Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Recent data on corporate mergers and acquisitions reveal a trend of fewer and fewer individual deals of larger and larger values, with “megadeals” (that is, deals valued over $5 billion) coming to dominate the world of industry consolidation. A June report from PwC notes:
M&A has joined this supersize party. This year, we’ve seen the largest ever deals in sectors from utilities to streaming to real estate investment trusts. Global deal value is on track to hit $4tn in 2026, up by about 13% year-on-year, even though deal volumes are declining. M&A transactions above $5bn have made up almost half of total global deal value so far this year. That’s double their share just two years ago. Strip out these megadeals, and deal value is down by 4%.
If the rest of the year continues as it has, “[d]eal values from megadeals are on track to increase year-on-year by 40%,” even as deal volume is projected to be 13% lower than it was last year. The report goes on, “Megadeals are the dominant force. Transactions above $5bn now account for 48% of global deal value, compared with 39% in 2025 and 26% in 2024. Strip out those largest deals, and the market looks more subdued, with deal value down by 4% year-on-year.” These megadeals are disproportionately concentrated in the United States, which will surprise few market observers.
A system with a small number of massive corporate conglomerates under which 99.9% of us have no substantive power whatsoever can never be one consistent with liberal democracy, the rule of law, or economic freedom. Those who focus their attention myopically on the current regime and the corruption thereof show that they understand neither the nature nor the scale of the social problem, and for this reason they can be of only little help in the struggles to come. Indeed, many are no less custodians of the political and economic status quo, and eagerly defend this system of corporate domination and economic fascism.
The formal shape of or label on the structure of ownership and power tells us nothing on its own, our ideological delusions notwithstanding. The formal juridical designations and labels do not reveal who makes decisions, at what scales and for how many others, the processes and information used, or the means at their disposal to impose their will. Arbitrary, authoritarian organizations have come to us under many names, the names of capitalism and socialism and others. Hierarchy and domination are much older and more durable than any of our modern-day ideological fancies. Institutional scale remains an under-discussed factor in the social and economic crises before us. As the PwC report observes, the most well-capitalized organizations are specifically pursuing scale as a strategic end; they understand better than our corporate liberals that within our system, size is protection and power. Available vocabularies often hide this all-important scale question.
From a historical and material perspective, rather than an ideological one, the various authoritarian capitalisms and socialisms of the last century bore striking structural similarities. When we set up a choice between these in the abstract, we promote confusion and obscure more important questions. The real and ultimate differences between systems are in how much power is available to and held by the people where they are, at the local and human-apprehensible and -manageable scales. Scale and opacity related to mammoth size are dramatically under-appreciated in our public discourse. Inequality of power and position—both within the organization (public or private) and within society (nominally socialist or capitalist) creates and sustains material inequality. We give far too much power and credence to the labels of the systems and we give much too little focus and attention to the actual relationships and system dynamics.
By 2026, it is perhaps worth asking how few gigantic mega-corporations could dictate the whole of the country’s economic system before the American right would take that system to be “socialism”? And conversely, among the state socialists, how hierarchical and exploitative would state-run, nominally socialist bodies have to be before they would be deemed “capitalism”? We choose what conceits we indulge and what terms we use. The arbitrariness of the available language seems to bother no one, because all sides appear to favor massive scales and authoritarian regimes. But it only seems this way. If the ruling class favors massive, unaccountable institutions, ordinary people of all political stripes and claimed ideological badges are today desperate to return real political and economic power and autonomy to the communities in which they live and work.
The problem is not size in and of itself; it is the institutional and social dynamics and human behaviors to which out-of-control size inevitably leads. As the scale of any institution grows, the distance separating the hubs of decision-making from the people actually affected by the decisions increases, and the processes through which the decisions are made become more specialized and opaque to those on the outside. More and more resources are governed and directed by fewer and fewer people, until the proportions reach dangerous new absurdities. The popular political and economic conversation has ignored this key variable, which is not about how we label the relations, but about the effective concentrations of power and discretion. These dynamics apply to all that we do. They apply to multinational corporations, to government ministries, to state-owned enterprises, to university bureaucracies, to large nonprofits, and so on. These characteristics belong to the way humans behave in massive scales, to the anonymities and power disparities that accompany them.
Major global companies today behave very much like socialist command-and-control economies, and many such conglomerates are greater in size, in GDP terms, than lots of countries. There are whole economies within the world of internal corporate governance. Massive corporate conglomerates are planned economies as a matter of course, allocating resources through layers of administrative command rather than transactions in a competitive marketplace. The international scale of today’s companies means that they extend this bureaucratic planning broadly across borders. Through their own internal procedures of accounting, transfer pricing, capital contribution, procurement, management and strategy, they have set up vast areas of intra-company dictatorial power and prerogative, quite apart from anything most of us would recognize as a free and competitive market. If the Trump era has seen renewed interest in the question of fascism, the fact is that, strictly speaking, we have had a form of fascism in the United States for many decades. Through the twentieth century, war and war preparation frequently laid a clear path for economic fascism.
The first few decades of the twentieth century saw the U.S. build up a version of corporatism remarkably similar to European fascism in structural terms. Here and in Europe, state corporatist fascism was in the air, a trend within increasingly massive and centralized industrial economies, at the center of which was government-led war mobilization. No one, neither proponents or opponents of the corporate state, could avoid acknowledging the similarities between these programs at the time. As Nelson A. Pichardo Almanzar and Brian W. Kulik have noted, “Mussolini praised the New Deal as ‘boldly interventionist in the field of economics,’ and Roosevelt complimented Mussolini for his ‘honest purpose of restoring Italy’ and acknowledged that he kept ‘in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian.’ Also, Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, was known to carry a copy of Raffaello Viglione’s pro-Mussolini book, The Corporate State, with him, presented a copy to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and, on retirement, paid tribute to the Italian dictator.”
Many among both our liberals and conservatives hope to present a picture of American fascism as beginning and ending with Donald Trump precisely so that they can avoid opening a discussion of fascism as state corporatism. We need not ask why they want to avoid this discussion: it is the system long favored by both parties. Megadeals and massive scales are an outcome of economic fascism or state corporatism, but they are also an input insofar as mammoth scale is among the factors or mechanisms that make economic fascism of this kind practically possible. To the formal state, organizations of such size, whatever called or labeled, cannot be left outside of official industrial policy.
They become “too big to fail,” for their collapse could touch off crises of employment, financial markets, even critical infrastructure and national security. Their global span likewise makes them not only economic players but key geopolitical actors whose decisions in other countries (China, for example) must be managed in part by Washington. Thus have the megadeal and the mega-firm brought the system of American economic fascism to a place that makes prior forms of state corporatism appear rather modest in their power and scale. Many scholars and commentators today are talking about state capitalism, but we might instead simply talk about these phenomena in terms of fascism in the political-economic sense, as opposed perhaps to the much thinner colloquial sense as a way to signal dislike only for Donald Trump and his policies. When scale begins to confer such implicit guarantees from the state, the corporation acquires a public or governmental quality, and its losses are spread across the amorphous masses even as its gains stay private. This is a structural feature of our system that rewards size and further consolidation. The state’s assessment of risk, its self-preservation, reinforces the drive for larger and larger firm sizes.
The true character of our system of political economy today is a form of “participatory fascism,” in which the state, interlocking with powerful corporate interests, creates a system of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, of bureaucratic power and rent-seeking, of police statism and recklessly violent social control—all covered by a veneer of democratic participation. How deeply buried in the sand were our heads if we believed that our system was a liberal democracy right up until Donald Trump? These recent M&A data help us see the truth. The contest has never been between abstract labels like capitalism and socialism, at least not necessarily or without saying a lot more. We might instead oppose decentralized, horizontal, self-governing organizations to highly centralized, hierarchical, and opaque ones, looking at structural designs and substantive relations more than the old and increasingly outmoded ideological tags in currency during the last century.
