.
The Transnational Institute will take part in the World Social Forum in Montreal, Canada, from 9 to 14 August 2016. Staff from TNI will be active in the space “People and the Planet Before Profit: Moving away from Free Trade and Extractivism to Dismantle Corporate Power”. Hundreds of organisations and movements will meet to discuss resistance, establish strategies to expand the many progressive alternatives activists build in their daily lives, and take action together to change the prevailing neoliberal capitalist system, which creates inequality and exclusion and destroys our environment.
Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres talks about how her mother's example and a belief that ancestors continue to accompany our struggles helps her and the indigenous movement in Honduras to continue to mobilise against injustice, state violence and corporate abuses.
2016 was a tumultous year politically with elections breaking with all conventions, but beneath the surface the main operating logic of our world remains the same, failing people and planet. How can alternative worldviews help us tell new stories and how can we hack culture to bring about systemic change?
The Transnational Institute (TNI) in the Netherlands is issuing an open call for essays, short papers, infographics and artistic collaborations for its forthcoming State of Power report launched in late January 2019 to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2019, we are particularly looking for accessible, engaging essays and artistic explorations that explore the issue of finance and power.
The State is Dead! Long live the State! At the turn of the century, many commentators from the right and left seemed united in their analysis that the state as an economic player was dead or at least no longer relevant. The combined pressures of globalisation, liberalisation and marketisation unleashed by the market-driven dogmas of Thatcherism and Reaganomics had massively expanded the private sector and concurrently downsized the public sector. Corporate power was in the ascendancy and many state-owned companies had become little more than second-rate government departments, and the underlying assumption was that, as the economy evolved, the government would close or sell them to private investors.
