Abstract
Hilferding’s last theoretical text (1940; published only in 1954) provides an insight into the creativity, as well as into the limitations, of Hilferding’s approach. While he shows himself, indeed, aware of the major challenges confronting Marxism in its crisis in the 1930s, he has an overwhelming tendency to look for solutions in the context of the academic mainstream. Still, his reflections do present a substantial challenge to the Marxist mainstream, which deserves to be taken up and properly answered.
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Notes
- 1.
Most impressively represented and summarised by the late Paul Ricoeur (2016).
- 2.
On his ideological career as a pupil of Martin Heidegger actively involved with German fascism, as well as flirting with Stalinism after the war, see Orozco (1995).
- 3.
The following refers to Hilferding (1940), in the form published by Cora Stephan in 1982. Translations are my own.
- 4.
- 5.
Which traditional Marxism had attempted to address under the somewhat obsolete category of ‘consciousness’, with a first high point in György Lukacs’s theory of ‘imputed consciousness’ (see the overview in Milner 2019).
- 6.
Who then had a hard time combating the reductionism of the ‘Young Ones’ in his letters of the 1890s (see Wolf 2009).
- 7.
The promotion of these notes to ‘theses’ by Engels is part of a problematic history of reception (see Wolf 2006).
- 8.
- 9.
This was exemplified by Plekhanov—and not overcome by Lenin’s mainly political criticism of his kind of Marxism. On the contrary, this tendency strongly helped to shape the Stalinist tendency Hilferding was confronted with.
- 10.
In the following text, all quotations from Hilferding’s essay ‘Das historische Problem’—in my own translation—will be referred to by simple page numbers in brackets. The edition by Cora Stephan—see <https://www.cora-stephan.de/home/>—seems to be trustworthy, even though the entire book seems to deserve the distancing note formulated by Hilferding’s heir on the last page (p. 336), with an almost non-sensical title, affirming the incompatibility of theory and practice, and mentioning Hilferding’s name only in the subtitle, and with some dubious commentary by Stephan who has no understanding at all for Hilferding’s claims to scientific analysis, nor for his notion of Marxist social democratic politics.
- 11.
In the United States, the beginnings of ‘political science’ in the ‘progressive era’ can be analysed as an alternative and parallel development which was to become hegemonic in the course of the twentieth century, whereas in France the current of ‘institutionalism’, as elaborated by Maurice Hauriou, should be seen as another parallel development.
- 12.
For a deeper discussion, see, for example, Jossa (2018).
- 13.
In this sense, Stephan’s proposal to read this last text by Hilferding as an exercise in self-critique (p. 297) is justified.
- 14.
A helpful analytical summary of an old debate can be found, for example, in Sherman (1981).
- 15.
The degree to which Weber’s radically subjective approach has left readers puzzled can be gauged by comparing the readings of his epistemology by Kolko (1959) and Wolin (1981). Still helpful for getting a clearer perspective is a systematic comparison of the theories of ‘modern society’ as elaborated by Marx and Engels and realised within West-Berlin Marxism, see Bader et al. (1976). A rather dazzling complexity of the much needed debate has been constructed by Greisman and Ritzer (1981).
- 16.
As it was classically discussed by Engels as early as in 1887 (https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1887/role-force/ch01.htm)—with a misleading translation of ‘Gewalt’ by ‘force’ instead of violence in the very title.
- 17.
As discussed by Althusser (1971, pp. 11 ff).
- 18.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s sketch of the dialectic of enlightenment originates in the same ‘night of the century’—and likewise fails to directly address, let alone overcome, the historical crisis of Marxism.
- 19.
As was realised, to my mind, by Balibar and Wallerstein (1991).
- 20.
See Albo and Jenson (1989).
- 21.
I have not been able to identify the specific debate Hilferding was referring to here. The term is still actively in use today. For a historical background overview, see O’Brien and Clesse (2002).
- 22.
- 23.
This even became the ratio essendi of a specialised journal: ‘Capitalistate’, published in the 1980s—and now apparently vanished from all libraries and catalogues.
- 24.
It seems that he even refused to take notice of the ‘Grundlagenstreit’ between radically different approaches to psychology as a science that has been ravaging the emerging discipline since the end of the nineteenth century (see the more recent examples of Holzkamp 1972 and 1973; Gröben and Westmeyer 1981).
- 25.
See the recent overview in Milner (2019).
- 26.
- 27.
He quite convincingly proposes to distinguish between Marx’s reconstruction of the fundamental classes of modern bourgeois society (incomplete in Capital ) and Marx’s exercises in class analysis in his later political writings (p. 322).
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Wolf, F.O. (2020). Hilferding’s Impressive Failure. A Reading of His Last Major Text. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F.O. (eds) Rudolf Hilferding. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47344-0_14
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