From the Fetishism of Law to Its Withering Away: Rethinking Pashukanis through Japanese Marxist Thought

This paper reconsiders the contemporary significance of Evgeny Pashukanis’s legal theory by reinterpreting it through the intellectual tradition of Japanese Marxist thought and recent theories of exchange. It argues that Pashukanis’s idea of the “withering away of law” should be understood not as the disappearance of social norms but as a critique of the “fetishism of law” that characterises capitalist society.