Hilferding's Finance Capital in the Development of Marxist Thought (Rudolf Hilferding) (Critical Essay‪)‬

When Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital was first published, it was regarded as a major event in the development of Marxian political economy. Two of the most important contemporary social democratic theorists greeted its publication with great enthusiasm. For Otto Bauer the book read like a fourth volume of Marx's Capital, while Karl Kautsky concluded that Hilferding had vindicated Marx's approach to economics. Kautsky described Finance Capital as 'a completion of Capital', which both supplemented and revised volumes II and III (Bauer 1909-1910; Kautsky 1910-1911). Otto Bauer (1881-1938) was one of the leading theoreticians of the Austrian socialist party, and himself the author of an acclaimed text on the Marxian interpretation of nationalism (Bottomore and Goode 1978). Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), sometimes described as 'the Pope of Marxism', had been the most influential theorist in the German socialist movement since the death of Friedrich Engels in 1883 (Geary 1987). Their praise was not given lightly. The original German text of Finance Capital was reissued in 1920 by the Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, in 1955 by Dietz in East Berlin, and in 1968 by Europaische Verlagsanstalt of Frankfurt. Italian, Spanish and French translations appeared between 1961 and 1970. (1) The English version was delayed until 1981, when the eminent British sociologist Tom Bottomore drew upon unpublished translations by Sam Gordon and Morris Watnick in preparing the English version. Bottomore does not explain why neither Gordon nor Watnick had themselves been able to publish an English translation. It is a sad reflection on the current level of interest in Marxian political economy that the English translation is now out of print.