At 12:03 PM 15/09/99 -0400, Doug wrote: >The conglomerates in the classic sense - those put together in the >1960s and early 1970s - have largely been dismantled. I'm not sure >what you're talking about here. Perhaps the classic conglomerates (companies with divisions in various sectors), but hasn't conglomeration increased through various kinds of holding companies (more vertical than horizontal integration)? My understanding it has in most countries, though the United States is a bit of an exception. One of the traditional arguments against Canada being an imperialist country is the lack of significant ownership links between banks and industrial firms. I'm working on an argument that finance capital here takes the form of financial and industrial firms being commonly owned by holding companies, often family-controlled. Or is 'finance capital' an obsolete category? > >It's a bit of an oversimplification to say that the "financial >oligarchy" lords it over the MNCs; the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are >themselves members of the ruling class with very substantial >stockholdings of their own. >.... >Actually they had a big struggle over that in the 1980s - just how >much direction major corps were going to take from Wall Street. Wall >Street won, but the very fact that there was a struggle suggests that >it's not quite so top-down as all that. > So, are there really different sectors involved in the circuit of capital? _Wall Street_ suggests that industrial firms are essentially self-financing, using aggregate data. But as noted above, 'Wall Street' has been gaining power. Isn't this a contradiction? Bill Burgess
