“American business leaders seem more comfortable negotiating among themselves than submitting to collective governance.”

Lhe cream of American business circles is in the process of erasing democracy, or at least that is what their behavior suggests. Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone investment fund, is one of the latest business leaders to publicly show his support for Donald Trump’s candidacy in the next presidential election. CEOs of major oil companies have done the same thing, and Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, recently said that Trump’s considerations on NATO, immigration and many important issues would “in the right direction”.

Much has changed since January 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election. In the weeks since the insurrection, many companies have solemnly vowed not to fund candidates who refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden’s undisputed victory. But those promises have proven to be little more than a windfall.

The business world has certainly never demonstrated delirious enthusiasm for democratic governance. When his own activities are at stake, he prefers autocracy to self-governance. General managers want to see their managers and employees obey them, and shareholders, who are supposed to be in charge, calm down easily provided they are given good financial reasons; they rarely manage to unite for collective actions, which are nevertheless essential if we want to hold leaders accountable.

What makes these corporate executives so powerful? The usual answer is to point to the control they enjoy over the assets of the company. This is what Karl Marx meant when he said that control of the means of production allows capitalists to extract surplus value from labor. This has since been abundantly justified by economic models showing that control of assets does indeed translate into domination over labor.

The legal tools of power

But things are a little more complicated. Because neither Schwarzman nor Dimon own their company’s machines or the buildings that house the brokers, investors or bank employees they employ. If they own shares of their empire in the form of stock, or options to buy more stock in their company, those holdings typically constitute only a fraction of all outstanding shares. And if we often define shareholders, collectively, as owners, their participation in the capital does not give them control over either the activities or the assets of the company. It only gives them the right to vote for directors, to exchange their shares and to receive dividends.

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