Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development

Abstract

At the outset the person on the Clapham omnibus could be forgiven for questioning the contemporary relevance of a volume of economic analysis whose main outline was completed in the early 1900s by a practising doctor at the age of 28 . An initial attitude of scepticism could easily be transformed into one of complete dismissal if one were to take at face value Lenin's characterisation of the same doctor as `ex-Marxist, and now a comrade-in-arms of Kautsky and one of the chief exponents of bourgeois, reformist policy in the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany . Yet when Hilferding's project was published in German as Das Finanzkapital in 1910 its impact across the political spectrum of his contemporaries was striking. Not surprisingly political `allies' such as Kautsky and Bauer hailed Das Finanzkapital as an additional volume of Capital. But the work of political adversaries such as Bukharin's (1918) study of imperialism also owes a large intellectual debt to Hilferding . And, paradoxically, Lenin's (1917) classic, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism is Hilferding's biggest debtor . A resolution of this paradox is suggested in the next section .