First published in 1910, Rudolf Hilferding's Das Finanzkapital (Finance Capital) was almost immediately hailed as a fourth volume of Marx's Capital. In fact, Finance Capital (translated into English in 1981) is less a continuation or an extension of the three volumes of Capital, than an updating and restatement of material covered by Marx, with only a very few exceptions to this general rule (e.g. Hilferding's development of the concept of promoter's profit). In addition to this, Hilferding's restatement of Marx's work is badly flawed in certain major respects; in particular, Hilferding's notoriously poor theory of money (which is admittedly derived from Marx's own confusion on this point) and, more seriously, his failure to apply the all important distinction that Marx makes between the concentration and centralization of capital.

However, Finance Capital is of interest to us here for two main reasons. Firstly, because the publication of Hilferding's book had a significant influence on the development of the neo-Marxist theory of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century (and especially on Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, first published in 1916); but secondly, because it introduced the highly influential but completely mistaken view that ‘finance capital’ was a stage in the development of the capitalist mode of production rather than something that might be better understood as a stage in the development of a highly developed mercantile system. The reader who is interested in Lenin's concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalist development (and Hilferding was content to merely describe this as the latest phase) will have to study this for themselves. For now, however, if we restrict our attention in this chapter to what Hilferding has to say on the subject of money capital, this will provide us with a useful way of examining what Marx has to say on the subject of ‘finance capital’ and will allow us to consider in what way, if at all, Hilferding's theory of the role of money capital represents an advance over what Marx had to say on this subject.