This book aims at examining the impact of the emergence and growth of the modern corporation – the joint stock company (hereafter JSC) – on advanced capitalist economies, in particular on corporate control and shareownership, consumers' choice, the mobilization of financial capital and the saving function, and capitalism's potential inherent tendency towards stagnation and crisis.

The principal feature of the modern corporation is that, unlike its predecessor – the small nineteenth-century firm – it is not owned by an individual tycoon or family but rather by the public at large through shareholding. The result of the historical emergence and dilution of shareownership is a tendency towards the socialization of corporate ownership (hereafter SOCO), or equivalently a tendency towards the socialization of the ownership of the means of production (hereafter SOMP) in advanced capitalist countries.

In this book, I identify two stages in the above tendency. First, direct or voluntary shareholding, i.e. the direct purchase of corporate shares by those households willing and able to do so. Second, indirect, often compulsory, shareholding. This is mainly associated with the so-called pension funds revolution, i.e. the introduction and expansion of compulsory funded occupational pension fund schemes. The role of such schemes is to ‘defer’ a part of the wage earners' income in order to finance their future retirement. In the meantime the income of the funds is invested by those who control them, mainly industrial firms or financial institutions, in the purchase of corporate shares, government securities, etc., at home or overseas.