Isaak Illich Rubin

Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was a Soviet lawyer, economist and scholar of Marx's work.

Though Rubin's reading of Marx had produced an extensive Russian literature throughout the 20s, by the late 30s his work and memory had been completely expunged within the Soviet Union.

In the same period, the Bund split, mostly dissolving into the new Communist Party, while others continued and founded the short-lived Social Democratic Union, of which Rubin served as secretary.

In addition, petitions from numerous influential Bolshevik intellectuals such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and David Ryazanov also repeatedly called for his release.

Rubin, a trained lawyer and an economist, outwitted his first interrogators and the first charge was dropped; he was then transferred to a cell in Suzdal, where he was placed in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation.

After the second shooting, Rubin negotiated a "confession" with his interrogators, who wanted him implicate his mentor David Riazanov as a member of a secret Menshevik conspiracy.

When he fell ill with a suspected cancer, he was removed to a hospital and encouraged to make further confessions in return for favourable treatment, but declined the offer.

Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija.

The work had important points of contact with the German [Neue Marx Lektüre | Neue_Marx-Lektüre] already begun by Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut_Reichelt and thereafter bcame a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz–Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth).

[7] Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies.