TRABALHO ABSTRATO E VALOR NO SISTEMA DE MARX

Abstract

The text is the corrected stenographic transcription of a lecture given by Isaac I. Rubin at a meeting of the General Economics Section of the Institute for Economics, Moscow, in May and June 1927. The lecture develops one of the main themes of Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, thus providing a useful introduction to the latter work, while developing beyond it in important respects. The lecture aims to bring out more clearly than had the Essays the distinction between the social commensurability of labour that is characteristic of any society that is based on the division of labour, and the specific form in which this commensuration is achieved in capitalist society, the form of abstract labour. The lecture thus centres on a further investigation of the concept of the form of value and brings out particularly clearly the significance of the distinctions between value and exchange value, and between abstract and embodied labour, as well as contributing to the debate about the methodology of Capital. At the time the lecture was given these issues were of the greatest political significance, for in the period of the NEP, when Rubin’s influence was at its greatest, the question of the applicability of the “law of value” under socialism, and so the proper understanding of the concept of value, was of the utmost importance to the future development of the Soviet Union.