Evgeny Pashukanis

Evgeny Pashukanis was a Soviet legal theorist born in 1891 in Staritsa in the Russian Empire, who rose within Soviet legal academia to become vice president of the Communist Academy by 1930 before his arrest on January 20, 1937, and his execution that September after being denounced as a Trotskyite saboteur in a fabricated conspiracy case; he was rehabilitated posthumously in 1957. His 1924 book, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, set out what became known as the commodity exchange theory of law, arguing that the legal form itself, with its abstract equal and formally free legal subjects, mirrors the structure of exchanging commodities on a market rather than existing as a neutral or eternal feature of any society. On this account, law and the state are historically specific superstructures generated by commodity production under capitalism, so that a genuinely communist society, having abolished commodity exchange, would eventually see law and the state wither away entirely. Pashukanis's theory also directly challenged Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law, insisting that legal validity could not be separated from the real social relations a law actually enforces, and after decades of official Soviet neglect following his execution, his work drew renewed international scholarly attention during debates over the theory of the capitalist state in the 1970s.