Legal Subject, Abstraction, Production. Actuality of Pašukanis
by Giso Amendola
pp. 106-122 Issue 13 (7,1) – January-June 2020 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2020.7.1.5
Abstract
Pašukanis’ theory of law is a sample of critique of political economy rigorously applied to the theory of law. Thanks to the concept of determined abstraction, Pašukanis builds a critique of juridical abstraction avoiding the idea of law as a mere ideological over-structure; but, at the same time, this critique maintains the solid connection between form of law and capitalist relations of production. On one hand, the design of juridical subject allows a conception of juridical relations as a relationship between (formally) autonomous and equal subjects; on the other hand, it bounds the production of juridical subject and relation to the commodity exchange and to the law of value. Nowadays, Pašukanis helps us to reconsider a critique of the juridical subject linked to the critique of political economy inside new modes of production, rethinking the relationship between the critique of juridical abstraction and the social production, seen as production of subjectivity.