Once they align into monopolistic cartels and integrate with government, that all changes - and that process (which took place for example in Germany in the 1930s) is well underway again. In such situations, corporations can direct governments to deploy their military forces for their own benefit.
IG Farben and a cohort of allied corporations provided critical funding to the Nazi party in the early 1930s, without which it would have had little ability to gain political power, and IG Farben's immediate reward was guaranteed government contracts for fuel, and later profited as it moved in to take over mines and factories behind the advance of the German armies.
> "By the end of 1933, the Reich agreed to buy all of the Leuna factory's output that couldn't be sold on the market, Jeffreys says. That same year, Farben donated more than 4.5 million Reich marks to Nazi Party funds." (Diarmuid Jeffreys, "Hell's Cartel", 2008)"
That is again a misunderstanding between funding/economics and actual power wielded. The Nazis had no problem flat out telling corporations and their owners what to do or not to do. The lines gets blurry if a high ranking Nazi owned a corporation or something.
Corporations might have had good business etc., but that again isn't the same as being in control.
> "Business Collaboration within the Nazi War Machine: Corporations and the State in the Austrian Semiperiphery, November 2019, Canadian Review of Sociology, Clarence Lo, University of Missouri"
Certainly the heads of those corporate entities (IG Farben, Krupp, Deutsche Bank) that the Nazi regime depended most heavily on had a degree of power and autonomy on a par with the political and military leadership, and were joint partners in, and joint beneficiaries of, the enterprise. It's true that other German business interests were in a more subservient position, however.
That is correct and not in contradiction to what I wrote. Not absolving any corporates here that willingly partnered with the Nazis.
What it doesn't say is that those heads of those corporate entities could go against the political leadership when exercising their power and autonomy (very late stages not so sure, never looked at that in detail) - their power come from an alignment of sorts. You can of course say, if everything is political in a system, then maybe the flip side is everything is corporate - but that didn't hold for the sources of physical violence, for example.
Purely military leadership possibly a little bit (more), because that was "below" political leadership in a way.
