Author of Finance Capital, chief theorist of the Weimar SPD and German finance minister
Austrian-born Marxist economist and politician. A Vienna paediatrician, he turned to theory at Kautsky's urging and moved to Berlin in 1906, where he edited Vorwärts. His Finance Capital (1910) strongly influenced Lenin's and Bukharin's theories of imperialism. Opposing the war, he went over to the USPD, returned to the SPD in 1922, and was finance minister in 1923 and 1928–1929. In exile he was handed over to the Gestapo in 1941 and died in a Paris prison.
Activities and affiliations
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1902–1941
Scholarship and theory
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1906–1918
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
Ideology and propaganda -
1918–1922
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD)
Political and party leadership -
1922–1941
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
Political and party leadership -
1923
Germany state institutionsGerman Minister of Finance
Economy, finance and planning -
1924–1933
Germany state institutionsMember of the Reichstag
Legislature and state representation -
1928–1929
Germany state institutionsGerman Minister of Finance
Economy, finance and planning
Career Timeline
- 1901Took a medical doctorate in Vienna.
- 1906.11Taught economics at the SPD party school in Berlin.
- 1910Published Finance Capital.
- 1918Editor-in-chief of the USPD daily Die Freiheit.
- 1923.08–10German finance minister.
- 1928–1929German finance minister.
- 1941.02.09Handed over to the Gestapo by Vichy police.
Finance Capital and the Weimar SPD
Studying medicine at the University of Vienna, Hilferding also studied political economy with Karl Renner, Otto Bauer and Max Adler, and with them became a central figure of Austro-Marxism. In 1902 he began writing on economics for Die Neue Zeit at Kautsky's request, and made his name the same year with a review rebutting Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx. In 1906, at Bebel's call, he taught at the SPD party school in Berlin, but a law against employing foreign teachers forced him out after one term and Rosa Luxemburg took his place. He then worked as an editor of the SPD paper Vorwärts.
Finance Capital, published in 1910, argued that finance capital, the fusion of bank and industrial capital, had come to dominate the economy, and it strongly influenced the theories of imperialism of Lenin and Bukharin. The book made him a leading figure of the Marxist centre of the SPD. In 1914 he belonged from the start to the minority opposing the party's support for the war, and by the time the opposition editors were dismissed in 1915 he had already been drafted into the Austrian army as a medic. In an article of October 1915 he first formulated the concept of "organised capitalism".
Joining the USPD in 1918 and running its daily Die Freiheit, he put forward a plan for socialising industry in the Socialisation Commission, which the government largely ignored. He opposed the Bolsheviks and criticised the October Revolution, and in 1922 he fought the USPD's merger with the Communist Party and led its reunification with the SPD instead. As the SPD's most prominent spokesman he was finance minister at the height of the 1923 inflation and again in 1928–1929. In 1925 he drafted the Heidelberg Programme with Kautsky.