Daily Inspiration Quote by Rudolf Hiferding

Hilferding is drawing a line in the sand against the comforting idea that markets can be understood by staring at price tags. Prices, for him, are the surface froth of capitalism: noisy, volatile, and constantly distorted by the bruising fact of competition. If you begin with price, you begin with the most misleading evidence. Start with value, and you get a theory sturdy enough to explain why prices swing, diverge, and still remain tethered to deeper social forces.

The intent is polemical as much as analytical. Hilferding is writing in the wake of Marx, but also against rival economists who treat price as the primary datum and competition as a tidy equilibration machine. His phrasing - "necessary theoretical starting point" - signals a methodological demand: you must adopt a concept of value (rooted in social relations of production and labor) before you can make sense of the "peculiar phenomenon" that capitalism advertises as natural and self-evident.

The subtext is that capitalism is not a neutral exchange system; it is a system of power that converts human activity into calculable abstractions, then presents the outcome as objective. Competition is not a moral referee; it is the mechanism that forces firms to behave as if value were law, even as they fight over prices to survive.

Context matters: Hilferding’s era saw the rise of cartels, finance capital, and increasingly organized industry. In that world, "competition" doesn’t simply reveal value; it scrambles it through strategic pricing, concentration, and credit. His claim is a bid to keep political economy political: if you can trace prices back to value, you can trace them back to the social order that produces both.