Layer 1

Rubin’s Legacy. Essays on Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value and Money

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published May 2026

Fred Moseley

Volume Editor: Fred Moseley
I.I. Rubin was the most important economist in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and is still influential today in Marxian scholarship around the world. This book presents assessments of Rubin’s legacy for Marxian scholarship by 10 Marx scholars from six different countries and will be essential reading for Marx-Rubin scholars going forward. 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.

Biographical Note

Fred Moseley is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. His published books are The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (1992) and Money and Totality: Marx’s Logical Method in Capital and the End of the Transformation Problem (2016), and he was the editor of five volumes of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory.

Readership

This book is especially relevant to Marx scholars around the world and graduate students in courses on Marxian economists

Table of Contents

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Evidence from His Previously Unpublished Writings 86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