The Executive Committee of the Ruling Class
A look at any large company demonstrates that the Boards of Directors, and executives, appointed to look after the interests of the main shareholders, do what every other bureaucracy does, which is to feather their own nests, whenever they have the opportunity. They organise remuneration boards, so that others of their ilk dominate them, and so each facilitates the payment of huge stipends way out of line with any value the individual executives might add to the business, along with assorted bonuses, share options and so on. The examples of Tyco, Enron, and so on, show how these practices can reach ridiculous levels, even bringing down the company, before the shareholders are able to step in and call those bureaucrats to heel. In the case of Enron, it threatened to also bring down a number of other companies.
Marx and Engels describe the capitalist state as an Executive Committee of the ruling class, and like any Executive Committee, its role is to embrace all of the divergent views and interests. It should act in the interests of Capital in General, rather than any particular capital or group of capitals. But, in reality, at any one time, some particular capitals will be more dominant than others, their particular interests will carry more weight, within this Executive Committee, than others. In addition, in the reality of capitalist competition, each individual large capital, and every important sphere of capitalist production, will seek to press its interests over those of every other capital, and, thereby, of the interests of Capital in General. Indeed, its one of the functions of the capitalist state, as such an Executive Committee, to limit that tendency, whenever it has the potential of threatening the interests of Capital in General.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe society as dividing increasingly into two great class camps of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. That description of “class camps” of course, does not mean just two classes. It means that the two major classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the poles around which all of the other social classes, and strata are drawn, at different times. And, as Marx describes when he looks at society, in practice, and at these classes in detail, nor does it mean that the classes themselves are homogeneous. As Marx describes, in Capital III, the capitalist class is divided into productive-capitalists, merchant capitalists, and money-lending capitalists. The first two of these, particularly as capital bursts asunder the fetters of the monopoly of private capital, and becomes socialised capital, have a shared interest in maximising the annual rate of profit, or more specifically the rate of profit of enterprise, from which both obtain their revenue, whilst the money-lending capitalists obtain their revenue from interest as a deduction from profits, which thereby sets the immediate interests of these two class fractions at odds. And again, as private capital gives way to socialised capital, and the main form of wealth of the private capitalists is held in the form of loanable money-capital, and in the form of fictitious capital, of shares, bonds and so on, so this division of interest between these two class fractions becomes intensified, with the money-lending capitalists sharing many common interests with the old adversary of the bourgeoisie, the landed oligarchy.
As Engels points out,
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc...
And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class.”
It is the basis of social democracy as the dominant form of bourgeois democratic state.
For Capital in General, there is always a requirement to create conditions that facilitate the maximisation of the rate of profit. That was the motivation behind the struggle against the landlords, for the repeal of the Corn Laws, not only as a means of reducing the value of labour-power, but also because corn, and other agriculture products formed a substantial component of the value of constant capital, and whose cheapening would act to raise the rate of profit. Yet, a reduction in agricultural prices, as a result of competition from cheaper imports, once the protection of the Corn Laws was removed, meant that not only would the landlords lose out as a result of lower rents, but agricultural capital would also lose out, as a result of lower prices, and profits. In the same way, capital in general sought to ensure that the wages paid to workers went to enhance the reproduction of labour-power, which is why they supported the Temperance Movement. Yet, if the workers heeded its calls to give up the demon drink, it would have spelled doom for the capital involved in brewing beer, gin and so on, as well as the capital employed in the provision of public houses.
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