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Due to a lack of translated material the work of Maximilien Rubel is little known in the English speaking world. In the following article Kevin Anderson analyses Rubel's achievements as a 'Marx editor' and interpreter of Marx's 'economics' overall. Anderson then explores possibly Rubel's greatest flaw—his anti-Hegelianism.

V. I. Lenin's 1914/15 notes on G. W. F. Hegel, which take up the Science of Logic & other major works by Hegel, influenced several leading Western Marxists. Published in Russian in 1929/30, in German in 1932, & in English in 1958, these notes, usually termed his Philosophical Notebooks, helped bring about a return to Hegel within Western Marxism. While not as important as the publication of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in this regard, Lenin's Notebooks exercised a little known influence on a number of important theorists. As with the 1844 Manuscripts, however, official communism tended for many years to downplay Lenin's Notebooks in favor of his earlier works, eg, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). The latter, which became the official Leninist text on dialectical materialism, defended a more orthodox scientific materialist position, while the more Hegelian 1914/15 Notebooks stressed new issues, eg, subjectivity, idealism, & self-movement. Although he later repudiated Lenin & wrote a critique of the Notebooks, Karl Korsch placed a statement from Lenin on Hegel as the frontispiece to his Marxism and Philosophy (1923). Later, after the first German translation of Lenin's Notebooks appeared in 1932, Georg Lukacs discussed them at some length in his The Young Hegel, a work written in the late 1930s but not published until 1948. Another important German Marxist theorist, Ernst Bloch, also commented on them in his Subjekt-Objekt: Erlauterungen zu Hegel (1949). In France, almost two decades before the Communist party publishing house published a translation, the more independent French communist theorists Henri Lefebvre & Norbert Guterman wrote a 130-page introduction to a 1938 French edition of Lenin's Notebooks. Issued by the prestigious Paris publishing house Gallimard under the title Cahiers sur la dialectique de Hegel, this edition helped make Lenin's Notebooks more central to debates over Hegel & Marx in France than in most other countries. In the US in the 1940s, three left-wing theoreticians from a dissident Trotskyist grouping, the Johnson-Forest Tendency -- the Russian-American economist Raya Dunayevskaya, the Trinidadian literary theorist C. L. R. James, & the Chinese-American theorist Grace Lee (Boggs) -- commented extensively on Dunayevskaya's unpublished English translation of the Notebooks. Their unpublished letters during the period 1949-1951 show a very serious engagement with Lenin's Notebooks as part of an effort to create an innovative form of Hegelian Marxism in the US. Dunayevskaya in particular, who after the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency published an abbreviated version of the Notebooks as an appendix to her Marxism and Freedom (1958), made Lenin's Notebooks central to all of her subsequent work on dialectics. Whether in Germany, France, or the US, the interest in Lenin's Notebooks usually came from quarters somewhat removed from official Marxist-Leninism. AA