Carlo Di Mascio

Can Marxist-Leninist philosophy exist without dialectical materialism, without the analysis of material and social contradictions, and without the need to overcome and resolve them in the interests of revolutionary transformation? Does the speaker acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism, as Lenin asked Bogdanov one day in May 1908? What had ‘official Soviet Marxism’ really become, capable of combining ideological dictatorship with militant philosophical ignorance, itself justified by the achievements of modern science, skilfully utilised as an instrument of domination and the preservation of the established order? How can one conceptually master reality and its contradictions, knowing full well that knowledge is never neutral but is class-based? These questions are answered by Evald Ilyenkov, one of the greatest Marxist philosophers of the 20th century, who, in the late 1970s, re-examined Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in a text entitled Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism—still unpublished in Italy—and identified the revolutionary leader as an exceptional theoretical ally. Just as Lenin had had to combat the attacks launched by Bogdanov’s theories—which drew on the empirio-criticism of Mach, Avenarius and Berman—as a form of dogmatic and reactionary materialism directed against the natural sciences, so too did Ilyenkov combat the infiltration of positivism into Soviet politics and philosophy, criticising the rejection of dialectics as serving only the technocratic project of building ‘socialism’ in the Brezhnev era—a disguised heir to the very empirio-criticism denounced by Lenin as the natural metaphysical conclusion of the logic of positivism.

For Pashukanis, law is not an a priori process, independent of the movement of society and its fundamental contradictions. It constitutes a social relationship specific to bourgeois society, in whose (legal) form – just like the commodity form, the money form and the labour form, as Marx demonstrated – lies hidden only the process of command and exploitation that gave rise to it. It is as if to say that there is no such thing as law, just as there is no such thing as power, but rather there are those who command and those who obey, those who exploit and those who are exploited. In this observation—which is, indeed, of the utmost theoretical relevance today, and which the crudeness of the established Soviet power could not comprehend at all—there lies an act of demystification and, at the same time, political critique on the part of Pashukanis, who, thanks to Marx, discovers that will no longer determines anything, since social relations have become independent of their subjects, the real, flesh-and-blood individuals, now calmly expelled from their concrete lives through legal norms; but above all that the objective other is nothing other than that which belongs to each individual, yet which capitalist society has managed to autonomise and take away from them. If, as Marx maintains, bourgeois political economy has claimed to demonstrate the eternity and harmony of existing social relations by unduly superimposing the categories of the bourgeois era onto all past eras, with a consequent inability to assess them objectively, inasmuch as it is always self-serving — the same operation is carried out by bourgeois legal science, and in particular by the school of natural law, which, in constructing ‘in its most general and abstract form’ the conditions of existence of bourgeois society, always regards them ‘as the conditions of existence of every society’.

In 1931, Evgeni Pashukanis published an essay entitled ‘Hegel. State and Law’, dedicated to the centenary of Hegel’s death. This text calls not only for taking a clear stance in a society founded on class struggle, but also for recognising that the capitalist ruling class, when it feels threatened, defends itself by resorting to every possible means, knowing that everything must in any case unfold within the organisation of capital—which is nothing other than the organisation of society— so that its ideological, philosophical and bureaucratic-judicial system represents only the essential condition of the dialectic of capitalist-bourgeois development, which unfolds powerfully between the imposition of labour and the social reproduction of the relationship of exploitation. And in its own way, this essay also urges us never to forget that if we lose sight of the insight that Marxism received from Hegel—namely, that no cognitive process can ever be reduced to the mere production of an isolated subject-consciousness, but is solely the consequence of its logical dynamism as collective praxis, in which every element is dialectically linked to the other in perfect harmony with material reality – one inevitably ends up losing all capacity for criticism of the existing world outside oneself. Moreover, a subject constructed as pure formality, which is not substance but illusory self-certainty, having become a mere function of exploitation, will never be capable of criticising capitalism.

By overcoming the historical separation between logic and the theory of being—that is, by rejecting the idea that the forms of thought are exclusively subjective and, on the contrary, demonstrating that they are themselves closely connected to objective reality—Hegel thus ‘geniusly intuited’, as Lenin puts it, ‘that logical forms and laws are not an empty shell, but a reflection of the objective world’. Whereas Kantian logic presents itself as a scientific investigation into the forms of knowledge, whilst its contents remain external, the Hegelian approach, on the other hand, does not separate form and content, since reality itself is pervaded by an internal logic, in which rationality manifests itself in the human mind, whilst being already present in things themselves. For this reason, Hegelian logic would coincide with metaphysics, in that the structures of reality, revealed by logic, are not merely formal schemes of thought but constitute the foundations of reality—a reality that goes beyond the senses and the perceptible—from which it follows that the exploration of these logical structures also becomes a study of the structures of reality, so that logic and metaphysics correspond. If, for Hegel, ‘nature, this immediate totality, unfolds in the logical idea and in the spirit’, this means, writes Lenin, that ‘logic is the doctrine of knowledge. The theory of knowledge’, and that ‘Knowledge is man’s reflection of nature’.

Karl Korsch, Chris J. Arthur, Oskar Negt, Bernard Edelman, Ronnie Warrington, Alan Norrie, Óscar Correas, Ingo Elbe, Andreas Harms, Celso Naoto Kashiura Jr., Márcio Bilharinho Naves, Alberto Bonnet, Étienne Balibar, Mariana Giaretto, Alysson Leandro Mascaro, Luiz Felipe Brandão Osório, Carlo Di Mascio, Antonio Negri. This volume is a tribute to Evgeny Pashukanis, a century after the publication in Russian of his major work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, in 1924. Pashukanis was, along with his compatriot Rubin, Lukács, Korsch, and a few others, one of those Marxists of the 1920s who were ahead of their time and continue to challenge their readers a century later. Pashukanis's decisive contributions are, naturally, framed within legal theory. He is widely recognized as one of the most rigorous Marxist critics of law. But they go beyond even that framework. His way of posing the problem of the State, for example, exerted a notable influence on the debate on the derivation of the State (which we publish in full, simultaneously, within this same collection of Marxismos contemporáneos). However, his thought is relatively little known in Argentina and in Latin America in general, with the exception of Brazil. This volume attempts to begin to reverse this ignorance through a broad discussion of his work, bringing together in its pages everything from Korsch's pioneering review, through the discussions prompted by the recovery of his work in the 1970s, to the most recent readings.

This text introduces the publication of Pashukanis's essay [Гегель. Государство и право (К столетию со дня смерти)] on the occasion of its first full German translation [edited by Karlo Lebt]. In the book Jahrbuch für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie #3: Postmarxismus, Mandelbaum Verlag eG, Wien - Berlin, 2024 by René Bohnstingl, Carlo Di Mascio, Simon Duncker, Gerhard Hanloser, Finn Holzner, Emanuel Kapfinger, Lukas Meisner, Monika Mokre, Peter Nowak, Linda Lilith Obermayr, Eugen Paschukanis, Karl Reitter, Dorothea Schmidt, Paul Stephan and Gerold Wallner. The Jahrbuch für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie sees itself as an alternative to academic developments in the academic world. Beyond Marxological philology, Marx's thought should rather be the background and starting point for a critical reflection on social developments. The analysis of central concepts of post-Marxism as well as their practical political consequences the focus of the third edition of the Jahrbuch. In particular, the (in)compatibility of post-Marxist radical constructivism and the rejection of the primacy of the economy and the class struggle with the original Marxist project is discussed. The ‘reprint’ section contains the first German-language translation of the little-known essay by Evgeny Pashukanis, ‘Hegel. State and Law (On the century of his Death)’. The volume is rounded off by numerous reviews of books whose topicality is not determined by their date of publication, but by the relevance of their relevance of their content.

Reading Kant through Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs offers a way of understanding how the restoration of unity can be achieved in the face of what threatens the established order. The novel posits a quest for self-transcendence through consensual submission, while highlighting how power uses philosophy to domesticate and normalise singularity. In this process, limits are set to prevent potentially overreaching transformations, ensuring that changes respect already consolidated values. Thus, singularity ends up being absorbed by the general framework, in a dynamic that recalls the practical purpose of Kantian morality, de facto inapplicable, but which, by adhering to the formal definition of the Law, becomes a tool to neutralise any attempt to undermine the ultimate foundations of the constituted order such as the Subject, the Law, the Duty, The Ultimate End or the State. The most striking aspect is that this same normative scheme resurfaces, mutatis mutandis, in the devices of neoliberalism, so that the Kantian ideology of submission to duty translates today into the construction of a subject perfectly adapted to the systemic priorities of contemporary capitalism, perpetuating structures that prevent the possibility of a true emancipation or subversion of the existing order.

Can Marxist-Leninist philosophy disregard dialectical materialism, the analysis of material and social contradictions, the need to overcome and resolve them in the service of revolutionary transformation? ‘Does the lecturer acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism’, as Lenin asked Bogdanov one day in May 1908? What had 'official Soviet Marxism' really become, capable of combining ideological dictatorship with militant philosophical ignorance, in turn justified by the achievements of modern science, skilfully used as an instrument of domination and preservation of the established order? How can one conceptually dominate reality and its contradictions, knowing well that knowledge is never neutral but is class-based? These questions are answered by Evald Ilyenkov, one of the greatest Marxist philosophers of the 20th century, re-examining Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism at the end of the 1970s with a text entitled Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, still unpublished in Italy, and identifying in the revolutionary leader an exceptional theoretical ally. Just as Lenin had had to fight the attacks promoted by the theories of Bogdanov, who approached the empirio-criticism of Mach, Avenarius and Berman, seeing it as dogmatic and reactionary materialism directed against the natural sciences, so Ilyenkov fought against the penetration of positivism into Soviet politics and philosophy, criticizing the rejection of the dialectic only functional to the technocratic project of building 'socialism' in the Brezhnev era, a disguised heir of the empirio-criticism denounced by Lenin as the natural metaphysical conclusion to the logic of positivism.

In 1931, Evgeny Pashukanis, the distinguished Soviet jurist, author of “The General Theory of Law and Marxism”, following an invitation to celebrate the centenary of Hegel’s death, published an assay entitled “Hegel, the State and Law” (Гегель. Государство и право) aimed to demistify, through a brief retrospective of Hegelian’s philosophy, its specific use, something achieved through the bourgeois ideology which, at some point in history, abandoned Kantism and its followers to embrace Neo-Hegelianism as a philosophy of domination and social control. In this unpublished text, Pashukanis reflects, from a Marxist and Leninist point of view, on the ability to use Hegel as a bourgeois defense tool, when a particular society, specifically the one from the 1920s to the 1930s, began to be affected by the fear of communism and by the crises that endanger its very survival. From this angle, the capitalist interest - following Pashukanisian interpretation of Hegel - will only develop in the terms of a scientific elimination of all those subversive potentials that the economic crisis is destined to produce, thus reformulating the notions of State and Law which, in between obedience, discipline and defense of the homeland, come to assert the official recognition of the inexorably crushed proletariat in a condition in which all relations of production and social reproduction are transferred to the realm of exploitation, as its definitive subsumption to capital.

La critica di Max Stirner, al pari di quella giuspositivistica, mirando alla dissoluzione di ogni valore assoluto, riconduce la costruzione dell'esperienza umana a un atto di volontà dell'individuo, il quale, irriducibile a ogni metafisica tradizionale e a ogni tipo di autorità ereditaria, crea e ricrea la propria esistenza e il mondo in maniera autonoma e incondizionata. In questo senso, la matrice non-cognitivistica comune sia al pensiero stirneriano che a quello giuspositivistico - oltre a denunciare il fondamento tipicamente universalistico e oggettivistico del giusnaturalismo, sempre volto ad annullare il punto di vista del soggetto e a determinare aprioristicamente quali valori e quali regole di vita egli è tenuto a seguire - fornisce l'occasione per una sorprendente quanto affascinante svolta vitalistica e materialistica, "all'insegna di una ontologia costruttivista, la quale, propugnando una concezione affermativa dell'essere, mira alla distruzione dei valori esistenti e alla continua creazione autonoma di nuovi valori".

Venus im Pelz is not just a book on masochism, love or the conflict of the sexes, but is also, in its own way, a work that aims to ridicule the philosophy par excellence, that in particular of Kant and Hegel, the great Fathers-Masters of philosophy, capable with their systems to rationalize the theme of voluntary submission, restoring the threatened order. In this direction, the same masochistic subversion, which with Severin had attempted to symbolically depose the Father, as the historical-political-cultural antecedent of Law and power, nevertheless appears destined to recompose, thanks to philosophy and its history, the product themselves of patriarchal speculations, always prompted to cage any singulariity prone to deviate from the trajectory traced by civilization. It is within this patrolling infrastructure that Severin, after «that cruel catastrophe of my life», will continue his existence, converted, from «rebelled by submission», into a new reactionary Father who now uses the whip with women, and that, now healed with its «moral steadiness [...] I learned to work, to fulfill duties» - tamed «with the Kantian ethics of the dignity of moral value that tunes with the Hegelian ethics of the redemption of the servant through the objectification of labor», does not realize that he has become himself an object of power, so that one day he may peacefully die in a rational and productive way.

On the verge of the 1917 October revolution, Lenin reads and elaborates on the Hegel's Science of Logic, as if he were attempting to outline, from it, specific effects. Theoretical effects, because human activity is never uncoupled from the logic objective, through which the real matter unfolds and to whom each individual indissolubly belongs. Practical effects, because if Hegelian philosophy is good for the Church, for the bourgeoisie, for the capital, by changing the order of some of its factors it may as well turn out good for guiding the practical-cognitive development of an urgent proletarian revolution.

Why, at a certain point in history, did the regulation of human relations acquire jurisdictional status? Why did class rule take the form of an official state power? What, in the complexity of social relationships, did the formal application of norms correspond to? But above all, why did the law, here meant as a system of legal norms, turn out particularly suited to social and economic capitalist developments? From an explicitly Marxist point of view, the author explores Evgenij Bronislavovic Pashukanis's "Theory of Law and Marxism" (1924), which is the first theoretical and organic attempt to define the structural goal of the law, not in terms of pure form, but in those of a system with systematic organization of production, thus revealing that the development of bourgeois law was not at all accidental but indeed essential to the functioning and existence of the capitalist production relationships. Towards this precise direction, “law, as a constituent element of production relations, is no longer defined by the traditional scheme of a mere ideological superstructure, but it is itself the very structure, already inherent in capitalist socialization, which is entirely immanent to society”. This captures the innovative specificity of Pashukanis's heterodoxy, certainly the greatest Marxist jurist of all time.