Rudolf Hilferding died in the Gestapo dungeon of La Santé in Paris in the second week of February 1941, two days after he was handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy Government. He spent the last months of his life in Arles, working on what he called a ‘critique of Marxism’ whose first and only draft survives as “Das historische Problem” (1940). The following extracts show that among other things Hilferding wanted Marxists to move towards a less passive, more dynamic conception of the state and its role in history.

