As capitalist production develops, there is therefore an increase . . . in the part of production that can be carried on under all circumstances. Hence the disruption of credit need not be as complete as in crises in the earlier period of capitalism. Furthermore, the development of the credit crisis into a banking crisis on the one side and a monetary crisis on the other is made more difficult . . . 15
The mass psychoses which speculation generated at the beginning of the capitalist era . . . seem gone for ever.16
Hilferding did not carry his argument through to its logical conclusion in Finance Capital, and still wrote that the system could not do away with "the cyclical alternation of prosperity and depression" .17 But by the 1 920s, when he served as a minister in two Weimar Republic governments, he veered towards Bernstein's approach with a theory of "organised capitalism" in which the anarchy of the market and the trend towards crisis disappear.18 One corollary was to deny that there was anything in capitalism inevitably leading to war, since the "organised capitalisms" in different countries would want to cooperate with each other.
A similar conclusion had already been reached in 1914 by Karl Kautsky, leading him too to a position that barely differed in practice from Bernstein's. But where Hilferding pointed to the merger of finance and productive capitalism, Kautsky's argument rested on seeing a fundamental distinction and antagonism of interests between them:
The finance capitalists . . . had a direct interest in transforming each national state into an apparatus of support for their own expansion. Imperialism was therefore directly linked to finance capitalism. But the interests of finance capital were not identical to those of industrial capital, which could expand only by broadening its markets through free trade. It was from the industrial sector that impulses towards international concord arose in the bourgeois camp . . . Imperialism, the expression of one phase of capitalist development and the cause of armed conflicts, was not the only possible form of development of capitalism.19
Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
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