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.

[7] He was the main defender of Marxism from critiques by Austrian School economist and fellow Vienna resident Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.

[10] 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 Freie Vereinigung Sozialistischer Studenten, whose chairman was Max Adler.

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).

He and his fellow socialist students and friends[12] Karl Renner, Otto Bauer and Max Adler also studied political economy, taught by the Marxist Carl Grünberg, and attended the lectures of the philosopher Ernst Mach, who both influenced Hilferding significantly.

He spent much of his leisure time studying political economy, where his real interest lay,[4] but he would not give up his profession until his first publications gave him success.

In 1902 he contributed to the Social-Democratic newspaper Die Neue Zeit on economic subjects[1] as requested by Karl Kautsky,[9] at that time the most important Marxist theoretician worldwide and who developed a long-lasting personal and political friendship with Hilferding.

She also had a Jewish background, had made her exams at the University of Vienna, and was a regular contributor to Die Neue Zeit.

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.

[2] Having arrived in Berlin in November 1906, he taught there for one term, but a law forbade the employment of teachers without German citizenship.

[27] Hilferding's theoretical abilities and his personal relationships to leading socialists allowed him to make his career in the party.

[28] Since 1912 he represented Vorwärts at the meetings of the party commission, which allowed him to decisively take part in the decision-making of the socialist politics in the years before World War I.

[30] In October 1915, the SPD leadership fired all these opposing editors, but Hilferding had already been drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army as a medic long before.

[35] In 1925, Kurt Tucholsky in Die Weltbühne argued that Hilferding had made the newspaper harmless and acted like a representative of the Imperial Association for Combating Social Democracy.

[36] 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,[34] delegated Hilferding to the Sozialisierungskommission (Socialization Committee).

In fact, the SPD leadership opposed socialization at this point since the armistice, demobilisation of the army and feeding the German people seemed more pressing issues at the time.

Hilferding gave a speech before the Reichsrätekongress (worker's councils' congress) and presented a plan to socialize industry.

[2] He had to relinquish this position because of pressure from the President of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht,[42] causing his fall in December 1929 by imposing to the government his conditions for the obtainment of a loan.

During the Depression, he defended the deflationary austerity regime of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and opposed the proto-Keynesian WTB plan supported by the unions.

After Hitler's coming to power, Hilferding as a prominent socialist and Jew had to flee into exile in 1933,[2] together with his close associate Rudolf Breitscheid and other important party leaders, first to Denmark, then Saarbrücken, Paris, and finally Zurich, Switzerland.

[43] 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.

[5] Fry, among others, believed that Hilferding was murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Adolf Hitler or another senior Nazi Party official.

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.