Diritto e metodo marxista in Pashukanis

For Pashukanis, law is not an a priori process, independent of the movement of society and its fundamental contradictions. It constitutes a social relationship specific to bourgeois society, in whose (legal) form – just like the commodity form, the money form and the labour form, as Marx demonstrated – lies hidden only the process of command and exploitation that gave rise to it. It is as if to say that there is no such thing as law, just as there is no such thing as power, but rather there are those who command and those who obey, those who exploit and those who are exploited. In this observation—which is, indeed, of the utmost theoretical relevance today, and which the crudeness of the established Soviet power could not comprehend at all—there lies an act of demystification and, at the same time, political critique on the part of Pashukanis, who, thanks to Marx, discovers that will no longer determines anything, since social relations have become independent of their subjects, the real, flesh-and-blood individuals, now calmly expelled from their concrete lives through legal norms; but above all that the objective other is nothing other than that which belongs to each individual, yet which capitalist society has managed to autonomise and take away from them. If, as Marx maintains, bourgeois political economy has claimed to demonstrate the eternity and harmony of existing social relations by unduly superimposing the categories of the bourgeois era onto all past eras, with a consequent inability to assess them objectively, inasmuch as it is always self-serving — the same operation is carried out by bourgeois legal science, and in particular by the school of natural law, which, in constructing ‘in its most general and abstract form’ the conditions of existence of bourgeois society, always regards them ‘as the conditions of existence of every society’.