Isaak Illich Rubin

Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаа́к Ильи́ч Ру́бин; 12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia – 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Jewish economist and is considered to be the most important theorist of his time on the field of Karl Marx's theory of value. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated.

Rubin became a revolutionary during the Revolution of 1905, when he was 19 years old. He first joined the Jewish Bund and later the Mensheviks. He withdrew from politics in 1924, devoting himself to the academic study of Marxist economics, and in 1926 he joined the prestigious Marx-Engels Institute as a research assistant. The Marx-Engels Institute was headed by David Riazanov, against whom Joseph Stalin nursed a grudge.

Essay's on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. Prior to his arrest, Rubin also published books on the history of economics and contemporary economics, as well as editing an anthology of classical political economy.

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.

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