Isaak Illich Rubin

Isaak and Polonia Rubin, 1910

Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was a Soviet lawyer, economist and scholar of Marx's work. His most important published work was Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (first edition, 1923).

His scholarly works and textbooks and his popular lectures, e.g., at the Institute of Red Professors, were an important influence on the Soviet interpretation of Karl Marx throughout the twenties; but he was not himself a Bolshevik and was frequently jailed, then banished to Soviet Central Asia, then executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.

Though Rubin published many works in the 1920s, and his reading of Marx had produced an extensive Russian literature, by the late 1930s his work and memory had been completely expunged within the Soviet Union. Rubin was also unknown in the West until the appearance of Roman Rosdolsky's major 1968 study of Marx's Grundrisse, "The Making of Marx's Capital"; Rosdolsky was a witness to the period and in the book made numerous references to the "Rubin school" of the twenties. Soon a rare surviving copy of Rubin's principal work, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, was found and an English translation appeared. Since that time much more material has emerged.

As a result, from the 1970s onward Rubin once again became a major point of reference in scholarly disputes about Marx's theory of value.

He was also rehabilitated by the Soviet Union; as the Russian researchers Lyudmila Vasina and Y. G. Rokityansky state "In the years 1989–91 I. I. Rubin was unconditionally rehabilitated with respect to all the trials of the 1920s and 1930s."(p. 836)

Early life

He was born in Dinaburg, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire, into a wealthy Lithuanian Jewish family, Rubin became a revolutionary prior to the Revolution of 1905, when he was 19 years old. He joined the Jewish workers' Bund and later also the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

During the period of the Russian Revolution, Rubin belonged to the left-wing faction Menshevik-Internationalists. He was, however, a member of the sub-faction that in 1920 opposed joining the Bolshevik dominated Russian Communist Party (b). In the same period, the Bund also split, mostly dissolving into the new Communist Party; but the other faction continued and founded the short-lived Social Democratic Union, of which Rubin served as secretary.

From 1921 Rubin was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka. Because of his scholarly reputation, Rubin enjoyed preferential treatment and was allowed to continue writing his works. In addition, petitions from numerous influential Bolshevik intellectuals such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and David Ryazanov also repeatedly called for his release. He was once again arrested in 1923 and imprisoned until December 1924, eventually being exiled to Crimea until 1926 before being recalled to work at the Marx-Engels Institute .

Scholarly career

Rubin had withdrawn from politics before 1924 and devoted himself to lecturing and the scientific study of Marx's critique of political economy. In 1926 he joined the prestigious Marx-Engels Institute — which increasingly possessed much of the archive of Marx's and Engels' works — as a research assistant. The Marx-Engels Institute was headed by David Riazanov, who had frequently protected Rubin as an irreplaceble scholar. His fate was by degrees tied to that of Riazanov.

Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. Rubin also published books on the history of political economy and contemporary economics, as well as editing an anthology of classical political economy. However, by 1928, criticism of his positions intensified. He was accused of distorting Marx's economic theory, taking an idealistic and metaphysical approach to economic categories, and separating form from content. He became the target of a campaign that culminated in an indictment published in Pravda in November 1930 accusing Rubin of being a member of a "Menshevik-kulak" conspiracy.

Persecution and death

Rubin was arrested on 23 December 1930, and accused of being a member of the All-Union Bureau of Mensheviks, a fictitious secret organisation. Rubin, a trained lawyer and an economist, outwitted his first interrogators and the first charge was dropped; he was then transferred to a cell in Suzdal, where he was placed in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation.

On 28 January 1931, Rubin was brought to another cell, where he was shown another prisoner and told that if he did not confess, the prisoner would be shot. Rubin refused and the prisoner was executed before him. The process was repeated the next night. After the second shooting, Rubin negotiated a "confession" with his interrogators, who wanted him implicate his mentor David Riazanov as a member of a secret Menshevik conspiracy. At the 1931 Menshevik Trial, Rubin refused to confirm the existence of a Menshevik organisation. Although he agreed to make false statements regarding correspondence with secret Mensheviks said to be in possession of Riazonov, he claimed that he was their source and had given them to Riazonov's care on the basis of "great personal trust" rather than organisational discipline. As a result of his failure to fully cooperate with his prosecutors, Rubin was sentenced to five years in prison. Although he attempted to shield Riazanov from the worst charges, Rubin emerged from the experience "morally broken, destroyed, degraded to a state of complete hopelessness", according to the account in Medvedev

Rubin served most of his prison term in solitary confinement, during which he continued his research as best as he could. When he fell ill with a suspected cancer, he was removed to a hospital and encouraged to make further confessions in return for favourable treatment, but declined the offer. He was released on a commuted sentence in 1934 and allowed to work in Aktyubinsk, Kazakh SSR as an economic planner.

Rubin was arrested once more during the Great Purge on 19 November 1937. After this arrest he was never seen alive again. He was executed under the accusation of Trotskyist conspiracy on 25 November 1937. He was rehabilitated during the period of Perestroika.

Rubin's value theory

Main article: Exchange theory of value

Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on.

Influence and legacy

Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Miloš Samardžija. The work had important points of contact with the German "New Marx Reading" already begun by Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt and thereafter became a major point of reference for the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified also by Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, the "Konstanz–Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, Volkbert Roth) and others. In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies.

According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital".

Family

His brother Aron Rubin (1888–1961), was a Soviet philosopher and literary critic. His nephew Vitaly Rubin was a Soviet orientalist and the topic of a global campaign to permit his emigration to Israel in 1974.

Selected publications

Chief work

• Rubin, Isaak Illich: Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman from the third edition, Moscow, Leningrad 1928. Fourth Printing. Montreal, New York 1990.
• Rubin, Isaak Illich : Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Conceived as a Variorum Edition (Historical Materialism Band 339) Brill, Leiden 2025, ISBN 978-90-04-72133-3.

Further publications

Books

• Rubin, Isaac Ilych: A History of Economic Thought Inklinks 1979. Translated and edited by Donald Filtzer from 2nd Revised Russian ed 1929.
• Rubin, Isaac Ilych: Essays on Marx's Theory of Money (1926–8) translated in Day and Gaido, 619-727.

Articles

• "Marx’s Teaching on Production and Consumption" (1930), translated Day and Gaido, 448-535
• "Fundamental Features of Marx’s Theory of Value and How it Differs from Ricardo’s Theory" (1924), translated Day and Gaido, 536-582
• "Towards a History of the Text of the First Chapter of Marx’s Capital" (1929), translated Day and Gaido, 583-618
• "The Dialectical Development of Categories in Marx’s Economic System" (1929) translated Day and Gaido, 728-818
• "Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s System" (1927), translated by Kathleen Gilbert.
• "Ricardo's Doctrine of Capital" (1936-7), note discovered by Vasina and Rokityanskii, English 1992

Further reading

• Boldyrev, Ivan and Martin Kragh. "Isaak Rubin: Historian of Economic Thought During the Stalinization of Social Sciences in Soviet Russia," Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 2015. Vol. 37, Iss. 3. P. 363–386.
• Joe, Hyeon-soo: Politische Ökonomie als Gesellschaftstheorie. Studien zur Marx-Rezeption von Isaak Iljitsch Rubin und Kozo Uno [German], Diss. Philipps-Universität Marburg 1995.
• Paula, João Antonio; Cerqueira, Hugo. Isaac I. Rubin e sua história do pensamento econômico. Belo Horizonte: Cedeplar-UFMG, 2013. (in Portuguese).
• Vasina, Ljudmila L.: I. I. Rubin – Marxforscher und Politökonom. [German], in: Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung. Neue Folge 1994, pp. 144–149.
• Vasina, Lyudmila L.; Rokityansky, Yakov G. "Pages from the Life and Creative Work of Economist I.I. Rubin" (1992) translated in Day and Gaido, 819-36. This essay incorporates the writers' Soviet and post-Soviet archival research into Rubin's biography. According to the prefatory pages of Day and Gaido, they were instrumental in Rubin's rehabilitation.
• Day, Richard B., Gaido, Daniel F., editors. Responses to Marx’s Capital: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin, Volume 144 of Historical Materialism Book Series. Pages 429-818 of this work translates six works of Rubin, most unknown before his rehabilitation, including the manuscript Essays on Marx's Theory of Money that was preserved from the 30s to 90s by members of his family.

External links

• Writings of I. I. Rubin at marxists.org
• Selected bibliography with links and materials.