>Engels's answer still holds true
Isn't that reassuring? Of course, Engels didn't live in a world in which the joint-stock company was the principal economic form - one owned by external shareholders and run by professional managers. In some sense, these give the system more visible structure and coherence than it had in the 19th century, but it also makes the pathways of exploitation and SV distribution more obscure. A mineworker can't point to the guy up the hill whose gold bathroom fixtures were purchased with the worker's uncompensated labor. This is part of what I like about Empire (the book, not the thing) - that it tries to make theoretical sense of the dispersion of power.
Doug