Rudolf Hilferding

Life in Vienna On 10 August 1877, Rudolf Hilferding was born in Vienna into a prosperous Jewish family, consisting of his parents, Emil Hilferding, a merchant (or private servant), and Anna Hilferding, and of Rudolf's younger sister, Maria. Rudolf attended a public gymnasium from which he graduated as an average student, allowing him access to the university. Directly afterwards, he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study medicine. Even before his school leaving examinations, in 1893 he joined a group of Vienna students who weekly discussed socialist literature and later formed with young university teachers the student-organization , whose chairman was Max Adler. This is where Hilferding first intensely came in contact with socialist theories and first became active in the labour movement. The organization also participated in social-democratic demonstrations, which came in conflict with the police, drawing the attention of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). As a university student, he became acquainted with many talented socialist intellectuals. however not with much enthusiasm. He spent much of his leisure time studying political economy, where his real interest lay, Karl Renner, Adler and Hilferding founded an association to improve the worker's education, which established Vienna's first school for workers in 1903. Hilferding married the doctor Margarete Hönigsberg, whom he had met in the socialist movement and who was eight years his senior. She also had a Jewish background, had made her exams at the University of Vienna, and was a regular contributor to . Margarete gave birth to their 1st child, Karl Emil. Kautsky worried that Hilferding, who now complained about his lack of time, would neglect his theoretical work in favor of his good social situation as a doctor in Vienna. Kautsky used his connections to August Bebel, who was looking for teachers for the SPD's training center in Berlin, to suggest Hilferding for this position. In July 1906, Bebel recommended Hilferding for this job to the party executive, which agreed to give it to him for six months. Life in Berlin and World War I In 1906, he gave up his job as a doctor and, following August Bebel's call, The Council of the People's Deputies, the provisional government of the November Revolution, consisting of members of the SPD and USPD, which had signed the cease-fire, delegated Hilferding to the (Socialization Committee). In 1919, he acquired German citizenship who called for a comprehensive tax reform in Weimar Germany to save the country from insolvency. Schacht together with Wilhelm Groener, Kurt von Schleicher, and Otto Meissner planned for a government that excluded the SPD. Hilferding remained the leading economist of the SPD after leaving office. During the Depression, he defended the deflationary austerity regime of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and opposed the proto-Keynesian WTB plan supported by the unions. Life in exile After Hitler's coming to power, Hilferding as a prominent socialist and Jew had to flee into exile in 1933, They were arrested by the police of the Vichy government in southern France and, despite their emergency visa to enter the United States of America, handed over to the Gestapo on 9 February 1941. Hilferding was brought to Paris and was severely maltreated on the way. in a prison in Paris, His death was not officially announced until the fall of 1941. == Finance Capital ==

Hilferding's Finance Capital (, Vienna: 1910) was "the seminal Marxist analysis of the transformation of competitive and pluralistic 'liberal capitalism' into monopolistic 'finance capital'", and anticipated Lenin's and Bukharin's "largely derivative" writings on the subject. Writing in the context of the highly cartelized economy of late Austria-Hungary, 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". Hilferding saw this as part of the inevitable concentration of capital called for by Marxian economics. 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; capitalists, rather than the nobility, now dominated the state. In this, Hilferding saw an opportunity for a path to socialism that was distinct from the one foreseen by Marx: "The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance (sic) 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 finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production." This would make it unnecessary 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. Furthermore, "the policy of finance capital is bound to lead towards war, and hence to the unleashing of revolutionary storms." == References ==