The Organization of the Corporate Class Segment of the U.S. Capitalist Class at the Turn of This Century

This chapter describes how the fusion of financial and industrial capital structured the new segment's relation to the means of production and how the segment organized itself in pursuit of institutional class hegemony in the context of class conflict. It explains how the corporation altered the relationship of capitalists to the means of production and how the new class segment organized itself politically and socially. Marxists more accurately portray the enduring saliency of class in the twentieth-century United States (US), but they have too often neglected to specify exactly how different segments are related to the means of production or describe how the organization of the segments differs in specific historical contexts. The US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of a new segment of the capitalist class based on the fusion of financial and industrial capital in large corporations—the corporate class segment.