The name of Rubin (Исаак Ильич Рубин,1886–1937) and a few of his works were known in Japan to a certain extent from the time preceding the Second World War by the literature related to the value debate going on in the Soviet Union at that time, translated and published about 1930 almost in real time. After the war, a negative image seems to have been enrooted for certain of those who were under the influence of the official disapproving view on Rubin and his followers adopted by the Soviet authority after the 1930s. Such a view was repeated and popularized in the textbooks of Marxist economics written by Russian researchers and translated and widely diffused in Japan1 after 1945 with the rise of Marxist economics in the post-war period. Resonance of such an influence has not totally disappeared even today.

In 1973, in the midst of the value controversy waged after 1968 among a few Marxist economists in the West, where the Marxist economics, a non negligible part of which was under a great influence of Soviet academy, had never been so important in the profession as in Japan, the masterpiece of Rubin, Essays on Marx’s theory of value (hereinafter Essays on value for short) was translated into English2, a book left and remained in oblivion for almost half a century. Rubin’s name and his works were thus rediscovered in the corner of the Western academic world, and his original interpretation of Marx’s theory of value gave a certain enduring impact on the then ongoing value debate3. Probably prompted by such a situation, the German and French versions (retranslations) of this work of Rubin were successively published, and also some of the original documents related to the value debate during the last years of 1920s, to begin with a few other works of Rubin himself, were translated and published, which contributed to make known something about this debate on the basis of its original resource materials. But, the pros and cons discussions at that and subsequent times about Rubin’s theory in the debate in the West were in many cases based solely on the English translation (and German and French retranslations) of his book given above, the other related literature not being referred to nor made use of. In addition, in these translations were omitted all the important supplementary materials originally annexed to the third edition of Essays on value published in 19284, which served as the exemplar to the translation: three articles of controversy (replies of Rubin to the criticisms by Dashkovskij, Shabs, Kon) newly added to this edition as ‘Replies to critics’, and ‘Appendices’ (author’s explanation of some of the keywords used in his book) showing Rubin as philologist and useful for understanding the text of Essays on value. This omission made hardly perceivable the controversial context where this book was found itself at the time of its publication. Leer más…