Finance Capital and Contemporary Financialisation

Abstract

In contrast to the judgement that Hilferding’s concept of finance capital is irrelevant to contemporary developments because today the relations between money capital and industrial capital are the opposite of what he posited, this chapter argues that, in Finance Capital, Hilferding contrasted the development of the financial sector in ‘free trade England’ with that of the ‘protectionist countries’, particularly Germany and the United States. In the former, short-term, market based, money-dealing capital focused on trading fictitious capital in a parasitical relation with industrial capital. In the latter, the ‘model states’ of finance capital, the relation between the banks and industry was so structured that, while the banks dominated, they used their dominance to engineer the productive expansion of industrial capital. Furthermore, this chapter argues that both Marx and Hilferding expected the English model to be superseded by the more productive model of finance capital, an expectation that was not fulfilled. The United States’ desire, only partially fulfilled after World War II, to emulate British financial dominance gave the British pattern a longer lease on life. Only now, its unravelling is being witnessed.

It was not free trade England, but the protectionist countries, Germany and the United States, which became the model states of capitalist development, if one takes as a yardstick the degree of centralization and concentration of capital (that is, the degree of development of cartels and trusts) and of the domination of industry by the banks – in short, the transformation of all capital into finance capital.

Hilferding, Finance Capital, p. 304