Rudolf Hilferding

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Rudolf Hilferding (10 August 1877, Vienna —February 11, 1941, Paris) was an Austrian Marxist economist and a popularizer of the "economic" reading of Karl Marx or Communism.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Finance Capital 3 Notes 4 References

[edit] Biography

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 Karl Kautsky in the German Socialization Committee in 1918. He was a member of the Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany 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 (soon after the establishment of the Nazi regime), 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. Fry, among others, believed that Hilferding was murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Adolf Hitler or another senior Nazi Party official.

[edit] Finance Capital

Hilferding's Finance Capital (Das Finanzkapital, Vienna: 1910) was "the seminal Marxist analysis of the transformation of competitive and pluralistic 'liberal capitalism' into monopolistic 'finance capital'",^[1] and anticipated Lenin's and Bukharin's "largely derivative" writings on the subject.^[2] Writing in the context of the highly cartelized economy of late Austria-Hungary,^[3] Hilferding contrasted monopolistic finance capitalism to the earlier, "competitive" and "buccaneering" capitalism of the earlier liberal era. The unification of industrial, mercantile and banking interests had defused the earlier liberal capitalist demands for the reduction of the economic role of a mercantilist state; instead, finance capital sought a "centralized and privilege-dispensing state".^[4]

Whereas, until the 1860s, the demands of capital and of the bourgeoisie had been, in Hilferding's view, constitutional demands that had "affected all citizens alike," finance capital increasingly sought state intervention on behalf of the wealth-owning classes: capitlists, rather than the nobility, now dominated the state.^[5]

In this, Hilferding saw an opportunity for a path to socialism that was distinct from the one foreseen by Marx: "Once finance capital has brought the most important branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ — the state conquered by the working class — to seize financial capital in order to gain immediate control of those branches of production."^[6] This would obviate the need to expropriate "peasant farms and small businesses" because they would be indirectly socialized, through the socialization of institutions upon which finance capital had already made them dependent. Thus, because a narrow class dominated the economy, socialist revolution could gain wider support by directly expropriating only from that narrow class. In particular, according to Hilferding, societies that had not reached the level of economic maturity anticipated by Marx as making them "ripe" for socialism could be opened to socialist possibilities.^[7] Furthermore, "the policy of finance capital is bound to lead towards war, and hence to the unleashing of revolutionary storms."^[8]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding