Look at how they are structured.

Most corporations have a Council of Elders who advise the Glorious Chief. The Council can technically depose the Chief, but this is extremely rare.

The Chief has a Central Executive Committee which is responsible for establishing and ordering policies. Politics is strictly limited to Committee members fighting among themselves and attempts to influence, bribe and convince the Committee members that certain plans should go forward at the expense of others. If the Council of Elders executes the Chief, it is usually a Committee member who they select to step up.

Large Corporations grow by dominating other Corporations through economic warfare and forcing them into starvation, invading and absorbing them, or, most insidiously, subverting their Council Elders and launching a coup.

Think of it this way, large parts of our economy are under central planning because of the power of large corporations.

For example Walmart, when they chose which company to buy lawnmowers from for example, they get to decide which lawnmower makers survive and which don't.

By picking one winner and putting in a huge order at a huge discount, they can undercut every other manufacturer, effectively putting them out of business.

I don't know about you, but I don't remember the election where I got to vote for who is in charge of Walmart, so it's very autocratic.

Complete with five year plans and local versions of kremlinology.

I never understood why at super-large corporations they would centralize operations for critical stuff (infrastructure, etc) under monolithic organizations when they are large enough to create multiple competing organizations to provide the services: office space, servers, databases/software, laptops, etc.

But then again no company really like competition unless the game is fixed in their favor, and neither does middle management.

I went back to do my master's degree after I had been working as a programmer for about 10 years, so I knew my way around corporate (dys)function by then. I had a professor who had spent his entire career in academia, but who had grown up under communist rule in (I believe) Czechoslovakia. He would often go on tangents about how horrible communist government was and give examples of their lunacy. I was struck that every example he gave was something I had actually seen happen in a corporate setting in my then ten years of employment. One example he gave was that the communist rulers would draft five-year plans, accomplish none of it, and then go back and change the wording of the plans to make it look like they had accomplished everything. I had literally been through that exact same dog-and-pony show at my job that day.

I don’t see what’s communistic about them? The employees don’t control the means of production. There’s rarely consensus.

I don’t see them resembling modern communes, like kibbutzes or Berkeley co-ops.

Seems more like a monarchy to me.

Actually the thing they most resemble to me, in terms of operational stature, is the military.

As a VP from Microsoft described it to me privately many years ago: “warm GULAG”.