The General Theory of Law and Marxism


Book Description

E. B. Pashukanis was the most significant contemporary to develop a fresh, new Marxist perspective in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1924 he wrote what is probably his most influential work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In the second edition, 1926, he stated that this work was not to be seen as a final product but more for ""self-clarification"" in hopes of adding ""stimulus and material for further discussion."" A third edition was printed in 1927.Pashukanis's ""commodity-exchange"" theory of law spearheaded a perspective that traced the form of law, not to class interests, but to capital logic itself. Until his death, he continued to argue for the ideal of the withering away of the state, law, and the juridic subject. He eventually arrived at a position contrary to Stalin's who, at that time, was attempting to consolidate and strengthen the state apparatus under the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Inevitably, Pashukanis was branded an enemy of the revolution in January 1937. His works were subsequently removed from soviet libraries. In 1954, Pashukanis was ""rehabilitated"" by the Soviets and restored to an acceptable position in the historical development of marxist law.In Europe and North America, a number of legal theorists only rediscovered Pashukanis's work in the late 1970s. They subjected it to careful critical analysis, and realized that he offered an alternative to the traditional Marxist interpretations, which saw law simply and purely as tied to class interests of domination. By the mid-1980s the instrumental Marxist perspective in vogue in Marxist sociology, criminology, politics, and economics gave way, to a significant extent due to Pashukanis's insights, to a more structural Marxist accounting of the relationship of law to economics and other social spheres.In his new introduction, Dragan Milovanovic discusses the life of Pashukanis, Marx and the commodity-exchange theory of law, and the historical lessons of Pashukanis's work. This bo




Legal Naturalism


Book Description

Legal Naturalism advances a clear and convincing case that Marx's theory of law is a form of natural law jurisprudence. It explicates both Marx's writings and the idea of natural law, and makes a forceful contribution to current debates on the foundations of law. Olufemi Taiwo argues that embedded in the corpus of Marxist writing is a plausible, adequate, and coherent legal theory. He describes Marx's general concept of law, which he calls "legal naturalism." For Marxism, natural law isn't a permanent verity; it refers to the basic law of a given epoch or social formation which is an essential aspect of its mode of production. Capitalist law is thus natural law in a capitalist society and is politically and morally progressive relative to the laws of preceding social formations. Taiwo emphasizes that these formations are dialectical or dynamic, not merely static, so that the law which is naturally appropriate to a capitalist economy will embody tensions and contradictions that replicate the underlying conflicts of that economy. In addition, he discusses the enactment and reform of "positive law"—law established by government institutions—in a Marxian framework.







Between Equal Rights


Book Description

"China Mieville's brilliantly original book is an indispensable guide for anyone concerned with international law. It is the most comprehensive scholarly account available of the central theoretical debates about the foundations of international law. It offers a guide for the lay reader into the central texts in the field."--Peter Gowan, Professor, International Relations, London Metropolitan University. Mieville critically examines existing theories of international law and offers a compelling alternative Marxist view. China Mieville, PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics, is an independent researcher and an award-winning novelist. His novel Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.




Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism


Book Description

Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justice, legality, and rights through the vantage point of his widely invoked but generally misunderstood critique of liberalism. The book begins by reconstructing Marx’s conception of justice and rights through close textual interpretation and extrapolation. The central thesis of the book is, firstly, that Marx regards justice as an essential feature of any society, including the emancipated society of the future; and secondly, that standards of justice and right undergo transformation throughout history. The book then tracks the enduring legacy of Marx’s critique of liberal justice by examining how leading contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Nancy Fraser have responded to Marx’s critique of liberalism in the face of global financial capitalism and the hollowing out of democratically-enacted law. The Marx that emerges from this book is therefore a thoroughly modern thinker whose insights shed valuable light on some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies today.




Keynes and Marx


Book Description

Keynes was an elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should embrace with caution. But his analysis provides a concreteness missing from Marx and engages with critical issues of the modern world that Marx could not have foreseen. This book argues that a critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, Dunn explores him in the context of the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy, and his politics. By offering a detailed overview of Keynes’s critique of mainstream economics and General Theory, Dunn argues that Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy. The book develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights, arguing that a Marxist analysis of unemployment, capital and the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The point is to change the world, not just to understand it. Thus the book considers the prospects of returning to Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that have come to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and the limits of the theoretical traditions that have made claim to his legacy.




General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money


Book Description

John Maynard Keynes is the great British economist of the twentieth century whose hugely influential work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and * is undoubtedly the century's most important book on economics--strongly influencing economic theory and practice, particularly with regard to the role of government in stimulating and regulating a nation's economic life. Keynes's work has undergone significant revaluation in recent years, and "Keynesian" views which have been widely defended for so long are now perceived as at odds with Keynes's own thinking. Recent scholarship and research has demonstrated considerable rivalry and controversy concerning the proper interpretation of Keynes's works, such that recourse to the original text is all the more important. Although considered by a few critics that the sentence structures of the book are quite incomprehensible and almost unbearable to read, the book is an essential reading for all those who desire a basic education in economics. The key to understanding Keynes is the notion that at particular times in the business cycle, an economy can become over-productive (or under-consumptive) and thus, a vicious spiral is begun that results in massive layoffs and cuts in production as businesses attempt to equilibrate aggregate supply and demand. Thus, full employment is only one of many or multiple macro equilibria. If an economy reaches an underemployment equilibrium, something is necessary to boost or stimulate demand to produce full employment. This something could be business investment but because of the logic and individualist nature of investment decisions, it is unlikely to rapidly restore full employment. Keynes logically seizes upon the public budget and government expenditures as the quickest way to restore full employment. Borrowing the * to finance the deficit from private households and businesses is a quick, direct way to restore full employment while at the same time, redirecting or siphoning




A General Theory of Exploitation and Class


Book Description

In this original and powerful work, John Roemer proposes a general theory of exploitation that provides a game-theoretic framework for expressing any conception of exploitation--feudal, capitalist, or socialist--in a standardized and explicit way, thus permitting a clear comparison of different ethical conceptions.




Law, Ideology and Punishment


Book Description

This book is about 'Kantianism' in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the former, it is about the tracing of the development of the retributive philosophy of punishment into and beyond its classical phase in the work of a number of philosophers, one of the most prominent of whom is Kant. In the latter, it is an exploration of the many instantiations of the 'Kantian' ideas of individual guilt, responsibility and justice within the substantive criminal law . On their face, such discussions may owe more or less explicitly to Kant, but, in their basic intellectual structure, they share a recognisably common commitment to certain ideas emerging from the liberal Enlightenment and embodied within a theory of criminal justice and punishment which is in this broader sense 'Kantian'. The work has its roots in the emergence in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States and Britain of the 'justice model' of penal reform, a development that was as interesting in terms of the sociology of philosophical knowledge as it was in its own right. Only a few years earlier, I had been taught in undergraduate criminology (which appeared at the time to be the only discipline to have anything interesting to say about crime and punishment) that 'classical criminology' (that is, Beccaria and the other Enlightenment reformers, who had been colonised as a 'school' within criminology) had died a major death in the 19th century, from which there was no hope of resuscitation.




Evgeny Pashukanis


Book Description

A thorough examination of Pashukanis’ writings, this book is a significant contribution to a proper assessment of Pashukanis’ work, the value of his theoretical legacy and the contemporary relevance of Marxist legal theory. Interest in the best-known Soviet legal scholar, Evgeny Pashukanis, remains widespread and his work retains considerable relevance. His writings provide a rich source of material on the Marxist theory of law and the state, as well as the attempts to apply that doctrine in Soviet Russia. In this book, Michael Head considers Pashukanis’ work both within its historical context and in relation to contemporary legal theory, answering a range of questions including: How and why did Pashukanis emerge as the pre-eminent Soviet jurist from 1924 to 1930? Why did he come under only minor criticism from 1930 to 1936 and then be denounced and executed in 1937 as a 'Trotskyite saboteur'? Why have many Western scholars generally praised the quality and originality of Pashukanis’ work, yet also drawn the conclusion that his fate illustrates the intrinsic impossibility of the entire communist project? Serving as an introduction to Pashukanis and Marxist legal theory and a timely contribution in light of the universal assault on civil liberties in the indefinite 'War on Terror' and the constant escalation of 'law and order' measures in Western societies, this volume is an invaluable resource for those interested in jurisprudence and critical thought.