Violations of the Law of Value, Violations of Legal Subject: Towards a New Theory of Legal Form from a Global South Perspective

This article starts from Pashukanis’s theory on the intrinsic relationship between value form and legal form, both capitalist forms of equivalence between commodities and between their guardians (Pachukanis, 2017). In capitalism, in theory, commodity exchanges are carried out with one of their main references being the value (abstract human labour) contained within them (the law of value). The same is true between the commodity labour power and wages, which must be at least the value of this commodity, that is, the amount necessary for the reproduction of labour power (Marx, 1999b ). As Pashukanis (2017) explains, the bearers of commodities also become equal, leading to the emergence of the “legal subject” (a term used by bourgeois legal theory). However, drawing on Marxist dependency theory (Marini, 2011a), which presents the violation of the law of value in exchanges between the periphery and the centre of capitalism, in this article I problematise the effects of this violation on the legal subjects. In particular, I focus on the super-exploitation of labour, whereby workers receive less than their value, a mechanism widely used by the bourgeoisie of these peripheral countries to compensate for their losses in unequal international exchange. My hypothesis is that the violation of the law of value leads to the weakening and even the denial of the subject of law. Accordingly, this hypothesis can explain the fragility of the legal subject in places like Brazil. To illustrate this thesis, I bring examples from the black portion of the Brazilian working class (with indigenous and African roots), which is precisely the one that is super-exploited and whose human rights are violated on a daily basis. The method used is historical materialism (Marx, 2008) to which the relations of production generally determine other social forms, including the form of regulation of social interactions, such as the legal form under capitalism, with its norms, contracts, legal personality and obligations between the State and citizens; and even determine racism, a social form that came from the colonial slave mode of production (Gorender, 2016) and was remodelled under capitalism. I start by presenting a brief introduction to the relationship between value form and legal form, both born in the circulation sphere of commodities. Then, I present the law of value violations, particularly the breakdown in equivalence between wage payment and labour force value, labour super-exploitation (in the context of Marini’s theory), and how workers caught in this process are treated as legal objects; and, furthermore, how racism is mobilised to justify and hide this. The paper concludes that there is a deep connection between the super-exploitation of labour (a form of violation of the law of value), the object form of law (as a denial of the subject of law due to the weakening of the legal form) and the persistence of non-equivalent forms of social standardisation such as racism. Keywords legal form Marxism Marxist dependency theory legal subject and racism super-exploitation of labour