CHAPTER III.
Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy
"An increasing proportion of industrial capital," says Hilferding, "does not belong to the industrialists who employ it. They obtain the use of it only through the goodwill of the bank, which as against them represents the owner of the capital. On the other hand, the bank is forced to place a more and more important part of its funds in business. Thus it is continually becoming more of an industrial capitalist: and this banker's capital, this money capital, turned into industrial capital, is what I call 'finance-capital'. . . . Financial capital is that capital which the banks dispose of and which industrialists employ."41
This definition is incomplete in so far as it is silent about one of the most important facts: the increase of the concentration of production and of capital to such an extent that it leads to monopoly conditions. But Hilferding's whole exposition, and particularly in the two chapters which precede the one from whch our definition is taken, stresses the part played by capitalist monopolies.
The concentration of industry: the monopoly arising therefrom: the fusion of banking and industry: these are the steps in the rise of finance-capital and the notion contained in the term.
We now have to describe how the domination of capitalist monopolies inevitably becomes, in conditions of commodity production and private property, the domination of a financial oligarchy. It should be noticed that the representatives of
