But there are plenty of low-grade capitalists (individuals and firms) for whom differential accumulation (as compared to other capitalists) is neither a goal nor a concern, for example.
I’m not sure. I think all capitalists are gripped by benchmarks — the main difference is that most small capitalists are obsessed with meeting the average, whereas larger ones try to and sometimes can beat it.
Is this always the case? One of the reasons I believe Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have such large market caps is because they’ve managed to capitalize the future earnings of those outside of their corporate hierarchies.
The inner hierarchies of the corporations themselves are only one aspect of hierarchical power, and not necessarily the most important one. In Section 3.3 of ‘Growing through Sabotage’ (2020), we classified corporations as micro hierarchies, nested in meso-hierarchies and further in meta-hierarchies. If we consider the full spectrum of social hierarchy, we might find that today’s capitalism is the most hierarchical society ever.
