Margins
Short pieces on events, books and ideas, from political economy to culture and philosophy.
The Half That Came True
Corporate ownership has concentrated while American union membership has declined. This essay examines Marx, Mandel and the tension between workers’ retirement savings and the voting power held by fund managers.
The Half That Came True
In 1976 Ernest Mandel wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx's Capital, and he argued that the Western world stood closer to the book's model than the world Marx wrote it in. Mandel named the evidence. Wealth and power had gathered in a few giant industrial and financial corporations, and that concentration had brought "an increasingly universal struggle between Capital and Labour."
Fifty years later the first half reads like a description of the present. A study published in 2017, using 2015 data, found that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street together held a larger stake than any other shareholder in 88 percent of the companies in the S&P 500. A separate study published in 2019 found that the three firms cast an average of about a quarter of the votes at those companies' meetings. Marx wrote that "one capitalist always kills many." The index fund does not kill. It holds shares in the companies that survived.
The second half went the other way, at least in American union membership. In 1983, the first year the Bureau of Labor Statistics kept comparable records, 20.1 percent of American wage and salary workers belonged to a union. In 2025 the figure was 10.0 percent. In the private sector it was 5.9 percent, and in finance, the industry that manages much of the concentration Mandel described, it was 0.8 percent.
So the concentration came and the organised struggle thinned. One reason may sit inside the funds themselves. The three firms manage retirement savings held in 401(k) plans and pensions alongside the wealth of other investors. The worker who sells her labour-power on Monday may have some of her retirement savings in an index fund that owns a sliver of the company she sells it to. She owns shares in the fund rather than the company, and unless she can and does exercise a voting choice, the fund manager generally decides how the underlying shares are voted. Capital and Labour have not stopped meeting. They meet now inside the same household and often inside the same person, and a struggle inside one person does not look like a struggle.
This is inference, not proof. Union decline has other causes: labour law, the move from factories to services, and decades of employers fighting organising drives. Nor does union membership measure every form of struggle between capital and labour. But Mandel's model described two classes that could see each other across a table. The ownership structure of 2026 includes a fund that votes across hundreds of companies and a worker who holds a small economic interest through it.
Mandel was right that the Western world came closer to the model of Capital. What looks different now is the worker's retirement savings inside the fund and the fund manager still holding the vote.