What is corporatism? In a (somewhat inaccurate) phrase, socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership & private management but with a crucial difference: as under socialism, government guarantees the flow of material goods which under true capitalism it does not. In classical capitalism...government's role in the economy is simply to prevent force or fraud from disrupting the autonomous operation of the free market...Under corporatism, it is not, instead being systematically manipulated to deliver goods to political constituencies... Unlike socialism, corporatism understands that direct government ownership of the means of production...