(Re)reading Pashukanis today. On “Marxismo y Derecho. A un siglo de la Teoría general de Pashukanis” (Mariana Giaretto and Alberto Bonnet, Eds., Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2024)

Abstract

At first glance (that is, from a—let us say—empiricist standpoint), the relationship between law and power (economic, political) is today of the utmost importance. All the more so in a region such as Latin America, where at present—from Ecuador through Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, among other examples—we explicitly encounter ways of doing politics in which the judiciary plays a preponderant role. This is the reason—one of the reasons—why the publication of a book such as the one reviewed here was more than welcome and highly relevant: it exhaustively and critically re-examines the work of the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis, in particular his most important work, “The General Theory of Law and Marxism” (originally published in 1924). This volume, compiled by Mariana Giaretto and Alberto Bonnet, includes articles by renowned authors of Western Marxism and the social sciences in general, such as Karl Korsch, Oskar Negt, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, among others. Beyond the importance of these names, however, what is far more interesting is the recovery and dissemination of Pashukanis’s work, as well as of certain debates—prompted by his work—that were and still are rendered invisible, yet are indispensable for understanding contemporary capitalism and the possibilities of overcoming it.