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Law & revolution: reading Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism at its 100th anniversary (LAW-DS-LAWREV-24)

LAW-DS-LAWREV-24

Description

This year is the 100^th anniversary of Evgeny Pashukanis’ The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), a good occasion to (re-)examine this classic of radical legal theory.

In The General Theory of Law and Marxism, a landmark text of Marxist jurisprudence, Pashukanis argues that after the revolution contract and property are not to be replaced by new concepts of proletarian law. Rather, the legal form as such, and hence law in its entirety, will disappear. The reason is that private law, whose basic categories, he argues, constitute the foundations of law in general, is intrinsically bourgeois, based as it is on the idea of the voluntary market exchange of equivalents (goods, services). Therefore, with the disappearance of the form of the equivalence relation between commodities, also its corresponding legal form, with its basic categories of contract, property, subjective rights et cetera will become obsolete and wither away.

Pashukanis’ work, his life, and the revolution were intertwined in a very dramatic way. After the October Revolution, he became a prominent Soviet legal scholar, and held important bureaucratic positions, but then fell out of grace under Stalin, who had very different plans for state and law than their withering away. Pashukanis was arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’ in 1937, after which he ‘disappeared’.

During this seminar we will engage in close reading of this landmark text. Moreover, we will discuss its relevance today: Does the commodity exchange fully determine the law? Does private law constitute the basis for law in general? Are constitutions plausibly understood in a fully materialist way? And what about fundamental rights? Is class struggle central to a proper understanding of the law? How to think society after law? Why has the law never withered away anywhere? Is communist jurisprudence plausible after the Soviet Union? Is Pashukanis’ rationalism and universalism Eurocentric? Could there be an EU without law? If Pashukanis is right then what should I do?

No specific prior knowledge of Marxism, legal theory, or other is required. Researchers from other EUI departments are more than welcome.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 26 to 30 September 2024

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