The Marxist legal philosopher who argued the legal form corresponds to commodity exchange: the most radical critic of Soviet law from within
In November 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice. On 20 January 1937, barely two months later, the NKVD arrested him at the pinnacle of the Soviet legal system he had theorized — the Marxist jurist who had argued law would wither away now stood before the most direct form of state power.
The most important Marxist legal theorist of the twentieth century. In his 1924 work The General Theory of Law and Marxism, he argued that the legal form derives from the commodity-exchange relation and, following Marxist premises, will wither away together with the state under communism. With Pyotr Stuchka he co-founded the law section of the Communist Academy (1922) and later became its vice-president and director of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he clashed openly with Andrey Vyshinsky's doctrine of 'proletarian law.' Arrested in January 1937 and executed that September, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His commodity-form theory remains widely studied in critical legal theory worldwide.
Career Timeline
- 1918Judge in Moscow; joined RCP(b)
- 1920–1923People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs; adviser at Soviet embassy, Berlin — helped draft the Rapallo Treaty
- 1922Co-founded law section of the Communist Academy with Stuchka
- 1924Published The General Theory of Law and Marxism — formulated the commodity-form theory of law
- 1927–1930Full member, then vice-president, Communist Academy
- 1931–1936Director, Institute of Soviet Construction and Law
- 1936–1937Deputy People's Commissar of Justice, USSR
Related historical events
The Proletarian Law Debate: Pashukanis vs. Vyshinsky
The theoretical core of Pashukanis's work, and the political clash that destroyed him, was his debate with Andrey Vyshinsky over the very possibility of 'proletarian law.'
In The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), Pashukanis applied Marx's analysis of the commodity form to law, arguing that the legal form itself arises from relations of equivalent exchange among commodity owners. His thesis was that 'only bourgeois-capitalist society creates all the necessary conditions for the legal element in social relations to attain full definition.' From this he rejected the notion of proletarian law outright: the withering away of bourgeois legal categories meant not their replacement by new proletarian ones, but the withering away of law altogether. Law under the transitional socialist state remained bourgeois in essence; as planned economy advanced, the legal form would become increasingly superfluous. This implied an uncomfortable conclusion for Soviet jurists: the task of Marxist legal theory was to study law's gradual evaporation, not the flourishing of the legal craft.
Vyshinsky launched his frontal assault in 1937 with his article 'On the Situation on the Legal Theory Front.' He tied Pashukanis's doctrines to the 'counter-revolutionary restorationism of Trotskyism and the Right,' and charged that treating Soviet law as bourgeois negated the reality of socialist construction. Vyshinsky's practical counter-argument was devastating in the political climate of the time: if Pashukanis were correct, then the more socialism developed, the less role law and the constitution would have. Yet the 1936 Stalin Constitution was the apex of legal codification. Vyshinsky declared Soviet law to be the highest type of law in history, socialist law, thereby affirming the very category Pashukanis had denied. 'Socialist legality' was redefined not as an instrument of revolutionary disruption but as the principle guaranteeing state stability and planned construction.
This was no mere scholarly dispute. Pashukanis's theory of legal withering was faithful to revolutionary Marxism, but it collided fundamentally with the Stalinist line of state consolidation. Vyshinsky's victory pivoted Soviet jurisprudence from a revolutionary horizon to a statist doctrine that endured until the USSR's collapse. Pashukanis's execution as an 'enemy of the people' was the extreme culmination of this theoretical defeat.