#hilferding

finance capital has three objectives in its policy, he argues:

The history of scientific socialism’s development is much more the development of science than the development of socialism. German philosophy, French historiography, English political economy — consolidated in their aggregate results and united in the irresistible drive to find a scientific solution to the great problems posed by the revolutionary era — tantae molis erat [so great was the effort] to establish the foundations of scientific socialism.

Significantly, meanwhile, Hilferding's discussion of creeping monopolization was not merely a conceptual one.  Where Marx elided the theoretical question of generalized monopoly because he saw it as practically unrealistic, Hilferding confronted it precisely because he disagreed.  And not only did he think it possible- he believed it was actually happening, all around him. That Hilferding saw actually existing capitalism as becoming more and more monopolistic in nature around the turn of the century is, of course, highly pertinent in the context of this book.  It is not coincidental that the period about which, and in which, he was writing was also the period in which competition law- with its ambition to curb monopolization- originally rose to prominence.  Moreover, various later commentators, not least Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in Monopoly Capital (1966), agreed with him: What Hilferding had essentially predicted, a supplanting of "competitive" capitalism by a generically centralized, monopolized form, they claimed had indeed come to pass. Yet this is simply not true.  Monopolistic tendencies have never developed- or never been allowed to develop- as far and as wide as Hilferding imagined they would and Baran and Sweezy maintained that they had.  Notwithstanding multiple periods of shakiness during which the essential dialectical balance between monopoly capitalism has come under pressure (including from the side of insufficient competition), such balance has ultimately been sustained and reproduced.  In other words, we must side with Marx against those who depict a monopoly-induced rewriting of capital and value; his sense about the strength of those "counteracting tendencies" has, effectively, been proven right.  And one of those counteracting tendencies- almost certainly unforeseen by Marx- has been antitrust law.  Below, we consider how exact, in theory, such law provides a counteracting force; first, however, we need to address the question of the problems that arise for capitalism's reproducibility if it starts to veer in the other direction- that is to say, in the direction of too much competition as oppose to too little.

In capitalist society the individual appears as ruler or slave according as he is enrolled in one or other of the two great classes. Socialist society makes him free, inasmuch as it abolishes the antagonistic form of society, inasmuch as it consciously and directly installs socialization. No longer, then, are the interrelationships of society concealed behind enigmatic economic categories which seem to be the natural qualities of things; these interrelationships now manifest themselves as the freely willed outcome of human co-operation. Political economy then ceases to exist...

And this is the fundamentally new element in Marx: that he attempts to combine the historical conception that Jones counterposes to Ricardo’s “abstract method” with the latter, and in that way complete it and revolutionize it. Nowhere did [Jones] try to go beyond historical description to theoretical comprehension. That is precisely Marx’s achievement: that he placed recognition of the historical and social character of economic categories at the service of transforming [economic] theory… The realization that economic relations are social relations led him to discover the fetishism of the concepts of commodity, money and capital. Labor appeared to him in its [historical] determination as wage-labor in its socially necessary form; the economic production process [appeared to him] in its double form as the labor process and the valorization (exploitation) process, the commodity as use value and as value. Capital is no longer a material stock [of goods], but the social relationship in which wage-labor is in opposition to the monopoly of the means of production. The workers sells his labor power; the product belongs to the capitalists, on whom the surplus labor devolves. The magnitude of the surplus labor, i.e. the surplus value, is determined by the division of newly created value between workers and capitalists, i.e. by the amount of wages of variable capital. The distinction between variable and constant capital is thereby given, and in the development of this ratio of the organic composition of capital Marx found capitalism’s most important law of motion… The competition between capitalists for spheres of investment brings about equalization of the different rates of profit into the average profit rate, which determines the transformation of values into prices of production. The historical-social view of economic categories destroyed their fetish character and led to solution of the problems upon which Ricardo and his followers foundered. The economic theory of scientific Marxism grew out of the specifically Marxist union of the “inductive method” of Jones and the abstract method of Ricardo.

The phenomenon of variations in the price of production has shown us that the phenomena of capitalist society can never be understood if the commodity or capital be considered in isolation. It is the social relationship which these occupy, and changes in that relationship, which control and elucidate the movements of individual capitals, themselves no more than portions of the total social capital. But the representative of the psychological school of political economy fails to see this social nexus, and he therefore necessarily misunderstands a theory which definitely aims at disclosing the social determinism of economic phenomena, a theory whose starting point therefore is society and not the individual. In apprehending and expounding this theory he is ever influenced by his own individualistic mentality, and he thus arrives at contradictions which he ascribes to the theory, while they are in truth ascribable solely to his interpretations of the theory.

Very different is Marx’s view. In his view, that goods contain labor is one of their intrinsic qualities; that they are exchangeable is a distinct quality, one solely dependent on the will of the possessor, and one which presupposes that they are owned and alienable. The relationship of quantity of labor to the process of exchange does not come into consideration until they are regularly produced as commodities, produced that is to say as goods specifically designed for exchange; thus this relationship makes its appearance only in a definite phase of historic evolution. The quantitative ratio wherein they are now exchanged becomes thereby dependent upon the time of production, which is in its turn determined by the degree of social productivity. The exchange relationship loses its chance character, thus ceases to be dependent upon the caprice of the owner. The social conditions imposed upon labor become objective limitations for the individual, and the social complex controls the individual’s activities. Now the mode of the social process of production determines the social process of distribution, for this latter is no longer consciously regulated, as if in a communist community. Under capitalism the process of distribution manifests itself as the outcome of the exchanges effected by independent individual producers, exchange controlled by the laws of competition.