Michelle Meagher is one of the world's leading thinkers in the anti-monopoly movement. As a competition lawyer, she brings internationally recognized expertise and global networks to the field. As part of our new funding partnership with SOMO (Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations), we are supporting Michelle Meagher to expand networks and strengthen strategic alliances in the fight against corporate power. In our interview, she explains why corporate power restrains us from tackling the biggest challenges of our time. 
 
You argue that monopolies are not only an economic problem, but also a social one. So how do we need to reframe the public debate about monopolies? 

Michelle Meagher: The key to understanding monopolies is to see that their power is the power to structure our societies. Throughout my career I have had to adopt a wider and wider lens to address the problem of monopolies. I started out as a competition lawyer focusing on promoting »competition«. I came to see that this busy industry of lawyers, consultants, even regulators, was really a cover for consolidating corporate power across most industries, across most of the world. I shifted my focus to market concentration, but this did not capture the true scope of corporate power, which goes far beyond capturing market share. Ultimately I have come to frame monopolies as having the power, as legal persons, to entrench their property rights -- not just rights in capital but the right to earn profits in the future, the right to externalise costs, the right to political speech, the right to exist -- in such a way that us natural persons become enmeshed in the world of their making. As corporate rights vest in the future and the present, we become stuck, unable to take the actions we know we must take in order to solve the biggest problems of our generation. 

In many countries, the current legal approach to regulating excessive corporate power often falls short. How can we overcome this? 

Michelle Meagher: First, we need to reclaim the word »monopoly«. It has disappeared from our language. In the US, after decades of absence, we can now see the word monopoly used on the newspaper front page. We need to bring it back into conversation and fill that word with a new meaning fit for the current moment. We cannot fight something we cannot name. 
Second, we need to accept that any attempt to constrain corporate power can and will be subverted. This power of subversion, which operates through influence over politics, lawmaking, and through control of ideas, is part of the power of monopoly. That being the case, any intervention must be designed to both reduce the inherent power of the corporation by reducing its ability to accumulate capital, and it must be as resistant to manipulation as possible. This means that open-ended investigations into »competition« or »efficiency« or »concentration« or even »power« will inevitably fail to challenge monopolies. We must instead use bright line rules such as size limits, structural limits, and outright bans. 

You are a co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project, an international anti-monopoly alliance. Currently, you are working with SOMO, one of Europe's best-known NGOs in the field of counterbalancing corporate power. What is the role of civil society in the global movement against market concentration - and how can it increase its impact? 

Michelle Meagher: I started out in the private sector and am relatively new to the NGO world. My observation is that NGOs increasingly operate like the corporates they oppose. I would not presume telling people who have been fighting this fight for decades how to do their work but I hold on to the fact that we are all »civil society« and that once we can reach people with a message in their personal capacity, they can bring that to their work no matter which sector they are in. For me, this means building shared understandings of monopolies and their power to shape society, teaching each other and learning as well, across the political spectrum and from Global South to Global North. 
 

Further details on the funding partnership with SOMO can be found here.