Editors' Introduction
Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis
(1891‑1937) has been the only Soviet Marxist legal philosopher to have
achieved significant scholarly recognition outside of the U.S.S.R.1
The pre‑eminent Soviet jurist of the 1920s and early 1930s, Pashukanis
fell victim to the great purges of the late 1930s and was thereafter reviled as
an "enemy of the people" until his posthumous legal rehabilitation in
1956.2
As a student at the University of
St Petersburg before World War 1, Pashukanis had been active in the Russian
revolutionary movement and, as a result of his involvement, found it necessary
to complete his education abroad at the University of Munich where he specialized
in law and political economy. The available details on his early life are
sketchy, but it is known that he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, briefly, served
as a local and circuit judge in the Moscow region, and then for several years
into the early 1920s worked as a legal adviser in the People's Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs while,
1
His major treatise was Obshchaia teoriia prava i marksizm, first
published in Moscow in 1924 and subsequently translated into French, German,
Japanese, Serbo‑Croat and into Engli'sh in its third edition of 1927 as The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In
1. Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal Philosophy (1951),
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, translated by H. Babb, pp. 111‑225.
2
According to the official spravka, Pashukanis was legally
rehabilitated by the Military Division of the RSFSR Supreme Court in March
1956. The editors wish to acknowledge the generosity of Professor Dietrich A.
Loeber, of the University of Kiel, for sharing a copy of this document with
them. The most recent evidence of Pashukanis' limited intellectual
rehabilitation is contained in the Soviet collection of some of his early
writings from the 1920s. These will appear under the entry E. B. Pashukanis, Obshchaia teoriia prava i marksizm, Nauka,
Moscow.
2
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
simultaneously, he cultivated a
blossoming career in juristic scholarship.3
In 1924 Pashukanis emerged from
relative obscurity with the publication of his ma or theoretical work The General Theory of Law and Marxism,4 which quickly placed him in the front
ranks of the field of aspiring Soviet Marxist philosophers of law. He regarded
this treatise primarily as an introduction to the problems of constructing a
Marxist general theory of law and by no means as the definitive statement on
the subject. In this spirit, he appropriately subtitled his monograph An Experiment in the Criticism of Basic
juridical Concepts, emphasizing that he had written the book primarily for
"self‑clarification" with the hope that it might serve as a
"stimulus and material for further discussion".5
Pashukanis' General Theory was warmly received by the reviewers and went into a
second edition in 1926 followed by a third edition in 1927 which eventually
encompassed three printings.6 The originality of Pashukanis' theory
of law‑which was largely outlined in the first Russian edition of The General Theory of Law and Marxism in
1924, and successively revised in a number of works after 1927‑lies 'in
the contraposition of three notions with what Pashukanis took to be the modus operandi of Marx's Capital. From Hegel Pashukanis borrows
the familiar distinction between essence and appearance, and also the notion in
The Philosophy of Right that the
Roman lex persona was an insufficient
basis for the universality of rights attached to individual agents under
capitalist modes of production.7 And from Pokrovsky, an Old
Bolshevik and the leading Russian historian between 1910 and 1932, Pashukanis
borrows the assertion that the development of
3 The sources for this biographical information are
Robert Sharlet's interview with the late L. Ia. Gintsburg in Moscow, 1974; and
J. Hazard, Settling Disputes in Soviet
Society: The Formative Years of Legal Institutions (1960), Columbia
University Press, New York, pp. 17‑18. The English reader should see
generally E. Kamenka and A. Tay, "The Life and Afterlife of a Bolshevik Jurist",
Problems of Communism (1970), vol.
19, no. 1.
4 See pp. 37‑131 of
present volume for translation of the first Russian edition.
5 E. B. Pashukanis, "Predislovie" to Obshchaia teoriia prava i marksizm (1926),
Moscow, 2nd corrected and supplemented edition, p. 3.
6 See R. Sharlet, "Pashukanis and the Rise of
Soviet Marxist jurisprudence, 1924‑1930", Soviet Union 1, 2 (1974), pp. 103‑121, esp. pp. 103‑112.
7 For Pashukanis' own
account of his Hegelian heritage, see E. B. Pashukanis, "Hegel on State
and Law", Sovetskoe gosudarstvo (1931),
pp. 1‑32.
INTRODUCTION
3
Russian capitalism must be
understood in the context of the historical primacy of mercantile capital.8
Pashukanis saw that it was not
accidental that Marx had begun his analysis of the inner dialectic of the
capital‑labour relationship (the production of surplus value) with a
critique of the categories of bourgeois political economy. It was not simply
that the categories of rent, interest, industrial profit etc. mystified the
essential qualities of this relationship. Rather, in order to apprehend the
historically specific form of the relationship of capitalist exploitation, one
had first to pierce the veil of appearances/semblances/forms which the real
relationship inherently produced, and on which it routinely depended for its
reproduction.
Pashukanis therefore infers that
had Marx actually written a coherent theory of state and law, as indeed he had
twice promised,9 then it would necessarily have proceeded along the
same lines as his iconoclastic analysis of the categories of political economy
and the social reality which they mysteriously yet inaccurately express and
codify.
Pashukanis consistently argues
that there is an homology between the logic of the commodity form and the logic
of the legal form. Both are universal equivalents which in appearance equalize
the manifestly unequal: respectively, different commodities and the labour
which produced them, and different political citizens and the subjects of
rights and obligations. The salience of this insight has only very recently
been recovered by Marxists, 10 and there are now
8 See M.N. Pokrovsky, History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial
Capitalism (1910‑1912), translated and edited by J. D. Clarkson and
M. R. M. Griffiths, Martin Lawrence, London, n.d. See further G. M. Enteen, The Soviet Scholar‑Bureaucrat: M. N.
Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (1978), Pennsylvania State
University Press, Pennsylvania and London.
9 See K. Marx, "Letter to Weydemeyer"
(February 1 st, 1859), in Marx and Engels: Selected Correspondence
(1942), International Publishers, New York, p. 119; and K. Marx, The
Grundrisse (1857‑1858), translated by M. Nicolaus (1973), Random House, New York, p. 108. 10 For example, see A. Fraser,
"Legal Theory and Legal Practice", Arena, no. 44‑45.
10 For example, see A. Fraser, "Legal Theory and
Legal Practice", Arena, No.
44-45 (1976), pp. 123‑156; C. Arthur,
"Towards a Materialist Theory of Law", Critique, 7 (1976‑1977), pp. 31‑46; I. Balbus, "Commodity Form and Legal
Form: An Essay on the 'Relative Autonomy' of the Law", Law and Society (1977), vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 571‑588; J. Holloway and S.
Picciotto, "Capital, Crisis and the State", Capital and Class, summer 1977,
no. 2, pp. 76‑101; C. Arthur,
introduction to Evgeny B. Pashukanis, Law
and Marxism: A General Theory (1978), Ink Links, London, pp. 9‑31, a
translation from the German edition of Allgemeine
Rechtslehre
4
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
some healthy indications that the
sterile dichotomy between instrumentalist and formalist approaches to law is
likely to be transcended. If Pashukanis' main argument is correct, then it
obliges us to ask two crucial questions. First, the specific content of legal imperatives does not explain why the
interests of dominant classes are embodied in the legal form. Why, for example,
are these interests not embodied in the form on which they episodically depend,
namely, naked coercion? Second, if under capitalism the struggle between
competing commodity producers assumes legal form through the principle of
equivalence, then it follows that the class struggle between proletariat and
bourgeoisie must also typically appear in the medium of the legal form.11
And how, then, are we able to transform legal reformism into a revolutionary
political practice?
By the late 1920s, as a result of
his scholarly reputation, Pashukanis had become the doyen of Soviet Marxist jurisprudence, eclipsing even his juridical
mentor Piotr Stuchka. However, after 1928 Pashukanis' theory as a Marxist
critique of bourgeois jurisprudence became increasingly incompatible with the
new political and economic priorities of the first Five Year Plan, especially
the necessity for a strong dictatorship of the proletariat and its ancillary,
Soviet law which, after 1937, would become socialist law.
In the ensuing ideological struggle
on the "legal front" of the Soviet social formation, Pashukanis made
the first of his eventual three self‑criticisms in late 1930.12 After
that experience his theory underwent substantial revision during the period of
the first and second Five Year Plans (1928‑1937), as Pashukanis became
the principal spokesman for the Stalinist conception of the Soviet state, while
simultaneously striving to maintain his political commitment to the Marxist
concept of the withering away of law. However, as soon as Stalin's
"revolution from above" subsided with the
und Marxismus: Versuch einer Kritik der
juristischen Grundbegriffe; S.
Redhead, "The Discrete Charm of Bourgeois Law: A Note on Pashukanis",
Crilique, 9 (1978), pp. 113‑120.
11 Other than in some of his early writings, such as On
the Jewish Question (1843), Marx himself had very little to say on the
importance of the legal form. But see F. Engels and K. Kautsky, "Juridical
Socialism", Politics and Society (1977), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 199‑200,
translated and introduced by P. Beirne.
12
See E. B. Pashukanis, "The Situation on the Legal Theory Front"
(1930), translated in J. Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal Philosophy (1951), op cit.
pp. 237‑280. Pashukanis' second self‑criticism appeared in 1934,
his third‑"State and Law under Socialism" (1936)‑is fully
translated in the present volume, pp. 346‑61.
INTRODUCTION
5
essential completion of
collectivization and a new legal policy of stabilization was demanded, the
intrinsic ambivalence of Pashukanis' dual commitment to the respective marxisms
of Stalin and Marx became apparent. This contributed to his downfall in early
1937. Following Pashukanis' purge, his successor as legal doyen, Andrei Vyshinsky, began the almost immediate demolition of
the considerable structure of his predecessor's influence and, concomitantly,
the systematic reconstruction of the Soviet legal system. Vyshinsky ushered in
the era of the "Soviet socialist state and law" which has prevailed
to this day in Soviet jurisprudence and legal practice.
Finally, in the process of
destalinization after Stalin's death in 1953, Pashukanis' name was "cleared"
of the politico‑criminal charges which were the cause of his demise, and
since then his status as a legal philosopher has been partially rehabilitated
in the Soviet Union. Ironically, in the U.S.S.R. today Pashukanis is
posthumously honoured as one of the founders of the jurisprudence of Soviet
socialist state and law, a formulation the full implications of which he had
resisted almost to the eve of his arrest.
Marxism and Soviet jurisprudence from War
Communism to
the New Economic Policy
The General Theory of Law and Marxism is a theory of the historical
specificity of the legal form, and Pashukanis ostensibly introduces his
argument with a critique of three trends in bourgeois jurisprudence dominant in
the U.S.S.R. before 1921: Renner's social functionalism, Petrazhitsky's and
Reisner's psychologism, and Kelsen's legal positivism. The reader quickly
learns that the gist of this critique contains two observations directed
against the consequences of economic reductionism. The first concerns the
ontological nature of ideological categories in general, and in particular the
nature of legal regulation as a specific form of ideological category. The
second concerns those instrumental forms of economism which reduce law to the
status of an epiphenomenon within the compass of the base/superstructure
metaphor.
Pashukanis notes that within the
sphere of political economy concepts such as commodity, value and exchange
value are indeed ideological categories, but that this assignation by no means
signifies
6 PASHUKANIS: SELECTED
WRITINGS
that they indicate only ideas and other subjective
processes. They are ideological concepts principally because they obscure
objective social relationships. Yet the ideological character of a concept does
not nullify the material reality of the relationships that the concept
expresses. Nor does the fact that they are ideological concepts excuse us from
searching for the objective conditions which they express yet somehow wrap in
mystery. What needs to be proved is not that juridic concepts can and do become
integrated into the structure of ideological processes, but that these concepts
have more than an ideological
existence. Pashukanis therefore asserts that law is also a real form of social
being, and in so doing he seems astutely to have avoided the troublesome charge
that both social scientists and theorists
of ideology, in the final reckoning, base their assertions on a positivist
epistemology.
Pashukanis is equally concerned
to rebut the view that law is capable of voluntaristic manipulation by dominant
social classes. Stuchka, for example, one of the early RSFSR Commissars of
justice and the author of Decree No. I on
the Soviet Court, had misconstrued the nature of law in his The Revolutionary Role of Law and State as
a "system of relationships which answers to the interests of the dominant
class and which safeguards that class with organized force". Pashukanis
retorts that such a definition13 is useful both in disclosing the
class content of legal forms and in asserting that law is a social
relationship, but that it masks the real differences between the legal form and
all other social relationships which involve regulative norms. Indeed, if law
is seen simply as a form of social relationship, and if one asserts that law
regulates social relationships, then one must engage the tautology that social
relationships regulate themselves.
Pashukanis correctly avers that
the social organization of collectivities as diverse as bees and primitive
peoples require rules. But not all rules are legal rules: some rules are
customary and traditional and may be based in moral, aesthetic or utilitarian
considerations. Further, not all social relationships are legal relationships;
under certain conditions the regulation of
social relationships assumes a legal
charac-
13 This definition was officially adopted by the
Commissariat of Justice in 1919, and incorporated into RSFSR Laws (1919). See also P. 1. Stuchka, "Marksistskoe
ponimanie prava", Kommunisticheskaia
revoliutsiia (1922), no. 13‑14, pp. 37‑38; and "Zametki o
klassovoi teoriia prava", Sovetskoe
pravo (1922), no. 3.
INTRODUCTION
7
ter. (1924: see this volume, p. 58.) Marxist theory must
investigate not merely the material content of legal regulation during definite
historical periods, but must also provide a materialist explanation of legal
regulation as a definite historical form. The crucial question therefore
involves the elucidation of the social conditions in which the domination and
regulation of social relationships assumes a legal character.
Pashukanis argues that the
fundamental principle of legal regulation is the opposition of private
interests. Human conduct can be regulated by the most complex rules, but the
legal element in such regulation begins where the isolation and antithesis of
interests begin. "A norm of law acquires its differentia specifica . . .", he says, "because it
presupposes a person endowed with a right and actively asserting it." (1924: see p. 72.) Accordingly, and following some of Marx's Hegelian‑inspired
comments in The Law on the Theft of Woods
(1842) and On the Jewish Question (1843),
Pashukanis distinguishes between those rules which serve the universal interest
and those which serve a particular interest. The former are technical rules and
are based on unity of purpose, the latter are legal rules and are characterized
by controversy. Thus, the technical rules of railroad ,movement Presuppose a
single purpose, for example the attainment of maximum haulage capacity, whereas
the legal rules governing the responsibilities of railroads presuppose private
claims and isolated interests. Again, the treatment of invalids presupposes a
series of rules‑both for the patient and for the medical personnel; but
inasmuch as these rules are established to achieve a single purpose‑the
restoration of the patient's health‑they are of a technical character.
But when the patient and the physician are regarded as isolated, antagonistic
subjects, each of whom is the bearer of his own private interests, they then
become the subjects of rights and obligations, and the rules which unite them
become legal rules.
Pashukanis asserts that Marx
himself had pointed to the basic conditions of existence of the legal form.
Thus, Marx had indicated that the basic and most deeply set stratum of the
legal superstructure property relations‑was "so closely contiguous
to the foundation that they are the very same relationships of production
expressed in juridic language". Law is some specific social relationship
and can be understood in the same sense as that in which
8
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
Marx termed capital a social
relationship. The search for the unique social relationship, whose inevitable
reflection is the form of law, is to be located in the relationships between
commodity owners. The logic of legal concepts corresponds with the logic of the
social relationships of commodity production, and it is specifically in these
relationships‑not in the demands of domination, submission or naked power‑that
the origin of law is to be sought. We might add that Lenin himself had said, in
relation to the law of inheritance, ". . . [it] presumes the existence of
private property, and the latter arises only with the existence of exchange.
Its basis is in the already incipient specialization of social labour and the
alienation of products in the market."14
Pashukanis recalls that the
ascendant bourgeoisie's central antagonism with feudal property resided not in
its origin in violent seizure, but instead in its immobility in exchange and
circulation. In particular, it was unable to become an object of mutual
guarantees as it passed from one possessor to another in acquisition. Feudal
property, or the property associated with the feudal order, violated the
abstract and cardinal principle of capitalist societies‑"the equal
possibility of obtaining inequality." (1924: see p. 83.)
At a certain stage of development
(with the appearance of cities and city communes, markets and fairs) the relationships
of human beings are manifested in a form which is doubly mysterious: they
appear as the relationships of objects which are also commodities, and as the
volitional relationships of entities which are independent and equal inter se: juridic subjects. Law thus
appears side by side with the mystical attributes of value and exchange value.
Moreover, it is in the concrete personality of the egoistic, autonomous subject‑the
property owner and the bearer of private interests‑that a juridic subject
such as persona finds complete and
adequate embodiment.15
The historically‑specific
object of a commodity, for Pashukanis, finds its pure form in capitalist
economies. The authority which the
14 V. 1. Lenin, what
the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social
Democrats (1894), LCW, vol. 1, p. 153 (for abbreviations, see this volume, p. 125).
15 The concept of
persona in Roman jurisprudence originally derived from the function of an
actor's stage mask. The mask enabled the actor to conceal his real identity and
to conform to the role written for him. Transposed into the legal realm, as a
permanent condition, man must assume a legal mask in order to engage in the
activities regulated by legal rules. See further, 0. Gierke, Associations and Law (1977), translated
and edited by G. Heiman, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
INTRODUCTION
9
capitalist enjoys, as the
personification of capital in the process of direct production, is essentially
different from the authority which accompanies production through slaves or
serfs. Only capital stands in stark, unhierarchical contrast to the mass of
direct producers. Capitalist societies are first and foremost societies of
commodity owners. Commodities have a dual and a contradictory character. On the
one hand a commodity is and represents a use‑value. But commodities
necessarily embody different use‑values because the qualitatively
distinct social 'needs which they fulfil, and the quality and quantity of
labour expended in their production, are necessarily different and unequal.
And, on the other hand, a commodity is and represents an exchange‑value.
One commodity may be exchanged for another commodity in a definite ratio. The
values encountered in this exchange are expressed by and facilitated through
the mediation of another commodity, money, as the form of universal economic
equivalent.
The potential for commodity
exchange assumes that qualitatively distinct commodities enter a formal
relationship of equivalence, so that ultimately they appear as equal. The
exchange of commodities thus obscures a double abstraction *in which concrete
labour and concrete commodities are equalized inter se and are reduced to abstract labour and abstract
commodities. This abstraction in turn perpetuates the fetish that commodities
themselves, including money, contain living powers: commodities thus dominate
their very producers, human subjects.
Pashukanis illustrates how
commodity fetishism complements legal fetishism. Exchange transactions based on
the vi et armis principles of
feudalism create a form of property which is too transient and too unstable for
developed commodity exchange. De facto possession
must be transformed into an absolute and constant right which adheres to a
commodity during its circulatory process. Pashukanis notes that Marx had
tersely stated, in Capital I, that
"commodities cannot send themselves to a market and exchange themselves
with one another. Accordingly we must turn to their custodian, to the commodity
owner." (1924: see p. 75.)
The legal form itself is therefore cast as both an essential part and simultaneously as a consequence of the exchange of commodities under capitalism. At the very same time that the product of labour is assuming the quality of commodities and becoming the bearer of
10
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
value, man acquires the quality
of a juridic subject and becomes the bearer of a right. In the development of
legal categories, the capacity to perfect exchange relationships is merely one
of the concrete manifestations of the general attribute of legal capacity and
the capacity to act. Historically, however, it was specifically the exchange
arrangement which furnished the notion of a subject as the abstract bearer of
all possible legal claims. Nor does the juridic form of property contradict the
factual expropriation of the property of many citizens; the attribute of being
a subject of rights is a purely formal attribute, qualifying all persons alike
as "deserving" of property but in no sense making them property
owners.
It is only under developed
commodity exchange that the capacity to have a right in general is
distinguished from specific legal claims. Indeed, a characteristic feature of
capitalist societies is that general interests are segregated from and opposed
to private interests. The constant transfer of rights in the market creates the
notion of an immobile bearer of
rights, and the possibility therefore occurs of abstracting from the specific
differences between subjects and of bringing them within one generic concept.
Concrete man is relegated to an abstract man who incorporates egoism, freedom
and the supreme value of personality; the capacity to be a subject of rights is
finally disassociated from the specific living. personality and becomes a
purely social attribute. The legal subject is thus the abstract commodity owner
elevated into. the heavens (1924: see p. 81), and acquires his alter ego in the form of a
representative while he himself becomes insignificant. The specific
characteristics of each member of Homo
sapiens are, therefore, dissolved in the abstract concept of man as a
juridic subject.
In order for property to be
exchanged and alienated there must be a contract or accord of independent
wills. Contract is therefore one of the central concepts 'in law, and once it
has arisen the notion of contract seeks to acquire universal significance. In
contradistinction to theorists of public and constitutional law, such as Leon
Duguit, Pashukanis holds that all law is necessarily private law in that it
emanates from commodity exchange. The distinction
between private law and public law is therefore a (false) ideological
distinction and it reflects a real contradiction in capitalist societies
between the individual and the social interest. This contradiction is embodied
in "the real relationships of human subjects who can regard their own
INTRODUCTION
11
private struggles as social
struggles only in the incongruous and mystifying form of the value of
commodities." (1924: see p. 109.)
Pashukanis argues that the
political authority of the state appears to be disassociated from the economic
domination and specific needs of the capitalist class in the market. He thus
hypothesizes that the capitalist state is a dual
state: a political state and a legal state. Thus he says that:
the state as an organization of
class domination, and as an organization for the conduct of external wars, does
not require legal interpretation and in essence does not allow it. This is
where. the principle of naked expediency rules, (1924: see p. 92)
Class dominance, i.e. the
dominance of the bourgeoisie, is expressed in the state's dependence upon banks
and capitalist sectors, and in the dependence of each worker upon his employer.
But it should not be forgotten that in the political class struggle most
evidently, at its critical phases‑the state is the authority for the
organized violence of one class on another. The legal state, on the other hand,
reflects the impersonal, abstract and equivalent form of commodity exchange.
The legal state is the third party that embodies the mutual guarantees which
commodity owners, qua owners, give to
each other.
The leitmotif of early Soviet Marxist thought on law at the time of the
October Revolution and immediately thereafter, was the imperative of
implementing the Marxist concept of the withering away of law. This initial
eliminationist approach to law was best exemplified by Stuchka, a Bolshevik
revolutionary and a jurist, who in the days following the seizure of power was
assigned the task of taking physical and political possession of the premises
and institution of the highest court of imperial Russia. On arriving at the
court building in what is now Leningrad, Stuchka found that the judges had fled
the scene leaving behind only a number of frightened and bewildered clerks and
messengers. To put this group at ease, Stuchka reassured them that although
previously the judges had occupied the chambers while they themselves had
waited in the antechambers, from that time on the clerks and messengers would
sit in the judges' chairs and their former occupants would be relegated to the
antechambers. 16
16 P. 1. Stuchka, "Na
ministerstvom kresle", in P. 1. Stuchka, 13 let bor'by za revoliutsionno‑marksistskuiu teoriiu prava
(1931), Moscow.
I I
12 PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
The first Soviet attempt to
implement the process of the withering away of law began less than a month
after the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks' first legislation on the
judiciary abolished the hierarchy of tsarist courts, which were soon after
replaced by a much less complex dual system of local people's courts and revolutionary
tribunals.17 This initiated a process of simplification and
popularization that in the immediate post‑revolutionary days and months
swept away most of the inherited tsarist legal system, including the procuracy,
the bar, and all but those laws vital to the transitional period between
capitalism and communism (e.g. Decree Abolishing
Classes and Civil Ranks, Nov. 1917). Even the remaining legal minimum was
subject to interpretation by a new type of judge, usually untrained in law.
These new judges were encouraged to guide themselves by their
"revolutionary consciousness" in applying the law. The Bolsheviks'
objective was that even these remnants would ultimately become superfluous and
wither away or disappear. Their vision was of a new social formation in which
people would be able to settle their disputes "with simplicity, without
elaborately organized tribunals, without legal representation, without
complicated laws, and without a labyrinth of rules of procedure and
evidence."18 However, harsh reality quickly impinged upon this
vision as civil war engulfed the country. Confronted with the exigencies of
governance under the most difficult conditions, the Bolsheviks deferred this
transformative process and, as early as 1918, as John Hazard has conclusively
demonstrated, began the process of re‑legalization, which culminated in a
fully articulated legal system based largely on foreign bourgeois models and
perfected in the first tederal constitution (1924) during the early years of
the New Economic Policy.
Pashukanis concludes his argument
in The General Theory of Law and Marxism by
opposing those who would wish to construct a proletarian system of law after the 1917 revolution. Marx himself,
especially in The Critique of the Gotha
Programme, had grasped the profound inner connection between the commodity
form and the legal form, and had conceived of the transition to the higher
level of communism not as a transition to new legal forms, but as the dying out
of the legal form in general. If law has its real origin in
17 See Dekrety
sovetskoi vlasti (1957), Moscow, vol. 1, pp. 124‑126.
18 J. Hazard,
Settling Disputes in Soviet Society (1960), op. cit., p. vi.
I
INTRODUCTION
13
commodity exchange, and if
socialism is seen as the abolition of commodity exchange and the construction
of production for use, then proletarian or socialist law was a conceptual, and
therefore a practical, absurdity. While the market bond between individual
enterprises (either capitalist or petty commodity production) and groups of
enterprises (either capitalist or socialist) remained in force, then the legal
form must also remain in force.
The purportedly proletarian system of law
operative under NEP was, Pashukanis asserts, mere bourgeois law. Even the new
system of criminal administration contained in the RSFSR Criminal Code (1922) was bourgeois law. Pashukanis notes that
although the Basic Principles of Criminal
Legislation of the Soviet Union and Union Republics had substituted the
concept of "measures of social defence" for the concept of guilt,
crime and punishment (1924: see p. 124), this was nevertheless a terminological
change and not the abolition of the legal form. Law cannot assume the form of
commodity exchange and be proletarian or "socialist" in content.
Criminal law is a form of equivalence between egoistic and isolated subjects.
Indeed, criminal law is the sphere where juridic intercourse attains its
maximum intensity. As with the legal form in general, the actions of specific actors
are dissolved into the actions of abstract parties‑the state, as one
party, imposes punishment according to the damage effected by the other party,
the criminal.
Pashukanis points out that the
Soviet Union of 1924 had two systems of economic regulation. On the one hand
there were the administrative‑technical rules which governed the general
economic plan. On the other were the legal rules (civil and commercial codes,
courts, arbitration tribunals etc.) which governed the commodity exchange that
was the essential feature of NEP. The victory of the former type of regulation
would signify the demise of the latter, and only then would Marx's description
of human emancipation be realized. Five years later, in "Economics and
Legal Regulation", Pashukanis still clung precariously yet tenaciously to
his dictum that "the problem of the withering away of law is the yardstick
by which we measure the degree of proximity of a jurist to Marxism" (1929:
see p. 268).
It must be stressed that The General Theory of Law and Marxism was
written during NEP at a critical juncture in Soviet development. Pashukanis argued
that in certain respects NEP had preserved
14
PASHLUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
market exchange and the form of
value, and that this was a consequence of "proletarian state
capitalism" (1924: see p. 89).19 Lenin himself had fully
appreciated the contradictory character of the different modes of production
encouraged by NEP. The Supreme Economic Council, set up in 1917 with the
explicit aim of introducing socialist methods of production into both industry
and agriculture, had achieved such limited success that in May 1921 Lenin
observed: "there is still hardly any evidence of the operation of an
integrated state economic plan."20 Arguing that there was much
that could and must be learned from capitalist techniques (Taylorism), Lenin
wrote in December 1921 that NEP marked "a retreat in order to make better
preparations for a new offensive against capitalism."21 The
painful experiences of War Communism had indicated that socialism would not be
attained overnight, and that unless the political domination of the proletariat
was ensured, it would not be attained at all. The temporary solution was to
allow the peasantry limited ownership of the agricultural means of production.
But this was to be a regulated retreat:
The proletarian state may, without changing its own
character, permit freedom to trade and the development of capitalism only
within certain bounds, and only on the condition that the state regulates
(supervises, controls, determines the form and methods of etc.) private trade
and capitalism.22
The general feeling among the
Bolsheviks, then, was that NEP was a temporary, necessary and regulated
retreat: one step backward, and two steps forward. Lenin warned that "It
will take us at least ten years to organize large‑scale industry to
produce a reserve and secure control of agriculture ... There will be a
dictatorship of the proletariat. Then will come the classless society. "23
The seeds of this progression were already at hand, however, and in May 1921 he
observed that: "the manufactured goods made by socialist factories
19 In 1927 Pashukanis asserted that the term
"proletarian state capitalism" was an error. See J. Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal Philosophy (1951), op. cit. pp. 179C
20 V. I. Lenin, "To Comrade Krzhizhanovsky: the
Praesidium of the State Planning Commission" (May 1921), LCW, vol. 42, p. 371.
21 V. I. Lenin, Draft
Theses on the Role and Function of the Trade Unions Under the New Economic
Policy (1922), LCW, vol. 33, p.
184,
22 ibid. p. 185.
23 V. I. Lenin, "Report on Party Unity and the
Anarcho‑Syndicalist Deviation" (March 16, 1921), LCW, vol. 32, p. 251.
INTRODUCTION 15
and exchanged for the foodstuffs
produced by the peasants are not commodities in the politico‑economic
sense of the word; at any rate, they are not only commodities, they are no
longer commodities, they are ceasing to be commodities."24
Under NEP Pashukanis' theoretical
achievements earned him more than just the praise of his contemporaries. During
the years 1924‑1930, he assumed a number of important positions in the
Soviet academic hierarchy and was named to the editorial boards of the most
influential law and social science journals. Through these strategic positions
and key editorial posts, Pashukanis extended and strengthened the influence of
the commodity exchange school of law on Marxist jurisprudence.25
When The General Theory of Law and Marxism appeared in 1924, Pashukanis
was a member of Stuchka's Section of Law and State, and of the Institute of
Soviet Construction, both of the Communist Academy which he subsequently
described as "the centre of Marxist thought.1126 Later, he was to become a
member of the bureau or executive committee of the Institute and of the
Section, as well as head of the latter's Subsection on the General Theory of
Law and State.
During 1925, the Section of Law
and State formally launched the "revolution of the law" with the
publication of a collection of essays entitled Revoliutsiia prava. Pashukanis served as co‑editor and
contributed a major article on Lenin's understanding of law.
In 1926, the second edition of General Theory was published. During
that year Pashukanis joined the law faculty of Moscow State University and the
Institute of Red Professors, the graduate school of the Communist Academy. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia also
‑began publication in 1926, and Pashukanis was named chief editor for law
shortly afterwards.
The third edition of General Theory was issued in 1927, the
year Revoliutsiia prava was
established as the official journal of the Section of Law and State with
Pashukanis as a co‑editor. Beginning that year, the Section's periodic
reports reflected Pashukanis' increasing
24V. I.
Lenin, "Instructions of the Council of Labour and Defence to Local Soviet
Bodies"
(May 1921), LCW, vol. 32, p. 384.
25 See R. Sharlet, "Pashukanis and the Rise of
Soviet Marxist jurisprudence", op. cit.
pp. 112‑115.
26
Pashukanis' phrase in "Disput k voprosu ob izuchenii prestupnosti",
Revoliutsiia
prava (1929), no, 3, p. 67.
16
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
predominance. His annual
intellectual ouput in books, articles, essays, doklady, reviews and reports was prodigious. Along with Stuchka,
Pashukanis dominated the scholarly activity of the Section. As an indication of
his growing impact on Soviet legal development, he was assigned the task of
preparing a textbook on the general theory of law and state, and was chosen to
represent the Communist Academy on the commission for drafting the fundamental
principles of civil legislation, created by the U.S.S.R. Council of People's
Commissars.
During this period Pashukanis
began to assume additional positions and editorships. He became Deputy Chairman
of the Presidium of the Communist Academy, and a co‑editor of Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii, the
major Marxist social science journal. He had previously been named a founding
editor of the journal Revoliutsiia i
kul'tura, a new publication designed to promote the cultural revolution.
His co‑editors on these publications were the most eminent Marxist social
scientists, including Lunacharsky, Pokrovsky and Deborin.
In 1927, in "The Marxist
Theory of Law and the Construction of Socialism,"27 Pashukanis
undertook two objectives. First, he once again warns of the political dangers
'involved in trying to erect proletarian or socialist legal forms, and he
asserts that the dialectic of the withering away of law under socialism
consists in "the contrast between the principle of socialist planning and
the principle of equivalent exchange" (1927: see p. 193). Thus, he took
issue with those such'as Reisner28 who saw Decree No. I on the Court, or the RSFSR Civil Code, as evidence that NEP utilized private property
and commodity exchange to develop the forces of production. But this was to
imply that in this context private property and commodity exchange had a
"neutral" character. What was important, Pashukanis pointed out, was
that one should understand the use of these forms not from the perspective of
developing the forces of production, but from "the perspective of the
victory of the socialist elements of our economy over the capitalist ones"
(1927: see p. 192). Provided that remnants of the capitalist mode of production
were in
27 E. B.
Pashukanis, "Marksistskaia teoriia prava i stroitel'stvo sotsializma",
Revoliutsiia prava (1927), no. 3, pp.
3‑12, translated in present
volume on pp. 186‑99.
28 M. A. Reisner, Pravo,
nashe pravo, chuzhoe pravo, obshchee pravo (1925), Moscow, translated in J.
Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal Philosophy
(1951), op. cit., pp. 83‑109.
INTRODUCTION
17
practice eliminated and that subsequent
social rules in the U.S.S.R. were of a technical‑administrative nature,
then Pashukanis could argue prescriptively and, possibly, descriptively, that
law would disappear only with the
disappearance of capitalism.
This 1927 article contains some
interesting emendations to his General
Theory of Law and Marxism. The most important of these, 'in response to
Stuchka's "State and Law in the Period of Socialist Construction",29
is the admission of "the indisputable fact of the existence of feudal
law" (Pashukanis, 1927: see p. 195). Pashukanis now indicates that we find
"purchase and sale, with products and labour assuming the form of
commodities, and with a general equivalent, i.e. money, throughout the entire
feudal period" (1927: see p. 195). But although feudal and bourgeois law
may have a common form, their content and class nature is essentially
different. Feudal law is based on the will of the simple commodity owner, while
bourgeois law is based on the will of the capitalist commodity owner. This is a
most important concession because, although Pashukanis will not yet admit the
primacy of production relations
within historical materialism, it allows him to posit the existence of what he
refers to as "Soviet law, corresponding to a lower level of development
than that which Marx envisioned in The
Critique of the Gotha Programme ... [and which] is fundamentally different
from genuine bourgeois law" (1927: see p. 194).
In 1929, in "Economics and
Legal Regulation", Pashukanis explicitly discusses the reflexive status of
the legal form, a question that was only implicit 'in his analysis of
ideological forms in The General Theory
of Law and Marxism. He uses two arguments to refute the criticism of
Preobrazhensky, Rubin and B6hm‑Bawerk that economic regulation under
conditions of socialism (in the U.S.S.R.) is similar, in certain respects, to
the regulation exercised by capitalist states under conditions of monopoly
capitalism and imperialism (chiefly in Germany and England).
Pashukanis argues, first, that these
sorts of criticisms tend to be based on the false polarity of base and superstructural
forms. "The social", he retorts, ". . . is the alter ego of the economic" (1929:
see p. 241). He continues, significantly, "in every antagonistic society,
class
29 P. I. Stuchka, "Gosudarstvo i pravo, v period
sotsiabsticheskogo stroitel'stva", Revoliutsiia
prava (1927), no. 2. See also the criticism in S. I. Raevick book review, Sovetskoe pravo (1928), no. 2 (32), p.
98.
18 PASHUKANIS:
SELECTED WRITINGS
relationships find continuation
and concretization in the sphere of political struggle, the state structure and
the legal order ... productive forces [are) decisive in the final
analysis" (1929: see p. 244). Superstructural forms, in other words, are
incomprehensible apart from those social relationships to which they initially
owe their existence. This marks the crucial transition in Pashukanis' work.
Even if he has as yet neither identified the proper place of the political
within the complex of the social relationships of production, nor posited that
the political has primacy in Marxist political economy, he has at the very
least conceded that productive relationships are in some sense
"determinant factors in the final analysis." Quite clearly, the
origin of law could not now be explained by commodity exchange‑‑primitive
or generalized‑and Pashukanis seems to have recognized the inferiority of
his radical position in the debates with Stuchka that were contained within the
Communist Academy and not made public until 1927.30
Pashukanis' second argument is a
weak rebuttal of the assertion that, because NEP relationships in part
conformed to the law of value, and also to the law of the proportional
distribution of labour expenditures, therefore the primitive socialist economy
contained capitalist contradictions. These notions, he replies, stem from a
simplistic understanding of Engels' concern with the leap from the kingdom of
necessity to the kingdom of freedom. To hold that the form of value exists in
the U.S.S.R. is to miss, as did Preobrazhensky, the crucial point that the
U.S.S.R. is a dynamic formation founded on "the economics of co‑operation
and collectivization" (Pashukanis, 1929: see p. 251), and "the union
of the working class and the peasantry" (1929: see p, 254). What matters,
concretely, is not where the U.S.S.R. is, but where it will be. The U.S.S.R. is in a necessary phase
preparatory to Engels' quantum leap. Further, it is
30 Indeed, it is most likely that "Economics and
Legal Regulation" was an indirect response to Stuchka's Vvedenie v teoriim grazhdanskogo prava of
1927. Here Stuchka had reiterated that exchange must be subsumed within the
concept of production because ". . . the distribution of the agents of
production is itself only one of the aspects of production". See P. 1.
Stuchka, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (1964),
Riga, p. 565, and R. Sharlet, "Pashukanis and the Commodity Exchange
Theory of Law 1924‑1930", unpub. Ph.D. diss., Indiana University,
1968, p. 210. The Communist Academy effected a compromise in 1929, in its first
syllabus on the general theory of law. The concept of law was now rooted in the
process of commodity production and exchange.
See A. K. Stal'gevich, Programma po
obshchei teoriia prava (1929), Moscow, p. 11, and see R. Sharlet (1968),
op. cit. p. 210.
INTRODUCTION
19
trivial to claim that the law of
the proportional distribution of labour expenditures is effective in the
U.S.S.R. This law is effective in all social formations. What matters here is
how it is determined, and in the U.S.S.R. it is determined by "the
economic policy of the proletarian state" (1929: see p. 257).
The regulation of the national
economy by the proletarian state under NEP, Pashukanis continues, is
qualitatively distinct from the domestic economic intervention of capitalist
states during the 1914‑1918 War. In contradistinction to the latter's
"57 varieties" of socialism represented by wartime state control, the
proletarian state has three unique characteristics by which it will effectively
realize the dialectical transformation of quantity into quality: the
indissolubility of legislative and executive, extensive nationalization and the
firm regulation of production in the universal rather than the particular
interest. The more these characteristics are actualized, says Pashukanis,
the role of the purely legal superstructure, the role of law‑‑declines,
and from this can be derived the general rule that as [technical) regulation
becomes more effective, the weaker and less significant the role of law and the
legal superstructure in its pure form. (1929: see p. 271)
Pashukanis' responsibilities
continued to multiply when he was appointed Prorector of the Institute of Red
Professors, which was also known as the "theoretical staff of the Central
Committee."31 In 1929, the Institute started a journal for
correspondence students with Pashukanis as chief editor. By this time, the
influence of his commodity exchange theory of law on the syllabi for the
Institute's law curriculum and correspondence courses was pronounced.
Finally, in 1929‑1930,
Pashukanis reached the apex of the Marxist school of jurisprudence and the
Soviet legal profession. In a major reorganization, the Institute of Soviet Law
was fully absorbed and its publication was abolished. All theoretical and
practical work in the field of law was concentrated in the Communist Academy.
In turn, the Section of Law and State and the Institute of Soviet Construction
of the Communist Academy were merged, and the journal Revoliutsiia prava was reoriented and renamed. Pashukanis became
director
31 A. Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party
(1959), New York, p. 21.
20
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
of the new Institute of the
State, Law and Soviet Construction (soon renamed the Institute of Soviet
Construction and Law); chief editor of its new journal, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia prava; and a co‑editor
of Sovetskoe stroitel'stvo, the
journal of the U.S.S.R. Central Executive Committee.
An indication of Pashukanis'
influence on the Soviet legal profession was the gradual emergence of the
commodity exchange orientation within the Marxist school of law. just a few
years after the appearance of The General
Theory of Law and Marxism, the group of Marxist jurists working with
Pashukanis in the Communist Academy became known as the commodity exchange
school of law. This group, led by Pashukanis, dominated Marxist jurisprudence
and was strongest in the general theory of law and in the branches of criminal
law and civil‑economic law. As the commodity exchange theory of law
became identified with the Marxist
theory of law, Pashukanis gradually assumed the unofficial leadership of the
Marxist school of law. By 1930, the Communist Academy was bringing all Soviet
legal scholarship and education under its control, and Pashukanis, as the pre‑eminent
Marxist theorist of law, was soon being acknowledged as the leader of the
Soviet legal profession.
As Pashukanis' prestige soared in
the late 1920s, a critical accompaniment, at first low‑keyed but later
swelling in volume, began to be heard. From 1925 to 1930, Pashukanis was
criticized for overextending the commodity exchange concept of law, confusing a
methodological concept with a general theory of law, ignoring the law's ideological
character, and even for being an antinormativist. Other critics disagreed with
Pashukanis' positions on feudal law, public law and the readiness of the masses
to participate in public administration. He was denounced by one critic as a
"legal nihihst".
Nearly all of Pashukanis' critics
were Marxists. Most were members of the Communist Academy. Within the Communist
Academy, as the commodity exchange school of law became ascendant, it divided
into two wings: the moderates and the radicals. All of Pashukanis' critics
within the Communist Academy were associated with the moderate wing of the
commodity exchange school. This group was led by Stuchka, and the radical wing
was led by Pashukanis. Outside of the Communist Academy, A. A.
INTRODUCTION
21
Piontkovsky, at that time a
member of the rival Institute of Soviet Law, was Pashukanis' major critic.32
Stuchka's criticism, which began
to appear publicly in 1927, was by far the greatest challenge to Pashukanis.
Basically, Stuchka, as a leader of the moderate wing of the commodity exchange
school, criticized Pashukanis' overextension of the commodity exchange concept
of law from civil law to other branches of law. Specifically, he criticized
Pashukanis for overextending the notion of equivalence, insufficiently
emphasizing the class content of law, reducing public law to private law, and
denying the existence of either feudal law or Soviet law.
Stuchka apparently had been
criticizing Pashukanis within the Communist Academy before the first
publication of his criticism in 1927. In his article "State and Law in the
Period of Socialist Construction", Stuchka footnoted his criticism of
Pashukanis to the effect that their mutual opponents, presumably those outside
the Communist Academy's legal circles, had been exaggerating the extent of
their differences. Stuchka conceded that differences existed between him and
Pashukanis and that under the circumstances, it was best to bring them out into
the open. In this article, however, he tended to minimize these differences.
Stuchka's contributions to
building a Marxist theory of law were undisputed by his contemporaries. During
the early 1920s, he had, first, argued for a materialist conception of law and
for a class concept of law against prevailing idealist conceptions. Second, he
was responsible for the conception of a revolutionary role for Soviet law
during the transitional period from capitalism to communism.33
Perhaps Stuchka's greatest contribution to the development of the Soviet legal
system was his insistence, which grew in intensity throughout the 1920s, on the
necessity for "Soviet" law during the transition period, although he
had no illusions about this body of law becoming a permanent feature of the
Soviet system. In an article in early 1919, Stuchka clearly stated that
"We can only speak of proletarian law as the law of the transition period. . . ." He underscored the temporary nature of proletarian law by character
32 On the
two wings of the commodity exchange school see R. Scheslinger, Soviet
Legal Theory (1945), Kegan Paul, London, pp. 153‑156.
33 A. Vyshinsky, "Stuchka", Malaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1930),
vol. 8, pp. 514‑515.
22
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
izing it as "a
simplification, a popularization of our new social system."34
At the end of the decade Stuchka summarized his recognition of the importance
of law as an agent of socio‑economic development by writing in the
Foreword to his collected essays, "Revolution of the law is revolutionary
legality in the service of furthering the socialist offensive and socialist
construction."35
In this context, Stuchka
criticized Pashukanis' theory of law for its
omissions, its one‑sidedness insofar as it reduced all
law to only the market, to only exchange as the instrumentalization of the
relations of commodity producers‑which means law in general is peculiar
to bourgeois society.36
If Stuchka's criticism was sharp
and constructive, then the criticism put forward by Piontkovsky was definitely
hostile. Piontkovsky was a specialist in criminal law, an advocate of the
development of a specifically Soviet legal system, and a member of the
Institute of Soviet Law until its absorption by the Communist Academy.
Piontkovsky's main and most effective criticism was that Pashukanis had
mistaken an ideal‑type concept, the commodity exchange concept, for a
theory of' law. He developed this in his book, Marxism and Criminal Law, which was published in two editions.
Possibly because Piontkovsky was outside the legal circles of the Communist
Academy, his criticism of Pashukanis' work was more explicit and much more
blunt. He effectively incorporated into his own criticism the criticism of
Pashukanis' colleagues, but without being subject to the restraints that they
apparently imposed upon themselves in the interest of unity within the
Communist Academy.
Piontkovsky valued Pashukanis' General Theory of Law and Marxism, but
with definite reservations. He devoted a large part of his book to what he
termed the "dangers" of Pashukanis' theory, while at the same time,
in his second edition, he defended himself against counter‑criticism from
Pashukanis' followers. One of these had written that Piontkovsky's study had
nothing in common
34P. I.
Stuchka, "Proletarskoe pravo", in P. I. Stuchka, 13 let ... (1931), op. cit.
pp. 24, 34.
35 P. I.
Stuchka, "Foreword" to 13 let.
(1931), op. cit. p. 4.
36P. I. Stuchka, Vvedenie v teoriiu grazhdanskogo prava
(1927), in P. I. Stuchka, Izbrannye proizvedeniia
(1964), op. cit. pp. 563‑564.
INTRODUCTION
23
with Marxism and by no means
explained reality, to which Piontkovsky replied:
Of course, our point of view has
nothing in common with that Marxism that is limited only to the explanation of
reality, but has ... something in common with that Marxism ... which is a
"guide" to action.37
By the end of the decade, the
volume of criticism of Pashukanis' radical version of the commodity exchange
theory of law had grown considerably. The two directions from which the
criticism emanated, from both inside and outside the Communist Academy, could
no longer be easily distinguished. Stuchka's and Piontkovsky's criticism began
to converge as the criticism took on an increasingly political tone in 1930.
One critic observed that Pashukanis had repaired to the "enemy's
territory" and had lapsed into "bourgeois legal individualism".
Another critic, in a similar tone, characterized Pashukanis' commodity exchange
theory of law as a "collection of mechanistic and formalistic
perversions".38
The most salient aspects of these
debates involved the fundamental questions concerning the role of state and law
in the lower phase of communism. These questions indicated a certain
dissatisfaction and uneasiness with the type of thought characteristic of
Marxist legal circles during the 1920s. Most fundamental was Stuchka's question
of the relationship of dictatorship to law. As he wrote, "We know Lenin's
definition of dictatorship as 'a power basing itself on coercion and not
connected with any kind of laws."' But then Stuchka goes on to ask,
"What should be the relationship of the dictatorship of the proletariat to
its law and to law in general as the means of administration?"39
The other important question,
raised from outside the Communist Academy by Piontkovsky, involved the
relationship of Pashukanis' general theory of law to the vital tasks of
political and economic development in a social formation dominated by feudal
social relationships. Piontkovsky pointed out that Pashukanis' theory of law
37 A.
Piontkovsky, Marksizm i ugolovnoe pravo:
sbornik statei (1929), 2nd ed., Moscow, pp. 32‑33, 39. Quoted in E.
B. Pashukanis, "The Situation on the Legal Theory Front" (1930), op.
cit. pp. 253, 250.
39 P. I. Stuchka, "Dvenadtsat' let revoliutsii
gosudarstva i prava", in P. 1. Stuchka, 13 let ... (1931), op. cit. p.
189.
24
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
was "not revolutionary" in the sense that it was not
designated for a voluntarist approach to social change.40
"Revolution from Above"
and the Struggle on the Legal Front
Despite growing criticism of
Pashukanis' theory the impact of his commodity exchange school of law on the
withering away process began to become apparent in the late 1920s. Pashukanis
and his colleagues assiduously devoted themselves to bringing about the
realization of his prediction that private law and the legal state would
gradually begin to wither away upon the elimination of the institutions of
private property and the market. From their point of view, the prevailing
political and economic trends were favourable. The doctrine of "socialism
in one country", signalling the forthcoming end of the strategic retreat
of the New Economic Policy, was first officially expressed in 1925 at the XlVth
Party Conference, Later in the same year, the XlVth Party Congress adopted the
policy of industrialization, which meant that a substantial growth of the
socialist sector of the economy could be anticipated For the commodity exchange
school of law, the imminent end of the New Economic Policy and the subsequent
growth of the state sector meant a significant weakening of the juridical
superstructure. By 1927 the Keith Party Congress was calling for the
construction of socialism, an objective that for Pashukanis and his colleagues
required the gradual elimination of law. The growth of the socialist base,
argued Estrin, meant "the simplification and contraction" of the
"legal form"‑in other words, a withering away of law.41
The revolutionaries of the law
directed their main attacks against the NEP codes as the core of the real legal
culture, and against the legal education system as the nexus between the real
and ideal legal cultural patterns and the means by which they were transmitted
and maintained. They reasoned that if the thicket of bourgeois laws could be
gradually thinned out, the ground could eventually be cleared,
40 A.
Piontkovsky, Marksizm i ugolovnoe pravo
(1929), op. cit. pp 87.
41 A. Ia. Estrin,
"XVth Congress of the Party and Questions of Law", Revoliutsiia prava (1928), no. 2, p. 13.
See also R. Shatter, "Pashukanis and the Withering Away of Law in the
USSR", in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928‑1931
(1978), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 169‑188.
INTRODUCTION 25
with the remaining legal
structures becoming increasingly superfluous and falling into disuse towards
that time when they would be razed.
Tactically, this meant the necessity of initially replacing the NEP codes with
shorter, simpler models which would compress (and hence eliminate) the finer
distinctions of bourgeois justice. The longer‑term thrust was towards
radically reforming legal education for the purpose of preparing cadres who
would be socialized into and trained to preside over the transition from the
legal realities of NEP to a future without law.
Their primary target was the
notion of equivalence, which they regarded as the unifying theme of bourgeois
legal culture and the factor most responsible for its cohesion. Against the
symmetry of economic‑legal equivalence, they opposed the asymmetrical
principle of political expediency in their radical efforts to recodify NEP law
and reform legal education during the first and second Five Year Plans.
Expediency as a principle of
codification meant that the draft codes of the transitional legal culture were
characterized by flexibility and simplicity, in opposition to the stability and
formality of the NEP codes based on equivalence. Although only a few of the
draft codes of the Pashukanis school were actually adopted (in the emerging
Central Asian republics), their re‑codification efforts nevertheless had
a subversive effect on the administration of civil and criminal justice during
the first half of the 1930s. The draft codes were widely distributed in the
legal profession, while their basic principles were constantly elaborated upon
in the legal press and taught in the law schools. The revolution of the law appeared
to be winning, creating what was subsequently called an atmosphere of legal
nihilism.
In the legal transfer culture,
criminal law became "criminal policy" (ugolovnaia politika),
reflecting its extreme flexibility, while many of the procedural and substantive
distinctions characteristic of bourgeois criminal jurisprudence were discarded
in the interest of maximum simplicity. Similarly, the civil law of equivalent
commodity exchange was supplanted by the new category of economic law,
encompassing the economic relationships between production enterprises within
the Five Year Plans, which were enforced as technical rules based on the
criterion of planning expediency. All of this was taught in the law schools,
where
26
PASHUKANIS:
SELECTED WRITINGS
the legal cadres were being
prepared to preside over the gradual withering away of the law.42
Although the second Soviet
attempt to carry out the withering away of law progressed well into the 1930s,
Pashukanis and the commodity exchange school, as advocates of his theory,
collided with the process of Soviet rapid industrialization at the XVIth Party
Congress in June 1930. The conflict between industrialization and withering
away, which had been implicit since 1925, now clearly emerged. Until 1928, this
implied conflict had been largely academic while NEP and the policy of economic
recovery were still in effect. However, once large‑scale
industrialization and forced collectivization were underway, a collision was
inevitable as it became apparent that the intervention and active support of
strong and stable legal and political systems would be necessary in the
U.S.S.R. Consequently, the commodity exchange school of law began its rapid
decline in the late 1920s, culminating in 1930 as Marxist jurisprudence was
brought into line with the "socialist offensive along the whole
front".
Stalin, as General Secretary, in
his address before the Central Committee Plenum of April 1929, warned against
promoting hostile and antagonistic attitudes towards law and state among the
masses. He argued instead that the intensification of the class struggle by the
kulaks required the strengthening, rather than the weakening, of the dictatorship
of the proletariat.43 This tendency culminated at the XVIth Party
Congress in the rejection of the concept of the gradual withering away of law
and state. On that occasion Stalin reconceptualized this process:
We are for the
withering away of the state, while at the same time we stand for strengthening
the dictatorship of the proletariat which represents the most potent and mighty
authority of all the state authorities that have existed down to this time. The
highest development of state authority to the end of making ready the
conditions for the withering away of state authority: there you have the
Marxist formula. Is this "contradictory"? Yes, it is
"contradictory". But it is a living, vital contradiction and it
completely reflects Marxist dialectics.44
42 See R. Sharlet,
"Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture", in R. C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism
(1977), Norton, New York, pp. 161‑162.
43 J. Stalin, Problems
of Leninism (1947), 11th ed., State Publishing House, Moscow, pp. 344‑345.
44 J. Stalin, "Political Report of the Central
(Party) Committee to the XVIth Congress, 1930",
in J. Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal
Philosophy (1951), op. cit. p. 234.
INTRODUCTION
27
The Communist Party's rejection
of the gradualist notion of withering away made it necessary, therefore, to
redefine the transitional role of law and state and seriously undermined the
theoretical foundations of the commodity exchange school of law.
In 1932, in his Doctrine of State and Law, Pashukanis
recognized that he should not have equated law as an historical phenomenon with
the equivalent exchange of commodities. In class societies every relationship
of production has a specific form in which surplus labour is extracted from the
direct producers, and he now argues that "the nature of the bond between
the producer and the means of production is the key to understanding the
specificity of socioeconomic formations" (1932). The factor that
determines the typical features of a given legal system is therefore the form
of exploitation. We might add that by now Pashukanis himself must seriously
have wondered whether the primacy of the individual subject within his theory
of law had its origins not in the legacies of Hegel, Marx and Pokrovsky, but
rather in that subjectivist epistemology represented in bourgeois jurisprudence
by Jhering, Laband, Jellinek and possibly Max Weber‑all of whom he would
undoubtedly have read during his studies at the University of Munich.
Sensitive to the political
dangers which he detects in his own earlier work, in Stuchka, and in the Second
International, Pashukanis raises the delicate question of whether social
relationships which are not relationships of production or exchange can enter
into the content of law. He asserts that law in bourgeois society does not
serve only the facilitation of commodity exchange, and bourgeois property is
not exhausted by the relationships between commodity owners. To argue that law
is reducible simply to economic relationships is in the end to identify it with
economic relationships, which in turn both excludes all but property and
contract law, and denies the reflexive effect of the legal superstructure on
economic relationships. And to hold to this latter argument would clearly be
inappropriate in the context of the end of the first Five Year Plan and the
beginning of the second. Pashukanis responds that law cannot be understood
unless we consider it as the basic form of the policy of the ruling class.
"A legal relationship is a form of production relationship", he
continues, "because the active influence of the class organization of the
ruling class transforms the factual relationship into a legal one, gives it a
new quality, and thus includes it in the
28
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
construction of the legal
superstructure" (Pashukanis, 1932: see p. 297).
Pashukanis accordingly now
reformulates his definition of law provided in The General Theory of Law and Marxism as "the form of regulation and consolidation of production
relationships and also of other social relationships of class society" (1932:
see p. 287). He adds that this definition is incomplete without reference to a
coercive apparatus (the state) which guarantees the functioning of the legal
superstructure. But the dependence of law on the state does not signify that
the state creates the legal superstructure. The state is itself "only a
more or less complex reflection of the economic needs of the dominant class in
production" (1932: see p. 291). To emphasize the primacy of the state
would be to miss the distinction, so crucial for the working class in its
struggle with capitalism, between the various forms of rule (democracy,
dictatorship etc.)45 and the class essence of all states.
"Bourgeois theorists of the state", says Pashukanis, "conflate
characteristics relating to the form of government and characteristics relating
to the class nature of the state" (1932: see p. 280). Following Lenin,
Pashukanis stresses that the techniques of legal domination are less important
than the goals to which they are directed. Soviet law, in each of its stages,
was naturally different from the law of capitalist states. Further:
. . . law in the conditions of
the proletarian dictatorship has always had the goal of protecting the interest
of the working majority, the suppression of class elements hostile to the
proletariat, and the defence of socialist construction . . . As such it is
radically different from bourgeois law despite the formal resemblance of
individual statutes. (1932: see p. 293)
In the course of the
"revolution from above" of forced collectivization and rapid
industrialization, a politically chastened but still theoretically active
Pashukanis tried unsuccessfully, as it transpired, to re‑define his
concept of the state during the transitional period. In effect, Pashukanis
superimposed the Stalinist concept of the state in Soviet socio‑economic
development onto the remnants of his original theory of law. Then by
simultaneously presiding over the theoretical articulation of the Stalinist
state as well as the practical
45 Marx
himself had first appreciated the salience of this distinction in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and
The Civil War in France.
INTRODUCTION
29
process of the withering away of
criminal law, Pashukanis inevitably contributed to the growth of a
jurisprudence of terror. As bourgeois criminal law and procedure were
superseded in application by a simplistically vague and highly flexible
"Soviet criminal policy"‑shaped by Pashukanis and his associate
Nikolai Krylenko through several proposed draft codes‑legal forms were co‑opted
for extralegal purposes, judicial process was subordinated to political ends,
and law itself was used to legitimate and rationalize terror. The jurisprudence
of terror institutionalized and routinized political terror within the context
of formal legalism. In effect, terror was legalized and the criminal process
overtly politicized. Through the legalization of terror, the concomitant
criminalization of a wide range of political (and even social) behaviour, and
the politicization of the co‑opted administration of justice, the
Jurisprudence of terror became a highly effective instrument of Party policy.
Speaking in late 1930, Pashukanis expressed the basic premise of the
jurisprudence of terror which he seemed to recognize as an inevitable stage on
the road to communism and the ultimate withering away of the law. Rejecting the
notion of a stable system of law, he argued for "political
elasticity" and the imperative that Soviet "legislation possess
maximum elasticity" since "for us revolutionary legality is a problem
which is 99 per cent political".46
The inherent contradiction
between the ideas of a strong state and weak criminal law did not become fully
evident until the waning of the revolution from above was embodied in the
XVIIth Party Congress's (1934) policy emphasis on the need for greater legal
formality and stability in Soviet jurisprudence as a means of consolidating the
gains of the previous turbulent years. Paradoxically, it was Vyshinsky, the
Procurator‑General of the U.S.S.R. and soon to become prosecutor of the
major purge victims, who became the spearhead of Stalinist criticism of the
adverse effect of Pashukanis' and Krylenko's legal nihilism on the
administration of ordinary ("non‑political") criminal justice.47
Similarly, Pashukanis and another
associate Leonid Gintsburg exercised an equally strong influence on civil
jurisprudence through their concept of economic law. Hazard, then an American
student
46 E. B. Pashukanis,
"The Situation on the Legal Theory Front" (1930), op. cit. pp. 278‑280.
47 See R. Sharlet, "Stalinism and Soviet Legal
Culture", op. cit. f49 and pp. 172‑173.
30 PASHUKANIS:
SELECTED WRITINGS
at Pashukanis' Moscow Institute
of Soviet Law, subsequently reported:
Law, concerning the rights of the
individuals was relegated to a few hours at the end of the course in economic-administrative
law and given apologetically as an unwelcome necessity for a few years due to
the fact that capitalist relationships and bourgeois psychology had not yet
been wholly eliminated.48
The final two translations in the
present volume illuminate how emasculated the brilliant insights of The General Theory of Law and Marxism had
become after the XVIth Party Congress and the introduction of the second Five
Year Plan. It is at this point that we no longer need to speculate on whether
the intellectual revisions to the main thrust of Pashukanis' work were induced
by strictly political and opportunist pressures. In the Course on Soviet Economic Law, written with Gintsburg and published
in 1935, Pashukanis offers a lengthy, simplistic and functionalist account of
the nature of Soviet economic law under the transitional conditions of
socialism. Conceived within the manifest constraints to conform with the
Stalinist interpretation of Marx's and Engels' brief and unsatisfactory
analyses of the period transitional between capitalism and the higher phase of
communism, the Course defines Soviet
economic law as "a special
(specific) form of the policy of the proletarian state in the area of the
organization of socialist production and Soviet commerce" (Pashukanis
and Gintsburg, 1935: see p. 306).49 Bourgeois law serves the
interests of the capitalist class in capitalist production; Soviet law serves
the interests of the proletariat organized as the ruling class under socialism.
The special nature of the production policies (i.e. planning) of the
proletarian state are revealed through the concept of socialist (revolutionary)
legality. Bourgeois legality, according to Pashukanis and Gintsburg:
is the will of the ruling class ...
directed at the support of the basic conditions of the capitalist mode of
production. Socialist (revolutionary) legality expresses the will of the last
48 J. Hazard, "Housecleaning in Soviet Law", American Quarterly on the Soviet Union
(1938), vol. 1, no. 1, p. 15.
49 To Pashukanis' credit he still refused to recognize
the concept of "proletarian law", But even this incorporated somewhat
of a major retreat, however, by his terminological nicety of the "class
law of the proletariat" (1935: see. p. 307).
INTRODUCTION
31
of the
exploited classes, which has taken power, of the proletariat.(1935:see p.314)
just as criminal policy came to
be regarded as counterproductive after the XVIIth Party Congress, so too
economic law during the second Five Year Plan began to encounter muted
criticism from the direction of a countervailing tendency toward the need to
return to the concept of contract (albeit a planned
contract) as a method of stabilizing and more effectively managing the
planning process. Pashukanis, as the principal theoretical exponent of both
criminal policy and economic law, became increasingly politically vulnerable in
the mid‑1930s.
In "State and Law under
Socialism", published on the eve of the new Constitution of 1936,
Pashukanis weakly confronts the most serious criticism that the commodity
exchange theory of law had always explicitly invited‑that it was a left
communist, or perhaps anarchist, theory which, if implemented, would greatly
impede the construction and reproduction of socialist relations of production
in the U.S.S.R. Pashukanis apologetically quotes Lenin's State and Revolution to the effect that:
... we want a
socialist revolution with people as they are now‑with people who cannot
do without subordination, without supervision, without "overseers and
auditors" . . . it is inconceivable that people will immediately learn to
work without any legal norms after the overthrow of capitalism. (1936: see p.
349)
Stalinism and Soviet Jurisprudence
The demand for greater
contractual discipline within the planned economy, the revival and
strengthening of Soviet family law so long submerged within economic law, and,
above all, the publication of the draft of a new constitution in June 1936, all
clearly foreshadowed an impending major change in Soviet legal policy. The new
constitutional right of ownership of personal property and the provisions for
the first all‑union civil and criminal codes implied the reinforcement
rather than the withering of the law. Stalin's famous remark later that year
that "stability of the laws is necessary for us now more than ever"
signalled the new legal policy, and the promulgation of
32
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
the Stalin Constitution a few
weeks later, in December 1936, formally opened the Stalinist era in the
development of Soviet legal culture.50
As the symbol of the defeated
revolution of the law Pashukanis was arrested and disappeared in January 1937.
The purging of Pashukanis and his associates cleared the way for the re‑articulation
of the dormant Romanist legal ideals of stability, formality and professionalism.
The process of rebuilding Soviet legal culture began immediately under the
aegis of Vyshinsky, Pashukanis' successor as doyen of the legal profession. While Pashukanis had been the
theorist of NEP legal culture, explaining its rise and predicting its demise,
Vyshinsky, the practitioner, was its consolidator by reinforcing and converting
it into the Soviet legal culture.51
Vyshinksy's critique of
Pashukanis involves an intellectual contortionism replete with invective‑laden
and often self‑contradictory statements.52 Vyshinsky argues
that law is neither a system of social relationships nor a form of production
relationships. "Law," he stresses, "is the aggregate of rules of
conduct‑‑or norms; yet not of norms alone, but also of customs and
rules of community living confirmed by state authority and coercively protected
by that authority.”53
Soviet socialist law, the
argument continues, is radically unique in both form and content because:
it is the will
of our people elevated to the rank of a statute. In capitalist society,
allusions to the will of the people served as a screen which veiled the
exploiting nature of the bourgeois state. In the conditions of our country, the
matter is different in principle: there has been formulated among us, a single
and indestructible will of the Soviet people‑manifested in the
unparalleled unanimity with which the people vote at the
50 See R. Sharlet, "Stalinism and Soviet Legal
Culture", op. cit. pp. 168‑169.
51 See R. Sharlet., "Stalinism and Soviet Legal
Culture", op. cit. p. 169,
52 This critique is largely contained in four sources.
See A. Ia. Vyshinsky, "The Fundamental Tasks of the Science of Soviet
Socialist Law" (1938), in J.
Hazard (ed.), Soviet Legal Philosophy (1951),
op. cit. pp. 303‑341; "The
Marxist Theory of State and Law", Bolshevik
(1938); "The XV111th Congress of the CPSU and the Tasks of the Theory
of Socialist Law", Sovetskoe gosudarstvo
(1939), no. 3; J. Hazard (ed.), The Law
of the Soviet State (1948), Macmillan, New York, translated by H. Babb.
53 A. Vyshinsky, "Fundamental Tasks of the Science
of Soviet Socialist Law" (1938), op. cit.
p. 337.
INTRODUCTION 33
elections to the
Supreme Soviet of the U.S. S. R. and the Supreme Soviets of the union and
autonomous republics ...54 The specific mark of Soviet law ... is
that it serves, in the true and actual sense of the word, the people‑society‑.
. . In the U.S.S.R. for the first time in history the people‑the toiling
national masses themselves‑are the masters of their fate, themselves
ruling their state with no exploiters, no landlords, no capitalists.55
Law is now to be viewed as a set
of normative prescriptions, enforced by the state (whose own character is
unproblematic), in accord with Stalin's conception of the character and
duration of the transitional phase. The conditions for the existence of Soviet
socialist law are the necessity "to finish off the remnants of the dying
classes and to organize defence against capitalist encirclement".56
Soviet socialist law must incorporate and instill revolutionary legality and
stability. "Why is stability of statutes essential? Because it reinforces
the stability of the state order and of the state discipline, and multiples
tenfold the powers of socialism ..."57
Ignoring the internal class
contradictions of the new Soviet state, Vyshinsky applauds Stalin's teaching
that "the withering away of the state will come not through a weakening of
the state authority but through its maximum intensification. "58
The process of withering away is of necessity postponed until:
all will learn to get along without special rules defining
the conduct of people under the threat of punishment and with the aid of
constraint; when people are so accustomed to observe the fundamental rules of
community life that they will fulfil them without constraint of any sort.59
The legal culture of NEP along with
the statutory legislation of the intervening years, so long castigated as
bourgeois, was redefined as a socialist legal culture. The need to systematize
the legal culture, so long obstructed as inconsistent with its withering away,
became the new agenda for the legal profession. jurists, driven from the law
schools, the research institutes, and the legal press by the
54 ibid. p.
339.
55 A. Vyshinsky, The Law of the Soviet State (1948), op. cit., p. 75.
56 ibid. p.
62.
57 ibid. p.
51.
58 ibid. p.
62.
59 ibid. p.
52.
34
PASHUKANIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
revolution of the law, reappeared
as participants in the reconstruction of legal education and research.
Disciplines banished from the law curriculum by the radical jurists were
reintroduced beginning in the spring term of 1937. New course syllabi and
textbooks for every branch of law, especially those eliminated or suppressed by‑the
legal transfer culture, began to appear with great rapidity. New editions of
earlier texts were purged of Pashukanis' influence and quickly re‑issued.
Carrying out the mandate of Article 14 of the Stalin Constitution, numerous
jurists were mobilized to prepare drafts for the all‑union civil and
criminal codes. Finally, a vulgar neo‑positivist jurisprudence, based on
"class relations" and largely derived from the Stalin Constitution
and even the Short Course, replaced
the tradition of revolutionary legal theory epitomized by Pashukanis.60
By way, not of conclusion, but as
preparation for future work, we must briefly outline the importance of a
question confronted but unanswered in Pashukanis' project that is also
unanswered, and unfortunately unaddressed, in our own time. How, precisely, are
we to understand the historical configuration of state and law in social
formations where capitalist property has been abolished but where communism has
by no means yet been achieved? How are we to resolve the apparent paradox that
the legal practices of most, if not all, social formations dominated by the
political rule of the proletariat have included the form, and very often the
content, of the legal rules typically associated with capitalist modes of
production?
To explain this question, as did
Stalinism, in terms of capitalist encirclement and the construction of
socialism in one country, is to avoid the issue. This is so for at least two
reasons. First, as Marx always and Lenin usually argued, under socialism the
proletarian dictatorship has two features which radically demarcate it from all
other state dictatures: the extent of
its powers and the duration of its domination must be limited, and these must
ultimately inhere in the consent of its citizens. These features are structural
preconditions of socialism, and without wishing to lapse into utopianism or
idealism, they seem necessary irrespective of the specific economic, political
or ideological histories of a given social formation. This would there
60 Published in November 1938, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(Bolshevik): Short Course almost immediately became the Stalinist
forerunner of what, for China later, Mao's Little
Red Book was the functional equivalent.
INTRODUCTION
35
fore exclude that Common
explanation of the intensity and longevity of the Soviet polity which pointed
to the essential continuity of pre‑ and post‑revolutionary
political practices. Further, these qualities of the proletarian dictatorship‑clearly
discernible as the early Roman, and not the post‑Reformation concept of
dictatorship6l‑must dialectically contain the capacity for
self‑transformation. State and legal forms, even while they are actively
utilized by the proletariat or by the party which truly represents it, must
simultaneously be in the process of immanent transformation. As Lenin himself
put it in 1919, "The communist organization of social labour, the first
step towards which is socialism, rests, and win do so more and more as time
goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people
themselves".62 As such, we are convinced that only intellectual
sophistry could assert that, at least since the late 1920s, the proletarian
dictatorship in the U.S.S.R. is a dictatorship
(in the classical sense) of the proletariat.
The second reason in part
involves the absence of the conditions necessary to the truth of the first. If
the historical development of the U.S.S.R. cannot be characterized as the
development of the dictatorship of the proletariat, then how can it best be
understood? If it is the case that capitalist property relationships have been
abolished, and that they have been replaced by state property and collective
farm property as the 1936 Constitution proclaimed, then one must inquire how it
is that the agencies of the proletarian dictatorship have been used not only to
prevent the external threats posed by capitalist encirclement, but much more so
to repress what are perceived as internal dangers? This, to us, can only be
explained by the endemic existence of class contradictions within the U.S.S.R.
At the very least, therefore, we must reject the mechanistic identification of
transformations in legal forms of capitalist property with the abolition of
exploiting classes.63 What is needed is a transformation in
61 See particularly, V. I. Lenin, "A Great
Beginning" (1919), LCW, vol. 29,
p. 420. 62 ibid. p. 420.
63 Any distinction between economic and legal property
faces the logical difficulty that economic property is usually conceptualized
in legal terms (ownership, use, possession etc.). This problem has recently
been posed, unsatisfactorily, by several authors. See E. Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977),
New Left Books, London, pp. 66‑77; C. Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR 1917‑1923 (1976), Monthly Review Press, New York,
pp. 20‑32; A. Glucksman, "The Althusserian Theatre", New Left Review (1972), p. 68; N.
Poulantzas, Political Power and Social
Classes (1973), New Left Books, London, p. 72. But, see the
36 PASHUKANIS:
SELECTED WRITINGS
social relationships themselves.
We are left with an ironic twist to Lenin's dictum, when applied to the
U.S.S.R. since his death, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the
continuation of the class struggle in new forms. This was the thrust of
Pashukanis' own concern.
January 1979 Piers
Beirne
Robert
Sharlet
interesting
and important reformulations contained in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), Princeton
University Press, Princeton; and P. Corrigan, H. Ramsay and D. Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory (1978),
Monthly Review Press, New York and London.