The Dialectics of the Legal Form

Although General Theory of Law and Marxism, by Evgeny B. Pashukanis, can be analysed as a fundamental work to the development of a Marxist legal critique, it is not a complete or systematic project. Pashukanis’s main contribution lies in drawing an inner connection between the value form and the legal form based on Marx’s Capital, but that connection cannot demonstrate how the simpler level of abstraction of the legal subject is necessarily connected to other moments of the legal form’s concretization. Therefore, this paper aims to reconstruct the dialectics of the legal form in homology to the dialectics of the value form. The latter comprehends the opening sections of Marx’s Capital, and grasps the transitions between commodity, money and capital, corresponding to different moments of conceptual development. The hypothesis is that the legal form’s concretization can be presented in homology to the value form corresponding, respectively, to the moments of the legal subject, legal norm (the general law) and the State. As value form, legal form is a category of reflection, which means it does not appear immediately – it only exists through its different forms of manifestation. The analysis of the commodity form reveals an internal contradiction between use-value and value, in the same way that legal subject is determined by the concrete and abstract subject. In its form development, the relation between two commodities reveals an opposition between relative form of value and equivalent form of value, in which the value of the former is reflected in the body of the latter. Accordingly, the exchange relation between legal subjects, the value of the abstract subject is reflected in the body (the concrete dimension) of the other. The money form encompasses the universe of commodities, excluding itself from them in a third, reified form in which its use-value becomes the form of value, its real abstraction. In its turn, the general law (as the “money” of the legal form) emerges from the inadequacy of the legal subject in being the universal manifestation of the legal form as it is still connected to particular relations of exchange. Finally, capital as self-valorizing value (as Subject) corresponds to the same abstract universal will of the State.