Uneven and Combined Development - Rudolf Hilferding's Theory

Rudolf Hilferding's Theory

Around the time that Trotsky settled in Vienna as a journalist in exile, after escaping from Siberia a second time, the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding wrote his famous book Finance Capital (first published in 1910) in which Hilferding mentions an idea very similar to Trotsky's. The passage occurs in chapter 22 on "the export of capital and the struggle for economic territory". It has never been proved whether Hilferding was influenced in any way by what Trotsky had written, although it is known they corresponded with each other, but Hilferding's own analysis of "the latest phase of capitalist development" certainly influenced a whole generation of socialist leaders. Among other things, Hilferding states:

"The export of capital, especially since it has assumed the form of industrial and finance capital, has enormously accelerated the overthrow of all the old social relations, and the involvement of the whole world in capitalism. Capitalist development did not take place independently in each individual country, but instead capitalist relations of production and exploitation were imported along with capital from abroad, and indeed imported at the level already attained in the most advanced country. Just as a newly established industry today does not develop from handicraft beginnings and techniques into a modern giant concern, but is established from the outset as an advanced capitalist enterprise, so capitalism is now imported into a new country in its most advanced form and exerts its revolutionary effects far more strongly and in a much shorter time than was the case, for instance, in the capitalist development of Holland and England."

Hilferding's insight was rarely noticed by English-speaking Marxists. His book Finance Capital, which went out of print several times, was never translated into English until 1981 (i.e. 70 years later), and the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy about world economics was based firmly on Lenin's 1916 pamphlet on imperialism. By the time that Hilferding became Finance Minister in Germany in 1923, the Marxist-Leninists regarded him as a reformist renegade, and his analyses were no longer taken seriously, or looked upon with suspicion.