>>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.
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>Having written a 400-page book on these matters, maybe I'm biased in thinking that it's not all so simple or self-evident. Managers and shareholders don't always see eye-to-eye. They fight over control and distribution. Boards are made up of outsiders and insiders; sometimes they do the shareholders' bidding (e.g., when they're firing a CEO), and sometimes they do management's (e.g. Enron). Profit maximization is a simple-sounding principle, but over what time period? Maximizing this quarter's profits, next quarter's, next year's - or, in Mitsubishi's case, over 250 years? At what ratio of risk and reward, using what capital structure, and what operational strategy? If you think you know the answer, tell the bourgeoisie - they're still trying to figure it out.
They've figured it out, its the people who want to be capitalists that are trying to figure it out. Which audience was your book aimed at and how much money did you make out of it?
>>As for this idea that there is some class difference between sole proprietors and other large shareholders, this is nonsense.
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>Really? They often take opposing positions on political issues - on trade agreements and regulation, for example. What sole proprietor can get a Senator or cabinet secretary on the phone?
Kerry Packer. AKA the Goanna. Australia's richest person. Though even Kerry gets a bit embarrassed when Prime Ministers grovel in public. As they are wont to do.
>>But isn't that just semantics? The revenue is derived from surplus value one way or the other.
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>The economic functions are different, and so are the social roles.
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>>They contribute capital to the capital-labour relationship, what are you talking about?
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>Really? By buying already-existing shares of stock? Do tell how.
I should have thought this was elementary. They contribute capital to the capital-labour relationship by requiring their wage slaves to work in the factories (or whatever) the corporation owns. Whether a capitalist buys already existing stock, or floats new stock, really makes absolutely no difference. Why do you imagine it would?
>>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.
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>Not necessarily. Institutional shareholders have gotten quite active in corporate governance over the last 20 years. Jackie O probably didn't.
What do you mean by "quite active" then, if not active in management of 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.
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>Oh, like Jeff Skilling?
Who's Jeff Shilling? Did he hire the wrong people or something? Look at it this way, if he can't even hire competent help, he'd probably make an even bigger balls-up of trying to manage the business personally.
>>You almost seem to be suggesting that only active managers of capital are true capitalists? This is a very odd conception.
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>I'm saying there's a big difference in the economic and political function, and the consciousness as well, among small businesspeople, the middle managers and senior managers of large corporations (further subdivided into regional, national, and multinational enterprises), institutional investors, and pure rentiers like Jackie O. If you don't agree, welcome to the 19th century.
Sure there's a big difference. Most small businesspeople are objectively working class for a start. But the difference between some of the others is merely form. "Rentiers", by which you appear to mean capitalists who choose not to personally manage their investments are different only in that they tend to be less obsessed with the business. Its really just a lifestyle choice. I suspect that he disapproval implied in the distinction says more about the American puritanical work-ethic thing than any difference in function.
But I'd be fascinated to learn more about what you think on this. (Don't get your hopes up though, I'm not in the market for a book.) ;-)
>>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.
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>This reminds me of my childhood experiences with the Baltimore catechism.
I wouldn't know about that, my parents were atheists. But if you are suggesting I'm quoting from a manual, you couldn't be more wrong. Actually, I'm making it up as I go along. Based on the simple definition of class mentioned every so often. I'm flattered you find it all too consistent and plausible to suspect an attempt to apply the principles of logical extension.
>> 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.
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>Which can never be far from state or cultural power. And different capitalists have different access and interests when it comes to those articulations.
Agreed. But access to political power is derives from economic power, not the other way around. The politicians do the bidding of Kerry Packer because he is wealthy. He retains his wealth in some measure due to his political power. But his primary power is economic, the power to make or break individuals, families, communities, nations maybe, merely by moving his money around.
>>The object of exercising political power is merely to preserve that economic power.
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>You have a gift for making the most complicated things sound a lot simpler than they are.
You don't appear to have the gift, or perhaps the inclination, to substantiate the assertion that they are not (in essence, if I can take up the invitation to use the term) as simple as I state them. Feel free to try to complicate and confuse things though, as something of an economist I understand this is what you 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.
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>In all likelihood, Jackie owned government bonds, so she wasn't consuming SV directly. A minor point perhaps, but the institutional and political relations are very different.
Direct, indirect, what's the difference? Except that se wasn't directly involved in managing the extraction of surplus value. You seem to place great stake in this remoteness from the coal face, but I don't see any reason why it is significance from a class point of view.
>>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?
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>God made me to know him, love Him, and serve Him in this life and the next.
Youre babbling Doug. Told you, didn't have a religious upbringing, don't comprehend this religious stuff. Every one to their own of course, but it goes right over my head.
>> 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?
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>>It is necessary to grasp that before you can understand much else.
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>Gosh, I don't know how I got this far in life without this basic understanding. A thousand expressions of gratitude!
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>> 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.
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>As Noam Chomsky put it to me once, most of the time the IMF will do, but sometimes you have to send in the Marines.
And sometimes you can't send in the marines. Otherwise there would be no need for the IMF. "Horses for courses" is the track jargon.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas