 Prior to his arrest, Rubin also published books on the history of economics and contemporary economics, as well as editing an anthology of classical political economy.Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value.Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism.