Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941)

Austrian economist; one of the leaders of the Social-Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the opportunism of the Second International.

Hilferding was born in 1877, in Vienna, Austria. In in 1901, he received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Vienna, and in 1902 he participated in the Social-Democratic Party of Austria. Hilferding co-founded Marx-Studien (Marx Studies) in 1904, and after 1906, he lived in Germany and participated in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. From 1907 to 1915, Hilferding served as editor of the Social Democratic Party of Germany organ Vorwärts (Forward). During the World War I, Hilferding took a centrist position, keeping alignment with social imperialism together with Kautsky. In 1917, he became one of the leaders of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and in 1920 he served as editor-in-chief of its organ Freiheit (Freedom). In 1923 and 1928, he participated in bourgeois government twice and served as Minister of Finance. After the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, he publicly opposed the Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1927, he made a report entitled Die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie in der Republik (The Tasks of Social Democracy in the Republic) at the Kiel Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, publicly preached “organized capitalism” and championed that modern capitalism can evolve into socialism on its own without socialist revolution. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Hilferding fled to France, where he was arrested by German Fascists in 1941 and died in prison that year.

Hilferding’s representative work is Finance Capital, published in 1910. The book attempted to use the Marxist standpoint and viewpoint to make a comprehensive and scientific analysis of the world economic development in the period after Marx, and the work was widely welcomed in the theoretical circles at that time as the fourth volume of Capital, especially by Kautsky, the editor of Theories of Surplus-Value. Finance Capital was a masterpiece by Hilferding, and he once intended to rewrite the volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Capital to depict the new changes in the value formation. In this book, he emphasized and analyzed the phenomena that Marx had predicted but could not analyze in detail, especially the phenomenon of monopoly in the form of trusts and cartels, which had an important influence on Lenin’s writing of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.