Capital is not money, capital can be represented by money but it is not inherently money. Capital is something you use to buy someone’s labor. More specifically it is the social relationship between wage labor and profit. Assets (private property) used to produce profit (surplus value) are capital
Capital is “the characteristic the means of production acquire when they are used to hire labor and generate surplus value”
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
You do not get any access to the company’s resources. There is no dollar sitting in company coffers for your dollar of investment. You don’t get to decide what that money does what so evwr, and its value is speculative on the performance.
That is far, far, far removed from owning or controlling any part of a company’s capital.
I’ve been part of multiple board elections where the little people have deciding votes because a 3rd party institutional investor needs to rally the retail investors to oust the current board for environmental crimes reasons.
Having a vote is having control of capital … and they pay you for it with dividends too.
But it isn’t the same as if the entire working class had a collective say in the capital, not just those who choose to and have the resources to pay in. It isn’t the same as the workers of that company having a say in their working conditions, shift lengths, compensation, etc.
Ok, so are we talking about assets or capital?
Capital is not money, capital can be represented by money but it is not inherently money. Capital is something you use to buy someone’s labor. More specifically it is the social relationship between wage labor and profit. Assets (private property) used to produce profit (surplus value) are capital
You do not get any access to the company’s resources. There is no dollar sitting in company coffers for your dollar of investment. You don’t get to decide what that money does what so evwr, and its value is speculative on the performance.
That is far, far, far removed from owning or controlling any part of a company’s capital.
I’ve been part of multiple board elections where the little people have deciding votes because a 3rd party institutional investor needs to rally the retail investors to oust the current board for environmental
crimesreasons.Having a vote is having control of capital … and they pay you for it with dividends too.
But it isn’t the same as if the entire working class had a collective say in the capital, not just those who choose to and have the resources to pay in. It isn’t the same as the workers of that company having a say in their working conditions, shift lengths, compensation, etc.