On 13/8/02, Doug Henwood wrote:
>It matters because it's not that easy to specify how corporations are run - for whom, by whom, under what principles.
These questions are elementary. Corporations are run in the interests of their shareholders, they are managed by the managers and their Boards. The principle is profit.
> We've been through 20 years in which the stock market was the guiding star - linking pay to stock performance was supposed to align the interests of CEOs and shareholders,
As we have seen, the only way the interests of capitalist owners and working class managers can be reconciled is for the managers to become capitalists or the owners to be proletarianised. The owners tried to provide that managers would only be able to accumulate large amounts of capital for themselves on the condition they accumulated even more for the existing capitalist owners. But the best laid plans of mice and capitalists often go awry...
When the cat's away, the mice will play... In some corporations the managers found it necessary, or more profitable, to bankrupt the corporation in order to accumulate capital for themselves. Its now a widespread phenomenon, it clearly isn't in the interests of shareholders, so it demonstrates once again that the interests of the working class and the capitalist class can never be reconciled. When it comes to money, the interests of capitalist and capitalist are quite difficult to reconcile. But all interests are not class interests, so that isn't relevant here.
As for this idea that there is some class difference between sole proprietors and other large shareholders, this is nonsense.
> and free & easy M&A was supposed to impose good discipline. It's come into a crisis of phony accounting and generalized bubble thinking. If you want to socialize corporations, how do you do it? Who are the owners, and how are the things run?
>
>Of course workers own stock; for that they may get some dividends and capital gains, though dividends are low and capital gains mainly a memory. Seriously rich people tend to move assets into municipal bonds and other fixed-income investments; they own claims to revenue, not surplus value.
But isn't that just semantics? The revenue is derived from surplus value one way or the other.
> Does that make them capitalists?
Of course.
> Or have they just found a way to tap into the surplus value on the basis of inherited congealed SV? They don't actively contribute to the capital-labor relation with their investments in New York State bonds.
They contribute capital to the capital-labour relationship, what are you talking about?
> Jackie O had no influence over corporate or state policy;
She owned the capital. She didn't have to "influence" corporate policy, by which I take you to mean actively work as a manager in the corporation. As a capitalist she didn't have to work and her best interests were served by hiring people who were better qualified to manage the business.
You almost seem to be suggesting that only active managers of capital are true capitalists? This is a very odd conception.
> she acquired some books and went to parties and watched herself on TV. (Gore Vidal said she spent her final days following the coverage of her final days.) Is Henry Kissinger a capitalist? He owns a consulting firm, for sure, but that's not the source of his power. He has some investments, but probably less than many of his neighbors. He seems to have gotten promoted from intellctual and functionary to a member of the inner circle. He has an influence over state and corporate policies.
>
>Maybe I'm just obsessing over terms, objecting to mixing up capitalists and members of a ruling class and the merely rich. But how is capitalist power exercised?
As explained before, capitalist power is exercised by requiring non capitalists to sell their labour power to capitalists, or in some other way to hand over a proportion of the value of their labour, to those who own the capital which is socially necessary for production of goods and services. It isn't complicated, capitalists are, via their control of the capital necessary for production, in a position to exploit a forced relationship with those who create wealth, to further enrich themselves. Capitalists don't need to exercise petty power, they exercise power ECONOMICALLY.
The object of exercising political power is merely to preserve that economic power.
> Jackie O had nothing to do with determining the conditions of social labor or the deployment of US imperial power abroad. Senior executives, financiers, and helpful intellectuals do.
Jacki O required a dividend on her capital, to permit her to continue living in the style to which she had become accustomed. This dividend of unearned income must be earned by someone. In this way she determined the conditions of labour in society, she didn't have to manage the business personally, her hired managers knew perfectly well what was expected of them. It probably wouldn't even have occurred to them to try to run the business without generating a profit, so that its employees could retain the full value of their labour.
It seems you are confusing this issue of economic power. It is almost as if you don't acknowledge its existence. Do you acknowledge its existence? Do you recognise that economic, rather than political coercion is the basic element of the capitalist system, be basic difference between the class society of capitalism and other class societies such as feudalism and slavery?
It is necessary to grasp that before you can understand much else. Many people don't, many anarchists are totally fixated on political power for example and they can never get it through their heads that political power derives from economic power, rather than vice versa.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas