Hilferding and Kalecki

Toporowski identifies the origin of Kalecki’s theory of the business cycle in Hilferding’s account of monopoly capital, in which changes in the business cycle are associated with shifts in the distribution of profits between monopoly capitalist firms, cartels, and non-cartelised businesses. Hilferding himself was sceptical about the possibilities of capitalist stabilisation. But his hints at the potential to stabilise capitalism through the proliferation of cartels, and their combination into a ‘general cartel’, aroused discussion among Austro-Marxists. Kalecki unconsciously followed one of them, Emil Lederer, to argue that cartelisation tended to make business cycles more extreme rather than less so. Kalecki also was able to make the leap from Marx’s schemes of reproduction, which provided the framework for Hilferding and Lederer’s analysis of the modern system of national income accounts.