Questions about Rudolf Hilferding
Short answers, pulled from the story.
Who was Rudolf Hilferding and why is he significant?
Rudolf Hilferding (the 10th of August 1877 - the 11th of February 1941) was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, socialist theoretician, and twice Finance Minister of Germany during the Weimar Republic. He is regarded as almost universally the foremost Marxist theoretician the Social Democratic Party of Germany produced in the twentieth century, and his 1910 work Das Finanzkapital substantially influenced Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin's writings on imperialism.
What is Das Finanzkapital and what did Rudolf Hilferding argue in it?
Das Finanzkapital, published in Vienna in 1910, is Hilferding's most famous work and a landmark in Marxist economic theory. In it, he argued that competitive liberal capitalism had given way to monopolistic finance capital, in which industrial, mercantile, and banking interests merged under the control of a narrow class; he further argued that a working class seizing state power could gain control of the entire economy by expropriating only that narrow class, since smaller enterprises were already dependent on the institutions finance capital controlled.
When did Rudolf Hilferding serve as Finance Minister of Germany?
Hilferding served as Finance Minister of Germany twice: from August to October 1923, at the peak of the Weimar inflation, and again between 1928 and 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. He was forced out of his second term under pressure from Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank.
How did Rudolf Hilferding die?
Hilferding died on the 11th of February 1941 in La Santé prison in Paris after being tortured by the Gestapo. He had been handed over by the Vichy French police to the Gestapo on the 9th of February 1941, despite holding an emergency visa to enter the United States. Varian Fry and others believed he was murdered on the orders of Adolf Hitler or another senior Nazi official.
What was Rudolf Hilferding's theory of organized capitalism?
Hilferding was the first theorist to put forward the concept of organized capitalism, which he began formally articulating in an October 1915 article in Die Neue Zeit. The theory held that the concentration of capital under finance capitalism was actually stabilizing rather than leading to the breakdown Marx had anticipated, a position he developed in the context of disputing Marx's theory of capitalism's instability.
What happened to Rudolf Hilferding during his exile from Nazi Germany?
After fleeing Germany in 1933, Hilferding passed through Denmark, Saarbrücken, Paris, and Zurich, living in Switzerland until 1938 and in Paris from 1939. He remained active in the SPD in exile, editing Die Zeitschrift für Sozialismus and representing the party at the Socialist International until 1939. When Germany invaded France he fled to Marseille, where he was arrested by Vichy police and turned over to the Gestapo in February 1941.