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Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was aSoviet lawyer,economist and scholar of Marx's work. His most important published work wasEssays on Marx's Theory of Value (first edition, 1923).
His scholarly works and textbooks and his popular lectures, e.g., at theInstitute of Red Professors, were an important influence on the Soviet interpretation ofKarl Marx throughout the twenties; but he was not himself aBolshevik and was frequently jailed, then banished to Soviet Central Asia, then executed in 1937 during theGreat Purge.[1]
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.[1] Rubin was also unknown in the West until the appearance ofRoman Rosdolsky's major 1968 study of Marx'sGrundrisse, "The Making of Marx's Capital";[2] 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.[3] Since that time much more material has emerged.[4]
As a result, from the 1970s onward Rubin once again became a major point of reference in scholarly disputes aboutMarx's theory of value.
He was also rehabilitated by the Soviet Union;[5] 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)[1]
He was born inDinaburg,Vitebsk Governorate,Russian Empire, into a wealthyLithuanian Jewish family, Rubin became a revolutionary prior to theRevolution of 1905, when he was 19 years old. He joined the Jewish workers'Bund and later also theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party.
During the period of theRussian Revolution, Rubin belonged to the left-wing factionMenshevik-Internationalists. He was, however, a member of the sub-faction that in 1920 opposed joining theBolshevik dominatedRussian 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 theCheka. 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 asAnatoly Lunacharsky,Mikhail Pokrovsky andDavid 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 theMarx-Engels Institute .[5][1]
Rubin had withdrawn from politics before 1924 and devoted himself to lecturing and the scientific study ofMarx's critique of political economy. In 1926 he joined the prestigiousMarx-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 byDavid Riazanov, who had frequently protected Rubin as an irreplaceble scholar. His fate was by degrees tied to that of Riazanov.[6]
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. Rubin also published books on thehistory of political economy and contemporary economics, as well as editing an anthology ofclassical political economy.[7] However, by 1928, criticism of his positions intensified. He was accused of distorting Marx's economic theory, taking anidealistic andmetaphysical approach to economic categories, and separating form from content. He became the target of a campaign that culminated in an indictment published inPravda in November 1930 accusing Rubin of being a member of a "Menshevik-kulak" conspiracy.[5]
Rubin was arrested on 23 December 1930, and accused of being a member of the All-Union Bureau ofMensheviks, 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 inSuzdal, where he was placed in solitary confinement and subjected tosleep deprivation.[6]
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 mentorDavid Riazanov as a member of a secret Menshevik conspiracy.[6] At the1931 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[6]
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 inAktyubinsk,Kazakh SSR as an economic planner.
Rubin was arrested once more during theGreat Purge on 19 November 1937. After this arrest he was never seen in public again.[6] He was executed under the accusation ofTrotskyist conspiracy on 25 November 1937. He was rehabilitated during the period ofPerestroika.[5]
Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory ofcommodity fetishism in thelabor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest inalienation 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 undercapitalism.[8] Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue thatsimple 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 ofvalue, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy:money,capital, the existence of aproletariat, and so on.
Rubin's work was never reissued in theSoviet Union after 1928, but in 1972Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English byFredy Perlman andMiloš Samardžija. The work had important points of contact with the German"New Marx Reading" already begun byHans-Georg Backhaus andHelmut 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".[9] Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeablecommodity (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 toCapital".[9]
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.
