[OPE] Rubin and abstract labor (again)

As I explained previously, Rubin's philosophy of value cannot logically reconcile how abstract labour results from commodity exchange, yet exists prior to exchange, and how abstract labour is unique to capitalism yet exists prior to capitalism (and indeed after capitalism is overthrown). Rubin was writing at a time when Stalin was consolidating his dictatorship, and ideologically Rubin had to reconcile Marx's critical theory of labor with the projected five year plan of the CPSU's command economy, which aimed to extract maximum surplus from workers' labour. Thus, Rubin's analysis is distorted by the typical Stalinist-bureaucratic conceptualisation method, where any word "dialectically" can mean anything the authorities happen to prefer. I discuss this more in a paper I am still working on.

Jurriaan

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Received on Wed Mar 4 10:06:34 2009