Rubin

[Chris Burford]

>Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 20:41:36 +0100
>To: CRG
>From: Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org>
>Subject: Rubin
>
>I have started to read Rubin on Marx's Theory of Value, as I indicated. I
cannot decide how much to get into him. I hope this does not set the cat
among the pigeons because there will obviously be a whole range of views,
but the preface says he was arrested as early as 1930. It makes no mention
of Trotskyism. He was tried on the basis of confessions (which in the UK is
a good way to risk miscarriages of justice). A Soviet philosopher
Rosenthal, is quoted as referring to the "followers of Rubin and the
Menshevising idealists who .. treated Marx's revolutionary method in the
spirit of Hegelianism". 
>
>Rubin claims that for Marx as well as Hegel, "Form necessarily grows out
of the content itself." Thus "the form of value necessarily grows out of
the substance of value. Therefore, we must take abstract labor in all the
variety of its social properties characteristic for a commodity economy, as
the substance of value." 
>
>What should I know about how to read Rubin?
>
>Chris Burford

I am forwarding, hopefully without wordwrap problems,  this query I sent to
the Capital Reading Group, moderated out of Utah, (although not by Hans
Ehrbar on this occasion).

What should I know about Rubin. I.I. Rubin, that is.

Thanks,

Chris Burford

London.