Hegel con Pashukanis. Una lettura marxista leninista

In 1931, Evgeni Pashukanis published an essay entitled ‘Hegel. State and Law’, dedicated to the centenary of Hegel’s death. This text calls not only for taking a clear stance in a society founded on class struggle, but also for recognising that the capitalist ruling class, when it feels threatened, defends itself by resorting to every possible means, knowing that everything must in any case unfold within the organisation of capital—which is nothing other than the organisation of society— so that its ideological, philosophical and bureaucratic-judicial system represents only the essential condition of the dialectic of capitalist-bourgeois development, which unfolds powerfully between the imposition of labour and the social reproduction of the relationship of exploitation. And in its own way, this essay also urges us never to forget that if we lose sight of the insight that Marxism received from Hegel—namely, that no cognitive process can ever be reduced to the mere production of an isolated subject-consciousness, but is solely the consequence of its logical dynamism as collective praxis, in which every element is dialectically linked to the other in perfect harmony with material reality – one inevitably ends up losing all capacity for criticism of the existing world outside oneself. Moreover, a subject constructed as pure formality, which is not substance but illusory self-certainty, having become a mere function of exploitation, will never be capable of criticising capitalism.