Abstract
This essay presents an extended defence of the general theory of law formulated by the Bolshevik jurist, Evgeny Pashukanis, and published in his Law and Marxism: A General Theory in 1924. The general theory is a theory of the legal form. Although Pashukanis did not name his theory, it has become known as the commodity form theory of law because of its theorising the legal form as a homologue of the commodity form. However, despite having weighty Marxist and revolutionary Bolshevik credentials, the general theory has been subjected to sustained attack, especially from new left and neo-Marxist circles. This essay identifies and explicates six major objections to Pashukanism from its left critics. These are that the general theory is too abstract to comprehend the reality of legal relations; that it is infused with economic reductionism; that it derives the legal form wrongly from commodity exchange; that it classifies the legal form incorrectly as an attribute of capitalism only; that it lacks the generality required of a general theory of law; and that it is imbricated in the growth of anarchism and Stalinism.
 
 Following a brief exegetical exercise, the bulk of the essay is devoted to demonstrating in detail that each of the six objections to the general theory is without merit, and that none makes any serious incursion into its integrity as a theory of the legal form. The central submission of the essay is that the Pashukanist general theory of law is rooted in the first principles of classical Marxism and hence may lay claim legitimately to being the Marxist theory of law.
Highlights
R Koen*Capitalism is in profound and open crisis
For more than a century already, capitalism as a mode of production has been in historic decline, wracked by an ever-deepening contradiction between relations and forces of production, as the former increasingly has become an obstacle to the development of the latter
The remainder of this essay will confront all of these six objections in some detail, with a view to demonstrating that each is of no critical consequence whatsoever to the integrity of the Pashukanist general theory of law
Summary
Capitalism is in profound and open crisis. The meltdown began in 2008 with the implosion of a host of flagship financial institutions in the most advanced capitalist states,[1] and continues to this day with the economic decimation of a number of the weaker capitalist states.[2]. Much the same may be said of two of the most conspicuous concomitants of the current crisis, namely, the rampant militarism accompanying the "war on terror” in the advanced capitalist world and the flagrant corruption which has become embedded in the very constitution of global capitalism Both are patently unlawful but are pursued with impunity, leaving liberal jurisprudence foundering because it lacks the analytical resources to apprehend the propinquity between legal relations and capitalist relations. The niggardly condition of liberal jurisprudence in the face of the contemporary crisis of capitalism is affined closely to its want of a theory of the legal form Marxism produced such a theory of the legal form already in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with the publication in 1924 of Law and Marxism: A General Theory by the Bolshevik jurist, Evgeny Pashukanis.
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