Corporations Classes And Capitalism

Large multinational corporations shape our lives to an enormous extent. How is the growth, power, and significance of big business to be explained and understood? Focusing on the issues of ownership, control, and class formation, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes explores the implications of changes in the nature of big business, which affect both the businesses themselves, and the economic and political milieu in which these multinationals operate. Up-to-date empirical evidence is reviewed in a wide-ranging comparative framework that covers Britain and the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and many other societies, including emerging forms of capitalism in China and Russia. Unlike other specialist texts in the area, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes relates its concerns to issues of social stratification and class structure. The first and second editions of the book (under the title Corportations, Classes and Capitalism) were enthusiastically received, and the present edition reviews new theoretical ideas and empirical evidence that has emerged in the ten years since the second edition appeared. The text has been completely re-written and re-structured, and it relates its concerns to contemporary debates over `disorganized capitalism' and post-industrialism.

The modem corporation, praised and condemned by thinkers from Weber to Bell and Dahrendorf, is the institution of modern society. Its enormous success has made it our premier social, as well as economic, institution, and modern society is increasingly coming to reflect the social structure, values, priorities, and hierarchies that have evolved within the corporation. So argues John McDermott in Corporate Society, an original and far-reaching analysis of the impact of the modern corporation on contemporary social structure. Combining business history with political insight, McDermott offers a systematic critique of the post-industrial order and the illusions it fosters. He warns against the development of a "post-society industry" in which the corporate order replaces democratic institutions as the primary organizer of social and cultural life, and he argues that the corporation harbors a set of explosive socioeconomic contradictions. The need to confront the challenges of this new order, with its potential for a uniquely modern class conflict, makes Corporate Society a crucial work for teachers and students alike.

What, and who, are we working for? A thoughtful assessment on our current society from “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist” (The New York Times). Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid-for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid, and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve. One key cause for this intolerable state of affairs is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. The solution requires the institution of genuine economic democracy, starting with workers managing their own workplaces, as the basis for a genuine political democracy. Here Richard D. Wolff lays out a hopeful and concrete vision of how to make that possible, addressing the many people who have concluded economic inequality and politics as usual can no longer be tolerated and are looking for a concrete program of action. “Wolff’s constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hope and Prospects

This book examines neoliberal corporate power within the context of the American political economy and its relationship to emerging market economies in order to understand the global dimensions of the corporate-financial binary.

In 1974, Maurice Zeitlin published a seminal article in The American Journal of Sociology, criticizing managerial theory and evidence, which ended one era in the analysis of the large corporation's ownership and control and began a new one. He called for research on the capitalist class that would reveal its inner structure--particularly the interaction of family ties, property, and business leadership in the large corporation. But, despite the subsequent blossoming of studies of intercorporate and class power, no one else has yet done the systematic empirical analysis he outlined. This work is thus the first to explore the full panoply of intraclass relations--interorganizational, kinship, economic, and political--within an actually existing dominant class. Theoretically sensitive, methodologically precise, and historically grounded, it aims to fill in the blank spots in our knowledge about how "economic classes" become "social classes" and how the latter in turn connect with other social forms. This work is a sustained empirical analysis of Chile's dominant class. But it does more than reveal that class's specific internal structure; it also provides a coherent theory of the inner relations constituting any dominant class in a highly concentrated capitalist economy, a methodological paradigm, and an exemplary body of findings, which can closely guide the study of other dominant classes, especially in the "advanced" societies of the West. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Non-manual workers are fast becoming the largest occupational category in Western capitalist countries. This is the first book to present a detailed socialist analysis of this much discussed change in the class structure of contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the class position of managerial and supervisory workers, Robert Carter takes as his starting-point the inadequacy of both orthodox Marxist and Weberian models of class relations. Rather, he concurs with recent structuralist theorists of class who maintain that there exists between capital and labour in the process of producing a new middle class. He parts company from the work of these theorists, however, in his insistence that the organisation and consciousness of the new middle class have also to be examined because of the practical consequences these have on class relations. The book therefore examines the historical rise of the middle class, both in the private and the state sector, together with the tendency of the class to respond to its changing relations with capital and labour by unionising. It is sharply critical of the dominant models of the causes and nature of white-collar unionism – both industrial relations and Weberian ones – and indeed rejects these models in favour of a perspective which views the extent and nature of middle-class unionism within the dynamics of class relations.