Corporate complicity in plutopopulism: How neoliberalism’s contradictions birthed a backlash against its own architects
Original framing: “US business leaders are waking up to the perils of plutopopulism” — Financial Times
Workers in the Rust Belt, gig economy laborers, and small business owners—who have borne the brunt of plutopopulist policies—are largely absent from the Financial Times’ framing. Their voices, such as those in the Fight for $15 movement or the UK’s Just Stop Oil protests, reveal how corporate deregulation has precarized lives while enriching elites. Marginalized communities, like Black and Latino workers in the U.S., have long warned of the dangers of outsourcing and automation, which plutopopulist leaders now exploit by scapegoating immigrants or elites. The headline’s focus on 'business leaders' obscures how these policies were sold to the public as 'pro-business' while disproportionately harming the most vulnerable.
The Financial Times’ framing of plutopopulism as a sudden corporate awakening obscures a systemic feedback loop where corporate greed, deregulation, and inequality create the conditions for their own downfall—a pattern seen from the 1929 crash to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
Indigenous and labor movements have long warned of this dynamic, yet their voices are excluded from mainstream narratives that treat plutopopulism as an emotional rather than structural crisis. Cross-cultural examples, from Zimbabwe’s land reforms to Nordic co-determination models, demonstrate that alternative economic governance is possible, but requires corporations to cede power to democratic institutions and marginalized communities. The trickster’s role here is critical: corporate elites, like mythic tricksters, have gambled on chaos only to find themselves bound by it, yet the Financial Times’ solemn framing conceals this irony. To break the cycle, solutions must combine legal accountability (e.g., executive liability laws), economic redistribution (e.g., wealth taxes), and indigenous-led sovereignty models—all grounded in the recognition that plutopopulism is not a bug of capitalism but a feature of its unchecked dominance.