Why am I passionate about this?
Being a Leftist, I started reading Capital as a student, back in the 1970s. I was impressed by Marx's analysis, emphasizing that capitalist relations of power appear as money generating more money, as a “thing” that functions as capital; furthermore, that credit functions as the most drastic form of money, so that the financial sphere is not a “parasitic” appendage of the “real economy”, but a mechanism for enforcing the “rules” of the system. As Professor of Political Economy since the late 1980s, I enjoy revealing to my students the structural contradictions of the system we live in. E.g., that the standard of living of the social majority (of the wage-earners) is (labour-)‘‘cost” of capital.
John's book list on Marxian economic theory
Why did John love this book?
The book emphasizes the importance of Marx’s theory of value.
Rubin argues that Marx's mature economic writings provide an understanding of how labor is determined and limited by capitalist social relations, which appear as objective structures, that are being “reified” in the money existence of commodities.
The author further argues that the notion of simple commodity production does not characterize human societies since antiquity, as it is often argued by both Marxists and critics of Marx.
In Marx’s analysis, it constitutes the outer husk of the capitalist economy. Value and money are concepts which cannot be defined independently of the notion of capital.
They contain (and are also contained in) the concept of capital.
1 author picked Essays on Marx's Theory of Value as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia – 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. 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'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…