The Withering Away of the Legal Form: Revisiting Past Debates for Future Movements

This chapter revisits the withering away thesis and examines its contemporary significance by focusing explicitly on the notion of the legal form. It begins by analysing this notion, as developed by Evgeny Pashukanis, in an attempt to review its analytical value. Recognising the historicity of the legal form (whose establishment was one of the major contributions of Pashukanis’ ‘General Theory of Law’) the chapter moves on to discuss the withering away thesis as developed by the classics of Marxism and as received by Soviet theorists. It continues discussing the most recent theoretical work on the withering away debate, namely Alexandros Chrysis’s work on democracy and communism and Igor Shoikhedbrod’s idea of ‘communist legality’. Motivated by these fruitful and challenging contributions, and cautious to avoid the idealist dangers of providing recipes for the cook-shops of the future, the chapter will tentatively put forward the following hypothesis: that the legal form, the predominant form of social consciousness in capitalist society, may be replaced by new forms of social consciousness based on the notion of the ‘ethical community’ (Sittlichkeit) and the principle of the ‘free and full development of the individual’.