Hilferding and the Large-Scale Enterprise

Hilferding identified the divorce of ownership and control which was beginning to take place in the large-scale corporations of his day. And he anticipated the relegation of shareholders to the status of simple ‘money capitalists’ who had, as the studies of Berle and Means were to demonstrate, traded in their economic control against the liquidity of their holdings of securities. Drawing on subsequent analyses, it is argued that this trend continues into our own day in spite of the neo-liberal attempt to restore the previous patterns of ownership and economic organisation. It is possible to suggest some of the ways in which the separation of ownership and control may be transforming socioeconomic relations, but there is as yet no full answer to a key problem posed by these developments: the lack of social control over large-scale enterprises.