Rubin’s Legacy

A reassessment of Isaak Illich Rubin’s legacy for Marxian scholarship, including contributions by Marx scholars from six different countries.

Rubin was the most important economist in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and is still influential today in Marxian scholarship around the world. The main controversy continues to be the relative significance of production and circulation in the determination of the value of commodities. A majority of authors in this book conclude that Rubin’s predominant view in the later editions of his book was that value is determined in production and realized in circulation, which is contrary to the popular value-form interpretation of Rubin’s book. This book is sure to be essential reading for Marx-Rubin scholars going forward.

Fred Moseley is Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy and editor of Marx’s Logical Method: A Reappraisal, New Investigations of Marx’s Method, Heterodox Economic Theories: True or False?, and Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Reappraisals. He has also published numerous articles on Marxian economics in scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and theReview of Radical Political Economics.

ISBN: 9798903931859

Publication date: May 7, 2027

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1
Fred Moseley

1 Limitations to Isaak Illich Rubin’s Advances from ‘Traditional
Marxism’ 46
Patrick Murray

2 Revisiting Rubin’s Thought on Production, Circulation and Value: New
Evidence from His Previously Unpublished Writings 86
Guido Starosta

3 Was I.I. Rubin a ‘Rubinist’? 129
Stavros Mavroudeas

4 Rubin on Abstract Labour and Value 155
Peter Green

5 The Importance of Equilibrium in Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of
Value and Money 188
Fred Moseley

6 Why Is Labour the Substance of Value 220
Martha Campbell

7 Rubin’s Interpretation of Marx’s Theory of Market Value 266
Ryuji Sasaki

8 Rubin and the Complex Labour Debate 295
Kei Ehara

9 How Rubin’s Conception of Abstract Labour Disseminated to
Japan 317
Susumu Takenaga

10 Isaak Rubin in Germany: On the Reception of Rubin’s Ideas in East and
West Germany (1949–89) 355
Paula Rauhala

Index 389