Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. (...) One last example worth mentioning is the stock market. In the 1987 crash, and on other occasions, the Federal Reserve Board acted to prop up the stock market. This is not a neutral intervention solely for the good of the economy. Stock holdings are heavily concentrated among the nation's richest families. The richest one percent own nearly 50 percent of stock shares and the richest 10 percent own more than 80 percent of individually held shares. When the Federal Reserve Board makes a decision to prop up the market, it is making a decision to transfer wealth from the rest of the nation to a minority of rich people. (...) ---------------------------------------------------------------- So don't these fat cats control corporations - and therefore the stock holdings of corporations - through their nominees, their network of clubs and associations, etc.? Aren't they like LBO'ers who take over corporate assets many times their size? Don't they own and control without actually paying for it?
Hakki
|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Charles Brown
|| Sent: 11 Ocak 2002 Cuma 00:04
|| To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| Subject: Capitalist class is a tiny elite; workers owning
|| stock, so what ?
||
||
|| Capitalist class is a tiny elite; workers owning stock, so what ?
||
||
|| 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.
||
|| %%%%%%%
||
|| CB: Do small groups control the Fortune 500 or all corps of
|| consequence ?
||
|| %%%%
||
||
||
|| >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.
||
|| %%%%%%%
||
|| 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.
||
|| %%%%%%
||
||
||
|| >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?
||
|| %%%%%%%
||
|| 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.
||
|| %%%%%
||
|| 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.
||
|| %%%%%%%
||
|| 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 ?
||