Why did a Soviet legal scholar argue that law must eventually wither away?
In short: Evgeny Pashukanis proposed a radical commodity exchange theory of law, suggesting that legal systems are merely superstructures of economic organization. He argued that in a true communist state, law and the state itself would become obsolete, a provocative stance that ultimately led to his execution by the Stalinist regime.
Born in 1891, Evgeny Pashukanis was a prominent Soviet legal scholar who rose to influence following the 1917 October Revolution. His seminal 1924 work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, introduced his commodity exchange theory. Pashukanis posited that legal principles are not abstract moral truths but reflections of economic relations. He argued that because law is inherently tied to bourgeois society, it cannot exist in a genuine communist state, where both law and state coercion should eventually wither away.
Pashukanis was a fierce critic of Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism. While Kelsen maintained a strict separation between legal norms and social reality, Pashukanis insisted that social relations must hold primacy over norms. He argued that a law without efficacy—such as a rule that no one follows—is effectively non-existent. This focus on reality over abstract logic put him at odds with the Soviet establishment, which sought to solidify state power rather than see it dissolve.
By 1930, Pashukanis faced intense pressure from Stalinists for denying the possibility of a distinct proletarian law. Despite attempting to revise his theories and holding high-ranking positions, including Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he could not escape the political purges. Denounced as a Trotskyite saboteur by Andrey Vyshinsky, he was arrested in January 1937 and executed that September. Although posthumously rehabilitated in 1957, his work remained outside the Soviet mainstream, only finding renewed academic interest during the 1970s.
The tragedy of Pashukanis lies in the tension between his intellectual rigor and the brutal political environment of his time. His insistence that the state should be an impersonal apparatus rather than a tool of class subjugation was fundamentally incompatible with the reality of Stalinist rule. His life and death remain a stark case study in the dangers of applying critical theory within an authoritarian system that demands total ideological conformity.
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