ABSTRACT
Rubin is one of the few Marxist authors who addressed the issue of productive/unproductive labour in the first half of the 20th century. He diligently illustrated Marx's ideas on the subject and stressed the general principle that activities involved in production are always productive while circulation activities are unproductive. The enormous growth of services, both public and private, and of intellectual labour forced Marxist authors to mitigate the exclusion of these activities from the field of productive labour, decreed by Marx. The main analytical tool for this operation was the concept of collective labour, which was, however, by then being used with a different sense to that attributed by Marx. Most Marxist economists seemed unaware of the revolution in the social organisation of labour of the 1960s–80s. It was a radical change that rendered the traditional opposition between manual labour and intellectual labour obsolete.
