Corporate Capitalism and the Origins of Communism

From about 1870, many on the Left began to worry that a new corporate capitalism was undermining the long-assumed association between liberty and bourgeois civil society. Here's David Beetham, from a very interesting article:

"Even a liberal such as Max Weber was compelled to admit that there was little similarity between the small scale competitive capitalism of the classical bourgeois period, and the cartellized, bureaucratized systems of production and labour control of his own day, at least in respect of their implications for political freedom. 'It is ridiculous in the extreme', he wrote in his 1905 study of the prospects for bourgeois democracy in Russia, 'to ascribe to modern advanced capitalism …any affinity with “democracy” or even “freedom” (in any sense of the word). All the forms of development are excluded which in the West put the strong economic interests of the possessing classes in the service of the movement for bourgeois liberty.'"

[David Beetham, 'Civil Society: Market Economy and Democratic Polity' in Civil Society in Democratization, ed. Peter Burnell and Peter Calvert (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 79]

It was partly this apparent de-coupling of capitalism and liberty that eventually led radicals like Lenin to disavow the traditional socialist policies of supporting the bourgeoisie insofar as it struggles with reaction, or of seeking power through - rather than against - parliamentarianism.