Rubel on Marx (1981)

Book Review from the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx: Life and Works, by Maximilien Rubel. Macmillan Chronology Series.

This is a sort of shortened paperback version (130 pages) of Rubel and Manale’s Marx without Myth, and a very good and fair year-by-year summary of Marx’s life and literary activities. Rubel, whose writings are only just beginning to be known in the English-speaking world, is a regular, if critical, attender at the meetings of our Paris discussion group and fully accepts that by socialism Marx meant a classless. moneyless, wageless society. Here, for instance, he points out that in Marx’s first published writing as a socialist (The Jewish Question, 1843) Marx made it clear that human emancipation “will only be obtained by doing away with the state and with money", a view he held for the rest of his life. 

Adam Buick