Rudolf Hilferding

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Rudolf Hilferding (1877 - 1941) was an Austrian Marxist economist and a popularizer of the "economic" reading of Karl Marx or Communism

A leading Marxist theorist of his day, identified with the "Austro-Marxian" group. He was the main defender to the challenge to Marx by Austrian School economist and fellow Vienna resident, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Hilferding also participated in the Crises Debate - disputing Marx's theory of the instability and eventual breakdown of capitalism on the basis that the concentration of capital is actually stabilizing. His most famous work was Finance Capital.

Hilferding served with Kautsky in the German Socialization Committee in 1918. He was a member of parliament for the Social Democratic Party in Germany and also served as the German Minister of Finance in 1923 and 1928-1929. Hilferding, who was Jewish, fled into exile in 1933, living first in Switzerland and then in France. There, efforts were undertaken by the Refugee Committee, under Varian Fry, to get him out of Vichy France, along with Rudolf Breitscheid. These efforts were not successful, and in 1941, approximately a year into the German occupation of France, he was arrested by the Vichy authorities and handed over to the Gestapo. He purportedly committed suicide in the Gestapo dungeon of La Santé on Feb. 11, 1941. Varian Fry, among others, believed that Hilferding was murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Hitler or another senior Nazi Party official.

Biographies

William Smaldone's Rudolf Hilferding

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