Re: reform and rev

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re: reform and rev
by Rakesh Bhandari
24 January 2002 18:09 UTC


>
>>CB: I am not familiar with Pashakunis' liquidation specifics,
>>although I believe it was after the Bolsheviks were dissolved into
>>the CPSU.
>
>How convenient that you are not familiar with the history of the
>Soviet Union that you have defended on email lists for six years!

If it were isolated event, no.

^^^^^^^

CB: This seems to reply to my asking you whether Pashakunis' death was a major event in Soviet history.  Nonetheless, the particulars of Pashakunis' death are not ciritical knowledge for understanding Soviet history. I am familiar with the intrigues, murders, etc. within the CPSU in the 30's etc. , and their role in Soviet history.  If you want to discuss that ok.

Put is this way,  I don't think it is likely that Pashakunis was murdered because he had some "good" Marxist theory of jurisprudence, and Stalin wanted to cover up the "good " theory and put forth a "bad" theory of Marxist jurisprudence. Does that speak to what you are getting at ?

Anti-Sovietism and Soviet baiting may make you feel good, and self-righteous but it doesn't make good argumentation.



>
>
>CB: The workers' are not the main owners of private property in
>capitalism. Nonetheless, what do you think is the important
>contribution in Pashakunis' writing ?

Pashukanis seems to me to have demonstrated that legal relations  do
have some objective basis in the relations of exchange. He overstates
the case, and he does not understand the connection to production.

^^^^^^^^

CB: Yes, and this point is Marxist jurisprudence 101

^^^^^^^^



But drawing from Roger Cotterrell, I wrote on LBO a long time ago:

Especially interesting, though I think incorrect, is his critique of
Pashukanis's reduction of the autonomous Kantian subject to the
codified illusion of the juridical subject (a dramatis personae) who
since she presumably can freely dispose of whatever she happens to
own can and should be bound by the contracts into which she enters.

That is, legal reasoning cannot conceive of a contractual
relationship except as a formally free agreement of wills. The fact
that the actual freedom to negotiate is often non existent in
contractual situations (in particular of course for the working
class) does not allow us to dismiss this fundamental legal principle
as irrelevant mystification because it is through this assumption, in
defined circumstances, of free agreement that the general
justification for making contractual terms binding is found and the
binding obligations arising from the contracts are fixed in a
predictable manner according to general principles. As soon as the
idea of compulsory 'contract' is introduced--that is, as Pashukanis
notes, agreement which the parties are compelled to make in
furtherance of a plan imposing obligations on both or all of them--it
becomes extremely difficult to fix, through contractual rules, the
limits of their reciprocal obligations.

^^^^^^^^^^

CB: Yes, but this is more how I would discuss contracts in bourgeois jurisprudence.  Most employers and employees don't have equal bargaining power, meeting of the minds is a fiction, contracts of adhesion,  etc. But this way of discussing it seems devoid of a specifically Marxist approach



>
>What would be grounds for murder ?


I am against capital punishment.

rb