Maximilien Rubel

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Maximilien Rubel (10 October 1905, in Chernivtsi – 28 February 1996, in Paris) was an Austrian Marxist historian, humanist, and council communist.

Rubel was educated in law and philosophy in

Jewish origins, Rubel lived semi-secretly in Paris under the German occupation of France
.

In his encounters with Marxist members of the resistance movement in this milieu Rubel was reputedly astonished by the incoherence and confusion that surrounded Karl Marx and so-called "scientific" socialism. In difficult circumstances Rubel then set to work to gain a thorough understanding of Marx's life and work. It was Rubel who originally coined the term "marxologie" to refer to a systematic scholarly approach to the understanding of Marx and Marxism, which he saw as quite distinct.

After the war, Rubel continued with his research, first publishing on Marx in 1946, and receiving a

Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1947, and retired as Maître de recherche honoraire in 1970. Rubel published widely on Marx—more than 80 titles—and had a very active academic career. He combined controversial readings of Marx with rigorous scholarship, and was frequently polemical in his criticisms of the ideologies of "Marxism", which he often contrasted with a view of working class
liberation that emphasised the "self-movement" of the working class above all else.

In the 1950s a political discussion circle gathered around Rubel, which eventually adopted the title Council Communist Group. It included the Vietnamese former Trotskyist

Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, thinkers who espoused "new sets of values, new reasons for living, new norms for acting, a new ethic."[2]

Selected works

External links

References

  1. ^ "Maximilien Rubel: Anti-Bolshevik Marxist". worldsocialism.org. Socialist Party of Great Britain. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  2. ^ Ngo Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (Oakland CA: AK Press) pp. 201–203