> So your saying that those long generations of vast fortunes don't willfully
> exert influence on world affairs?
"They" (the Gates, Waltons, Quandts, etc.) exert influence, not total control -- but very often things don't go as they plan. In a weird kind of way, the total system is incrementally expropriating capitalists of their ability to dispose over capital -- nowadays there are tax authorities, state legislation, forms to fill out, the media spotlight, etc. Not even those Swiss bank accounts are safe from Swiss prosecutors anymore. And each bureaucracy gets in the way of all the other bureaucracies, resulting in endless turf fights.
Adorno has this great comment about causality in the system, namely that it recedes to a vanishing-point; every factor causes every other factor, the net is drawn so tight that the system itself becomes its own prime mover, as it were -- thus the necessity for new types of multinational thinking and praxis, capable of thinking geopolitically, on a planetary scale.
-- Dennis