Commodity form theory is a theory of

jurisprudence Jurisprudence, or legal theory, is the theoretical study of the propriety of law. Scholars of jurisprudence seek to explain the nature of law in its most general form and they also seek to achieve a deeper understanding of legal reasoning a ...

advanced by the

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

legal theorist

Evgeny Pashukanis Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis (Russian: Евгений Брониславович Пашуканис; 23 February 1891 – 4 September 1937) was a Soviet legal scholar, best known for his work ''The General Theory of Law and Marxism''. Early li ...

. The theory argues that the legal form is the parallel of the commodity form under

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...

society. All law is concerned with the process of the exchanging of commodities between subjects who act as the "guardians" of commodities and are created by law in order to enable the commodity production form of society to function. The theory can be explained as based on two premises, logical and historical.

The logical premise

"Every legal relation" proclaims Pashukanis, "is a relation between subjects". Pashukanis' conceptual account of law begins with the idea of a responsible agent - what he calls "the legal subject".

Property Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...

, says Pashukanis, is the basis of the legal form, but only capitalist property that can be disposed of in the

market Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: *Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand *Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market Geography *Märket, an ...

. The subject in law is the expression of the freedom of property, that is, the freedom to alienate property. Thus the key to understanding law is the contradiction between commodities and subjects. Commodities according to

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

relate to each other as values, that is exchange takes place on the basis of equivalent amounts of labour-time embodied in commodities passing between buyers and sellers, indicating that there are social relations among things and material relations among people. Contract is both logically the central legal premise on which all other aspects of law are based, and also the highest form of expression of the commodity owning subject. This is because it is the relations of contract that are crucial for commodity production society since the contract is the necessary legal expression of commodity owners' ability to use their commodities in the market. For Pashukanis, all other forms of legal relations in capitalism flow from this.

The historical premise

The commodity form of exchange historically precedes the legal system which emerges from it. But it is not merely that the commodity form produces the legal form; it is that the commodity form exists prior to the legal form and that only with the full development of the commodity form is there the possibility of a fully developed abstract legal form at all.

Fetishism

Commodity form theory is related to Marx's theory of

commodity fetishism In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people ...

. Marx argued that the commodity was a fetishized form because the formal equality that the commodity form postulated was only an apparent equality. The legal form is blind to substantive human differences, just as the commodity form is blind to substantive differences in use value. Ultimately, the legal form, just as the commodity form, exists independently of the will of the individual. The illusion is produced that the law – as the universal political equivalent – has a life of its own.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Commodity Form Theory Communist theory Jurisprudence