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Rudolf hilferding biography

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Rudolf Hilferding

Austro-German economist, pediatrician, journalist, Marxist theoretician and politician

Rudolf Hilferding (10 August 1877 – 11 February 1941) was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, socialist theorist,[1] politician and the chief theoretician[2] for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic,[3] being almost universally recognized as the SPD's foremost theoretician of the twentieth century.[4] He was also a physician.[4]

He was born in Vienna, where he received a doctorate having studied medicine. After becoming a leading journalist for the SPD,[3] he participated in the November Revolution in Germany and was Finance Minister of Germany in 1923 and from 1928 to 1929. In 1933 he fled into exile, living in Zurich and then Paris, where he died in custody of the Gestapo in 1941.[1][5]

Hilferding was a proponent of the "economic" reading of Karl Marx, identifying with the "Austro-Marxian" group.[6] He was the first to put forward the theory of

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It is now the third time that Judith Dellheim and Frieder Otto Wolf to present a new volume in the Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy series on the website of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. This is not simply because of the unifying theme of “Luxemburg” in the title, but also because of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s sponsorship of the books themselves.

Edited by Jan Toporowski and Frieder Otto Wolf, the series is based on three elementary and foundational ideas:

  • The term “political economy” is used in an inflationary manner in contemporary public debates, whether academic or political. In light of this reality, we refer back to Karl Marx’s concern to radically criticize the relations of domination both theoretically and practically—as he particularly elaborated with regard to the relations of capital, the capitalist mode of production and its effects on people and their natural living conditions, and especially by systematically elaborating a critique of bourgeois political economy.
  • The capitalist mode of production with its social and ecological consequ
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    Rudolf Hilferding and the Austrian School of Anti-Capitalism

    Austria has long been synonymous with free-market economics. Economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, whose ideas were forged in Central Europe during the early twentieth century, have become talismanic figures for latter-day proponents of untrammelled capitalism. The term “Austrian School” now encompasses a whole set of free-market ideologues, many of whom have no connection to the country itself.

    Yet Austria was also the home of an alternative tradition of economic thought whose exponents locked horns with celebrated “Austrians” like von Mises and Hayek. One of its luminaries was the Marxist thinker Rudolf Hilferding, who combined his intellectual work with a leadership role in the Social Democratic movements of Austria and Germany. Hilferding also served as Germany’s Finance Minister during the Weimar Republic, but ultimately fell victim to Nazism in 1941.

    His thought contains many valuable insights into the way the modern capitalist system works. Men like Hilferding, who formed an alternative “Austria

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