[lbo-talk] Lenin and Hilferding

Patrick Bond pbond at mail.ngo.za
Tue Feb 24 11:31:53 PST 2009


Doug Henwood wrote:
> Why do that? Didn't Lenin and Hilferding answer these questions almost
> 100 years ago?
>

They did... and they got the basic argument wrong, because - like others we might want to mention under our breath - they vastly overestimated the power and stability of 'finance capital'. Hilferding once said: "If you take control of the six Berlin banks you will control all of German industry." He also said that capitalism would generate concentration/centralisation of financial capital so that soon there'd be only one giant bank... which a leftist government could just take over peacefully and voila, socialism.

The antidote to such nonsense was a 1929 book by Heinrich Grossmann. Right, James?


>



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