Rudolf Hilferding: What Do We Still Have to Learn from His Legacy?

472 Pages·2022·8.39 MB·English

by  Judith Dellhei, Frieder Otto Wolf

LUXEMBURG INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
Rudolf Hilferding
What Do We Still Have to Learn
from His Legacy?
Second Edition
Edited by
Judith Dellheim · Frieder Otto Wolf
Luxemburg International Studies in Political
Economy
Series Editors
Jan Toporowski
University of London
School of Oriental and African Studies
London, UK
Frieder Otto Wolf
Institute of Philosophy
Free University of Berlin
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is one of the largest political education
institutions in Germany today. The Foundation’s book series Luxemburg
International Studies in Political Economy publishes serious academic
studies in political economy, broadly conceived to cover critical research in
the social sciences on capitalism, as well as feminist and environmental
political economy. This series has been supported by the Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation, one of the larger political education institutions in
Germany today.
Judith Dellheim • Frieder Otto Wolf
Editors
Rudolf Hilferding
What Do We Still Have to Learn from His Legacy?
2nd ed. 2023
Editors
Judith Dellheim Frieder Otto Wolf
Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation Institute of Philosophy
Berlin, Germany Freie Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
ISSN 2662-6373 ISSN 2662-6381 (electronic)
Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy
ISBN 978-3-031-08095-1 ISBN 978-3-031-08096-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08096-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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P f e
reface to the irst dition
This is the third volume of the series “Luxemburg International Studies in
Political Economy”.
In 2014, at the International Conference “The 100th Anniversary of
‘The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation
of Imperialism’—A Century-old Work Remains Current, Provocative and
Seminal”, Jan Toporowski presented his idea for the series. In an interview
about the project he said: “Political Economy has become very fashion-
able now, for example, among political scientists and heterodox econo-
mists. However, much of this literature … is eclectic in its inspiration,
ranging from libertarian Austrian ideas, to rather free interpretations of
Marxian concepts. This series is distinctive in taking forward the system-
atic work in political economy from the discussions following Marx’s
death in 1883, to which Rosa Luxemburg contributed, and showing the
relevance of those discussions to problems of capitalism today. For me the
key here is the systematic methodology that derives from these discus-
sions, rather than imaginative, but loose, thinking inspired by concepts
used in nineteenth century discussions before the emergence of mature
capitalism” (Dellheim 2016).
The projected series then started in 2016, with the volume “Rosa
Luxemburg: A Permanent Challenge for Political Economy” (Dellheim and
Wolf 2016). This book helped to at least begin overcoming a still existing
fear which has for a long time prevented the European left from any
explicit dealing with the entire theoretical legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.
One important aspect of this legacy is that Luxemburg—as one of the
most fascinating and radical characters in the struggle for liberation and
v
vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
equality—developed a very specific critical relationship with Karl Marx
and his theoretical heritage. Accordingly, it was no coincidence that our
call for abstracts on the occasion of Marx’s 200th birthday began with a
quote from Luxemburg: “In accordance with Marx’s whole worldview, his
magnum opus is no Bible containing ultimate truths that are valid for all
time, pronounced by the highest and final authority; instead, it is an inex-
haustible stimulus for further intellectual work, further research, and the
struggles for truth” (Luxemburg 1918, p. 453). That we returned to this
quote on the eve of Marx’s 200th birthday was due to the central idea
underlying our second volume, dedicated to the unfinished system of
Marx’s volumes on Capital. In following Luxemburg in this respect, we
tried to make use of the fragmentary state of the volumes II and III of
Capital which “provide something infinitely more valuable than any sup-
posed final truth: a spur to reflection, to critique and self-critique, which
is the most distinctive element of the theory that was Marx’s legacy”
(ibid., p. 461). Unfortunately, this spur was not taken up by many of those
who followed Luxemburg in her day, as the further development of
Marxist theory was dramatically overshadowed and crippled, by reaction-
ary and fascist terror, war and by Stalinism.
Confronted with further developments of the capitalist mode of production,
as well as those pertaining to other forms of societal hierarchies, we urgently
have to deal more specifically with the issue of money and finance, still
attempting to follow in the very tracks of Marx and Luxemburg. And it is,
accordingly, just another consequence of our approach that we now address
the work of Rudolf Hilferding and its reception in Marxist debates. The
importance of Hilferding’s work was already underlined in the call for
abstracts to our book on the unfinished volume III of Capital (Dellheim,
collective, 2016). Consequently, when the second volume of our series,
“The Unfinished System of Karl Marx. Critically Reading Capital as a
Challenge for our Times” (Dellheim and Wolf 2018b), appeared, we already
announced that the third one would deal with Hilferding’s legacy (ibid.,
p. 24). The argument for this plan was, on the one hand, that some of our
authors referred to Hilferding anyway, given his evident efforts to analyse
social and especially economic developments in the world after Marx and
Engels. Accordingly, we proceeded from the conviction that a critique of
Hilferding’s theoretical achievements would be of crucial importance for a
deeper understanding of the present societal, economic and political situa-
tion—especially of the global financial crisis and its connections to other
problems and crises, particularly global warming, the loss of bio-diversity,
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION vii
militarisation and increasing violence against people, as well as poverty and
social exclusion.
Based on his own, specific understanding of Marx—which merits and
requires both analysis and criticism—Hilferding showed how the develop-
ment of banks and joint-stock companies, especially in their expansion
towards the control of industry, modified the very structure of societal,
economic, political relations, and, last but not least, also of international
relations.
Three questions were, or, rather, still are, of crucial interest here. They
were already formulated in our call for abstracts written between the 200th
anniversary of Marx’s birthday and the 100th anniversary of the brutal
murder of Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919:
• First, we asked contributors to take a deeper look at the political
dimension of Luxemburg’s and Hilferding’s handling of Marx’s the-
oretical legacy. This is much needed, because any sound critique of
their theoretical conceptions should take into account that neither of
them were able to refer to all of Marx’s manuscripts later published
in the (second) MEGA edition. The question we asked pertained to
the specific research methodology and the general approach to theo-
retical work in both Luxemburg and Hilferding, while at the same
time looking for an explanation of their very distinct political devel-
opments. Hilferding’s analyses of banking capital and its relation to
other forms of capital, particularly of ‘finance capital’ as a specific
kind of capital collectively accumulated by money capitalists as well
as by industrial capitalists, as well his historico-empirical reconstruc-
tion of the societal and political consequences this development trig-
gered, opened up a field of important Marxist research and debate.
His analysis then significantly influenced the Marxist debates on
imperialism, on the prospect of further capitalist development and
on the strategic conclusions socialists/communists could or should
draw from these findings (Nikolai Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin, Henryk
Grossmann, Fritz Sternberg, as well as their supporters and oppo-
nents participated in these debates).
• A second question that demands more in-depth scrutiny refers to the
consequences of Hilferding’s theory of finance capital for the under-
standing of modern, contemporary processes of the accumulation of
capital, for conceiving of its possibilities and perspectives of
viii PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
development, as well as for working on socialist political strategies of
transformation.
• Our third question was about how to deal with Hilferding’s legacy as
a contribution to the critique of political economy, i.e. as a lasting
challenge to the economists of today, in order to find out what could
be gained scientifically—in an analysis of reality and in a construction
of possible futures—as well as politically—in a diagnosis of possible
interventions—by taking up and critically addressing this legacy
(Dellheim et al. 2018).
The original interpretation of Hilferding put forward by the influential
political economist Joseph Schumpeter (who developed from an early
sympathiser of Marx and Engels via conservative to reactionary positions)
asserted that Hilferding had shown that capitalism was evolving towards a
stable ‘general cartel’. This reading of Hilferding was challenged by the
Austro-Marxists, who in turn were an important influence on Michal
Kalecki and Tadeusz Kowalik, inspiring them to make more critical use of
Hilferding’s achievements. Their investigations produced a significant
legacy of insights, even though they were ignored, falsified, or negated by
the Stalinist interpretations which had come to dominate the main thrust
of Marxist debates. Proceeding from Kalecki and Kowalik’s approach, we
shall look at what can be gained today by specifically analysing the accu-
mulation of finance capital—understood as globalised collective capital
using credit for mobilising a maximum of resources for its accumulation
by primary exploitation (unpaid wage labour) and by secondary exploita-
tion (redistribution, dispossession)—in its relation to the dynamics of
societal hierarchies (class, gender, ethnic and cultural origin, individual
orientations, etc.) and, at the same time, its effects on the natural
environment.
We were very pleased with the resonance our call was met with and the
large number of eminently intriguing abstracts, especially from female
economists and from scholars from Central and Eastern European coun-
tries and from the global South. Unfortunately, the cooperation with
many of these authors did not materialise, for very different reasons—
some due to very delightful circumstances, like pregnancy and the birth of
a child; but also for very sad reasons caused by political repression and
economic constraints; or simply due to too busy schedules. We wish the
young mother and her new-born baby only the best and express our soli-
darity with the colleagues living under complicated political conditions. As
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION ix
coordinators of this volume we are grateful to Scott Aquanno (Canada),
Patrick Bond (South Africa), John Grahl (Great Britain), Jan Greitens
(Germany), Pat Higgins (Poland), Andrew Kilmister (Great Britain),
Michael Krätke (Netherlands), Stephen Maher (Canada), Radhika Desai
(Canada), Claude Serfati (France), Nikos Stravelakis (Greece), and Jan
Toporowski (Great Britain) for their chapters and their constructive coop-
eration. As some originally planned contributions could not be realised,
we were glad that Michael Krätke was able to address several topics in his
chapter which otherwise would have been lost to this volume. Not only
because of those contributions which ultimately could not be accom-
plished, we look forward to continuing the debate in this way.
Our book consists of several chapters covering very different aspects of
Hilferding’s rich, dramatic, and tragic legacy which, moreover, address in
different ways the three questions we raised. We very much appreciate that
all authors were also interested in the practical perspectives opened up by
their contributions. They pursue the aim of helping the reader to under-
stand the recent problems, the reasons for the overall defensive state of
progressive alternative forces, and to find ways to overcome these situa-
tions of defensive struggles, as well as the underlying structural obstacles
for democratic, just, socially and ecologically sustainable solutions for the
mounting societal and global problems.
• Michael Krätke offers an overview of the history of Hilferding’s sem-
inal work and draws a comprehensive picture of its major theoretical
achievements. In so doing, he shows that Hilferding effectively pur-
sued the aim of continuing Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of
production. On the other hand, Krätke presents a full list of major
amendments and conceptual changes to Hilferding’s theoretical leg-
acy that should allow the reader to begin to understand the phenom-
ena of contemporary financial market capitalism.
• Nikos Stravelakis’ chapter is about the key political economy contri-
butions which originated from Finance Capital, covering the period
from its publication in 1910 to the year 1966. In the author’s view,
the conclusions of Hilferding, Moszkowska, and Sweezy on eco-
nomic crisis rely on the neoclassical theory of perfect competition
and its ‘dark side’, i.e. monopoly ‘price setting’. In conclusion,