From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Subject: Re: Charles Brown wrote:
>Doug:
Let me rephrase that - there's almost no corporation of any consequence in which identifiable individuals have a controlling interest.
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CB: Do small groups control the Fortune 500 or all corps of consequence ?
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>The capitalist class is a very small group of people relative to the
>total population. The few that do have the controlling interests in
>big corps are the capitalists.
Most stock is held by institutional investors - pension funds and mutual funds. Are the portfolio managers the capitalists then? But they're just the hired agents of the fund managers. The fund managers are the hired agents of the ultimate beneficiaries. It's the Wall Street branch of Empire, where power doesn't reside at a known address.
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CB: Seems to me what you term "ultimate beneficiaries" are the financial oligarchs or a major fraction of today's big capitalists. I wouldn't be adverse to including very powerful fund managers in that ruling class.
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>CB: When you say "owned by millions of shareholders ", you don't mean
>that the millions control most corporations , do you ? This
>"ownership" is a legal fiction I'd say.
Lemme ask you - who controls AT&T? IBM? JPMorgan Chase?
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CB: Here's how this parses logically for me. You would either be saying that the millions of shareholders do control AT&T, IBM and JP; or you are saying no one controls them. Aren't the three logical possibilities that a few, a many or no one controls them ?
The fact that I can't name the specific few individuals who , in my theory , control, doesn't mean they don't exist. One of my premises is that most bourgeoisie seek to rule in privacy and anonimity.
>CB: Owners of _small_ businesses are by definition petit
>bourgeoisie, no ? CEO's of corps the size of IBM are a very small
>number of people. Not much problem including those with the most
>economic control and power in the capitalist class.
But the CEO of IBM doesn't "control" it - he could be fired on a vote of the board. And the board can (though not easily) be replaced on a vote of the shareholders. The CEO of IBM looks like a capitalist in some ways, but he doesn't own a very large block of stock.
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CB: I don't think the Marxist concept is not that it _has_ to be one person controlling by himself. In law school, there is a famous case they give you in which Henry Ford lost a shareholder suit for not maximizing profits. Is the CEO of IBM part of a small group that control ?
Nonetheless, what you say here comports with the impression I have from studying corporations law. I _have_ often heard of % 's of stockownership much less than 51% as controlling . Is that a misimpression I have ? It would be the stockholders who own the controlling block of stock. These may often be financial institutions, and so the controlling owners of the financial institution would control the underlying corp.
I guess I really resist the notion that big corps are controlled by some kind of mass shareholder democracy. Does anybody seriously claim that ? I had thought not, but.. This would be control by the many. The only alternatives to that are no one controls, which seems wrong, and a few control.
>Bottomline on this thread, workers who own some stock don't control
>the company and are not capitalists. There is very little friction
>or contradiction in that conception, and the points raised on this
>thread do not confound the Marxist conception of class in 2002.
Dunno about confound, but it sure complicates it.
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CB: I agree that the structure of the bourgeois ruling class is more complicated than in Marx's day. Even way back when, Engels and Marx noted the trend of the separation of managing from owning. I'm trying to think of an analogy. Don't you think there are a few shareholders at IBM who have a lot more control over the board of directors than the vast majority of shareholders ?