Isaak Illich Rubin's Dialectical Reading of Marx's Economic Works

Readers will recall that in the first document translated for this book, Illarion Kaufman had difficulty understanding how Marx could be ‘more realistic than all of his predecessors', despite the fact that the ‘external form of his presenta­tion' was so suggestive of German idealist philosophy.

Rubin is known among readers of Western European languages for his ex­traordinary exposition of Marx's theory of value,^[70] to which should be added his masterful overview of the history of political economy from the mercant­ilists to John Stuart Mill.^{[71] [72] [73] [74] In this volume we have included six previously untranslated essays by Rubin, including his account of Marx’s theory of money, which survived in manuscript form following his assassination by Stalin’s regime and has only recently been published in the original Russian. To take into account the tragic fate of this remarkable Marxist scholar, our collection closes with an essay on Rubin’s life and work by Lyudmila L. Vasina and Yakov G. Rokityansky.72}

In his essay on ‘Marx’s Teaching on Production and Consumption’/³ Rubin pointed out Marx had often been accused of ignoring the process of consum­ing products and forgetting the existence of use-value. Rubin dismissed this argument and attributed it to the critics’ preoccupation with individual judge­ments of utility, which, according to marginalism, determine a commodity’s value. Marx, in contrast, always regarded exchange-value in objective terms and treated consumption as one moment in the reproduction process as a whole.

In a commodity-producing society, the immediate purpose of production becomes exchange-value rather than use-value. Production and consumption begin to separate at the same time as they remain connected. The primacy of exchange-value over use-value becomes all the more evident in capitalist society. At this point, the two moments of the reproduction process are fur­ther separated at the same time as they remain necessarily connected through market demand. Demand, in turn, assumes a determinate character depend­ing upon the class distribution of incomes. The development of production creates growing needs for both items of consumption and means of produc­tion, yet there is a ‘law inherent in capitalist economy that keeps the workers' consumption at a low level despite the gigantic growth of labour productivity'. Consumption remains determined by production and the social forms within which it occurs, not ‘by the needs and arbitrary will of separate individuals'.

Rubin then recounts the various ways in which use-value figures in the ‘determinations of economic form', such as the constant and variable forms of capital, or the natural form of products that had to be considered in the reproduction schemes of Volume ii of Capital.

The capitalist production process is a unity of the labour process (i.e. the process of producing use-values) and the process of the production and expansion of value. Political economy takes the latter aspect of the production process, i.e. the process of the production and expansion of value, to be the special subject matter of its investigation. But the process of the expansion of value represents the form in which the process of the production of products, or of use-values, occurs. Thus, the latter process is always a part of our investigation, although not as an independent object for analysis by this science but rather as another side of the single process of reproduction, which we study as the ‘social structure of production' (Lenin). It follows that use-value is included within the ambit of our investigation only insofar as this is necessary in order to understand the process of the production and expansion of value.^{[75] [76]}

In his essay ‘Fundamental Features of Marx's Theory of Value and How it Dif­fers from Ricardo's Theory'/⁶ Rubin argues that Ricardo studied the material- technical process of production, and particularly the result of changes in labour

productivity, without reference to the particular ‘social form’ of capitalist pro­duction relations, because he took capitalist relations to be fixed and beyond the scope of inquiry. Marx, on the contrary, emphasised that political economy presupposes capitalist society as its subject matter, and that the resulting eco­nomic categories are exclusively those of the capitalist social formation.

Thus, while Marx was Ricardo’s successor in terms of seeing labour as the content of value, he also advanced far beyond Ricardo in his differentiation between concrete and abstract labour, and in the resulting treatment of value as a specific historical form. As Rubin writes, ‘the dual character of labour reflects the difference between the material-technical process of production and its social form. This difference... is the basis of the whole of Marxist economic theory, including the theory of value’.^{[77] [78]}

Marx showed that all the contradictions of capitalism are implicit in the fundamental contradiction of the commodity. ‘Value’ is a social form, whose content is concrete labour that has been abstracted.

The equalisation of all types of labour through market equalisation of all the products of labour as values - this is what Marx means by the concept of abstract labour. And since the equalisation of labour through the equalisation of things results from the social form of commodity economy, in which there is no direct social organisation and equalisation of labour, it follows that abstract labour is a social and historical concept. Abstract labour does not express a physiological equality of the various types of labour, but rather the social equalisation of various types of labour that occurs in the specific form of market equalisation of the products of labour as values.78

Value, money, capital, and the various other categories of political economy are, on the one hand, relations between people; but they are simultaneously ‘things’ that have acquired a social-functional existence. Exchange-value is not the inherent property of a useful product of human labour, nor is wage-labour the natural form of human productive activity. Nevertheless, the requirement that labour become abstract in order to appear as social labour also entails the consequence that the resulting social forms appear to be real and con­crete. ‘This “reification” consists of the fact that the thing, with respect to which people enter into a certain relation between themselves, fulfils a special social function of linking people together, the function of mediator or “bearer” of the particular production relation between people'.

Rubin's next essay, ‘Towards a History of the Text of the First Chapter of Marx's Capital’,™ provides a detailed analysis of the development of Marx's the­ory of value from his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to Capital. The problem that Rubin poses is why the two works differ so substantially in terms of Marx's exposition of his theory of value. The reason, explains Rubin, is that ‘in the Critique Marx did not yet draw a sharp distinction between value and exchange-value... The Critique still lacks any teaching on the development of the poles of value (i.e. the relative and equivalent forms of value) and on development of the forms of value (i.e. the simple, expanded, general and mon­etary forms of value)'.

In the Critique, Marx did not yet strictly distinguish the content of value from the form; he treated value quantitatively, whereas in Capital he added a qualitative dimension. Rubin demonstrates this point by reference to the distinction between the ‘value relation' (Wertverhaltnis) - relating the quantity of materialised labour in one commodity to that in another, or their identity as values - and the ‘value expression' (Wertausdruck), in which the value of one commodity is expressed in terms of the use-value of another commodity. In the latter case, the first commodity takes the ‘relative form' and the second the ‘equivalent form', a qualitative difference that points to exchange-value itself as a distinct value ‘form'. Both sides of the equation still contain the same quantity of materialised labour, their ‘common denominator', but Rubin emphasises that the change of form in the ‘value expression' sets in motion ‘the dialectical (logical and historical) transformation of one form of value into the other'.

The need for such distinction arose from the fact that Ricardo did not differentiate between value and exchange-value. As Rubin comments, ‘the conversion of commodities into money seemed to him to be a purely formal and external act'. The result, however, was to create an ‘impassable abyss' between value and exchange-value, leading Samuel Bailey, a critic of Ricardo, to argue that the labour theory of value makes no sense. Rubin explained that the structure of Marx’s argument in Capital, as distinct from the Critique, resulted from the need to address two challenges simultaneously. First, Marx had to respond to Bailey’s criticism of Ricardo; second, he had to clear up the confusion left by Ricardo in the first place. The difference between Ricardo and Bailey was that ‘the former ignored the form of value, while the latter thought it possible to manage without the concept of value’.

79

Document 18.

In his concluding paragraph, Rubin provides a concise summary of his argument:

While the classics concentrated their attention on value and regarded the form of value as something external and inconsequential, Bailey fell into the opposite error. He turned his attention mainly to the multiplicity of value expressions and imagined that ‘by pointing to the multiplicity of the relative expressions of the same commodity-value he had obliterated any possibility of a conceptual determination of value’. In order to deflect Bailey’s attacks, which threatened the entire theory of labour value, Marx had to draw a sharp distinction between ‘value’ and ‘value expressions’, from which logically followed the need to provide separate analyses of value and exchange-value. But it was only possible finally to overcome Bailey’s criticism by filling the gap left by Ricardo...As distinct from the classics, [Marx] supplements the doctrine of value with the [separate] doctrine of ‘the form of value, or exchange-value’... The need to arrange the investigation in these two opposing directions is what explains the unique structure of the first chapter of Capital.^{[79] [80]}

Rubin’s ‘Essays on Marx’s Theory of Money’8¹ emphasises that Marx begins by setting aside the subjective intentions of exchange participants. Although the theory of money results from the theory of value, the theory of value in turn cannot be constructed without the theory of money. If Marx had not presupposed money as the medium of developed commodity circulation, he would have had to begin with the exchange of two items in natura - that is, with two non-commodities - in which case it would have made sense to say, together with the marginal utility school, that ‘such exchange may be regulated by the individual requirements of the participants and by their subjective appraisal of the relative usefulness of products'. Only by explicitly beginning with commodity production - the production of useful things for sale - was it possible for Marx ‘to eliminate in advance the individual-psychological way of posing the question (i.e. use-value) and from the very beginning to define the subject matter of his investigation, exchange-value, as an object belonging to the social world, as a social function or form of the product of labour'. The commodity, being an attribute of a particular ‘social world', is also necessarily one of the latter's forms: it is a ‘social form' of production relations between people, the theme that runs through all of Rubin's work.

All commodities are qualitatively equal in terms of the unity of their social function as products of labour, but for exchange to occur they must overcome their quantitative inequality as use-values: they must be equalised in terms of the abstract, socially necessary labour that they represent, or their common property as exchange-value. Thus ‘the investigation leads from social labour (or the content of value) to the form of value;... from the form of value to money; and... [to] money as the finished result'.^{[81] [82]}

Rubin describes the link between the theories of value and money as follows:

Examination of the mechanism of social dependence between the equa­tion of labour and the equation of commodities... constitutes the theme of the Marxist theory of value, or the first stage of our investigation. After showing how the equation of labour takes the form of the generalised equation of commodities, Marx turns to analysis of the latter process, showing that the generalised equation of commodities is only possible in the form of them all being equatedwith one and the same designated com­modity, which acquires the character of money. This is the theory of the origin and social function of money, or the second stage of the study. Only after that is it possible to turn to consideration of the individual prop­erties of money as finished results of the process of circulation, which at first appear to be independent of the latter and to inhere in money itself. This is the theory of the separate functions of money, or the third stage of the investigation. In other words, these three stages of the investigation can be characterised as the doctrine 1) of value, or of the commodity; 2) of the transformation of the commodity into money; and 3) of money itself.8³

Rubin explains that the allegedly ‘metaphysical’ doctrine concerning the dual nature of the commodity contains ‘a sociological analysis of the produc­tion relations between commodity producers’. The general form of exchange­ability entails money, as the universal measure of abstract labour and ex­change-value. And money, in turn, now appears as the true reified ‘carrier’ of the economic relation: ‘The commodity that fulfils thefunction of active initiator of the production relations of exchange between commodity producers, i.e. that pos­sesses the capacity for direct universal exchangeability for any other commodity, is money’.^[83]

With a comprehensive analysis of the history and categories of money and exchange, Rubin guides his reader through the first three chapters of Capital, ending at the point where Marx turns from the accumulation of money - as a hoard - to the transition to the next higher category, capital. It is only to be regretted that the manuscript, after analysing the functions of money as measure of values, means of circulation, hoarding and means of payment, breaks off when it was about to describe its function as world money - an omission which should be added to Stalin’s long list of crimes.

We close our selection of primary documents with the crowning glory of the collection: Rubin’s essay ‘The Dialectical Development of Categories in Marx’s Economic System’.^{[84] [85] The issue of methodology has reappeared throughout the documents that we have translated, but nowhere is it more central than in this essay by Rubin. There is no question that this essay represents a theoretical triumph on Rubin’s part that far surpassed the insight of almost all of his predecessors and contemporaries.}

Lenin noted in his Philosophical Notebooks that

In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fun­damental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commod­ity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz., the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all con­tradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the ∑ [the sum] of its individual parts. From its beginning to its end.8⁶

In his essay on Marx's dialectical method, Rubin completed the undertaking that Lenin projected: he began with the initial ‘cell' of bourgeois society and then followed Marx in dialectically (that is, logically and historically) revealing all the fundamental contradictions of capitalist society, culminating in the category of crisis.

Rubin stresses the ‘dual character of the law of the unity of opposites', show­ing how, through a process of gradual development, different social forms arise from unity, gradually separating and becoming externally independent of one another. As in Hegel's Logic, Rubin's analysis moves within a dialectical circle of necessity - from the immediacy of a simple category (the commodity, for example) through its internal differentiation (the poles of value) to a new self­identity in a higher category (in this case money serving as universal equivalent for the circulation of commodities) - which again proves contradictory (money as a private hoard or means of settling private credit obligations, each with the capacity to disrupt circulation) and thereby necessitates further movement. Rubin shows that in the entire dialectical movement of the three volumes of Capital, there is a sequential process of immediacy dissolving into contra­diction and then returning in the immediacy of a more complex, but also transitory, self-identity - all of which expresses continuously changing produc­tion relations between people. Each group of phenomena, which constitutes a unity, gives way to polarisation and difference; and each group, which appears to be contradictory, constitutes a unity within whose limits the phenomena are antitheses.

In Marx's analysis, phenomena that have ‘become detached' are revealed as ‘alienated' production relations between people, or social forms of human relations that have, as Rubin says, ‘coalesced' with things. The reified ‘determin­ations of form', at each level of analysis, are shown confronting one another in a condition of contradiction and struggle, yet ultimately the entire system points beyond itself to the restoration of human community. Marx's understanding of history begins with the patriarchal family and primitive community; it ends with the projection of a restored community that transcends class divisions but also retains the wealth of history. As Rubin writes, a history of class struggle, culminating in the conflict between those who own and those who create the means of production, prepares the ground

for a real ‘removal' of the alienated and detached forms of social life and for a genuine revelation of the unity that lies at their basis. The more the power of‘alienated' labour (capital) grows over living labour, the more the conditions are created for the elimination of this alienation. It is precisely because capital develops the powerful productive forces of labour, which can no longer operate within the limits of capitalist production relations, that it also prepares its own end.^{[86] [87]}