In the case of socialised industrial capital, the borrower is the company itself, whether a joint-stock company, a worker cooperative, or a consumer cooperative. The company is itself a legal entity, the equivalent of a person. What it certainly is not is the people who lend it money, and whose rights and interests are not only distinct from it, but antagonistic to it. It borrows the money, and it is the owner of what it buys with that money. However, the company can only be those employed within it. Decisions to borrow money, to buy this or that means of production can only be made by humans, i.e. the associated producers within it. It is they who should exercise democratic control over it, and not shareholders.
There is no reason why shareholders, who simply lend money to the company should have any right to exercise control over what the company does with the money it has borrowed from them. Indeed, banks and bondholders, also, lend money to companies, but have no right to exercise any control over the company. Landowners lend land to companies, but that gives them no right to a vote at company meetings. Owners of equipment loan equipment to companies, but that gives them no right to a say in appointing directors, of determining company policy.
In each of these cases, the lender is simply entitled to an appropriate revenue – interest/dividends, rent – and the return of what they lent, at the end of the agreed period. A landlord can sell the title deeds to their property, in the intervening period, but only on the basis of the new landlord honouring the existing lease. The same with a leasing company. Share and bondholders can sell their shares to other buyers.
There is one reason, and one reason only that shareholders are given control over property/capital they do not own, and that is that, without such control, their continuation as ruling-class would quickly end. Laws of corporate governance were created by the bourgeoisie itself, and, as socialised capital expropriated private industrial capital, leaving the bourgeoisie as just a parasitic class of money-lenders, owners only of fictitious capital, they ensured that they could continue their control over that socialised capital, by using their control of the political regime/parliament.
The classification of shareholders as separate from other forms of creditor, or money-lender, serves simply to preserve the façade that these shareholders are, in some way, the owners of the company, just as were the private industrial capitalists of the past. But, clearly, they are not. The shareholders play no more functional role in the day to day activities of the company than does a bondholder or bank manager. A shareholder may have absolutely no involvement with a company, and yet gets their dividends all the same.
If other money lenders and creditors had the same rights as shareholders this façade would be exposed. For one thing, if banks had the rights of shareholders, simply on the basis of making bank loans to companies, it would raise the question of why they did not have similar rights in exercising control over other loans. If the bank manager came to inspect what colour you painted the walls of your living room, or what you watched on TV, it would soon provoke a response, for example. Yet, the money-capital loaned by a bank to a company is no different to the money-capital loaned to a company by a shareholder.
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