Given this historical opportunity created by the state's war economy, corporate leaders and Wall Street developed the tenets of shareholder democracy to promote their own long-sought cultural and economic legitimacy, articulate a conservative, anti-regulatory, anticollective political agenda, and obscure unequal class antagonisms through an employee buy-in of the corporate class agenda. [...] Wall Street investment trusts and brokerages argued against the necessity of labor organizations and government-administered social welfare, for the individual can "compensate for his lack of independent proprietorship in the traditional sense by assuming the mantle of corporate shareholder"; in an era of large corporations, it was through "investment, rather than production or consumption," that individual economic betterment could be pursued [...]

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Wall Street and corporate executives advocated for widespread shareholding, not as a vehicle to give shareholders control (as public shareholding was understood and actualized as a dilution of control), but a cultural rehabilitation. Their motives were to promote conservative social and political goals designed explicitly to counter state regulation of markets, foreclose contestation over the control of corporate governance by invoking the semblance of agency via investing, and resist worker unrest. [...]