Pashukanis and the Dialectic of Historical Concretion

Evgeni Pashukanis represents, like no other Marxist legal theorist before or after him, the true revolution in law, as it developed in Soviet Russia between 1924 and 1936. It was not only the major influence of his ideas, but also and above all that of his militancy as a Bolshevik and as a member of the Communist Party, as well as that of the practice of the collective of communist jurists organised under the School of the Commodity-Form Theory of Law, which he headed and for which he served as the main theoretical influence. My main focus in this article is Pashukanis’s search for historical concretion of the ideas contained in his seminal General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924) , as is testified by his later writings and practice (at least until 1930). He was conscious of the fact that without that concretion, his abstractions would be divorced from the realities and the challenges faced by his country under the socialist transition away from capitalism and towards communism. His search was undoubtedly problematic and not free of theoretical-practical tensions, given the equally problematic and contradictory historical circumstances that he was forced to navigate. Keywords dialectical negation dialectical affirmation Aufhebung historical concretion commodity form legal form state form transition period metajuridical state non-law communal form