German politician, physician, and social scientist, born in Vienna, Austria. Author of texts on Austromarxism and editor of Vorwärts (190716), he was a pacifist member of Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (USPD) and later of Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) of which he was a committee member. He was twice German finance minister in the 1920s. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 he lived in France and died after a suicide attempt following arrest by the Gestapo.
Rudolf Hilferding (1877—February 11, 1941) was an Austrian Marxist economist and a popularizer of the "economic" reading of Karl Marx or Communism.
Biography
A leading Marxist theorist of his day, identified with the "Austro-Marxian" group. 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.
Hilferding served with Karl Kautsky in the German Socialization Committee in 1918.
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.
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.
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