Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1930?)

Major work:

Key concepts:

Related figures:

Essays on Marx's theory of value (1928)

Value, commodity form

Marx

Marx�s theory of commodity fetishism has been understood to argue that relations between things veil relations between persons. However, Marx says more than that - he thinks that under capitalism relations between persons must be expressed as things. Thus there is an objectification going on that needs to be analyzed in its forms i.e. the way things appear as entities rather than relations. Marx supports this latter in the Trinity Formula, where he criticises vulgar economy for taking capital as an entity. Rubin looks as the presuppositions within forms (Rubin 40)

Value presupposes use-values. Abstract labour presupposes concrete labour. Though the essence of the social process might lie in the abstract labour - i.e. it is not the labour of the tailor - there is a presupposition of its determinate forms

History of Economic Thought;Contemporary Economics in the West; Classics of Political Economy from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century; Essays on Marx�s Theory of Value