TWO REVIEWS BY TOM KEMP

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ports. Remember the lads down labour and redundancies. Devlin here have been in and out for mos last austriesar tind leave most behind militancy.

The main reason why the employers put up such a tough front was because they have everything to lose. If the higher basic had been won it would have put paid to Phase Two.

With the £20 basic, piece rates and tonnage and bonusés they could never put up their present offer of £35 for Phase Two on this dock again. They have a cheek offering us this in the first place when you can get near this with the old methods —without speed-up, redundancies etc.

And the next step in this fight is, of course, against Phase Two.

We will not accept this at all, we still want the £20 basic the bonuses and the piecework. This is our answer. And if we don't get it through official channels we will go our way like we have always done in the past.

Now there is a lot of money being earned on some of the container berths in Liverpool.

But its 20 men working on a dock where there used to be 300 and that's no exaggeration. For this they get £10 a day pittance for the cargo they are shifting.

IMPORTAN STALI BRITAIN NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS PRICE 22s6d 186A Clarke High& On the Gladstone container dock you get no tonnage rates and work for a flat 19s 6d-anhour rate.

But they shift at the rate of about 600 tons-an-hour. Let's say. you should get Is a ton, which is cheap, this means a man should be earning 600s an hour, that's £30 an hour-we think this is a reasonable claim for Devlin.

Devlin Phase Two will be a weapon the hands of the employers in many ways. You see you all get the same rate, no matter what cargo.

So you could have an easy cargo like plywood and a bad one like carbon black, who goes on which? You can guess, it gives the employer a whip to beat the militants with, it's the fighter who will get all the bad jobs to break them down.

They issued the 42-page Devlin Phase Two document in reply to our demands—now there's one thing this is good for. When I feel a bit depressed I read it— the bumper book of fun we call it on the docks. It's really quite a good laugh.

But seriously we all know the big one has yet to come, I think this will be. in the next 12 months. And if the unions are not going to go in fighting we'll do it on our own—it will probably be an unofficial strike.

READING NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS A TROTSKYIST ANALYSIS A neglected subject MARXISTS have paid little attention in recent years to the theory of law and jurisprudence, despite its importance and the observations of Marx and Engels on the subject.

In the early years of the Soviet state it was bound to be of burning interest.

What had to be done with the legal codes and procedures, the courts and prisons inherited from the past?

What would have to be the basis of law and legal theory in what was regarded as 'the period of transition'?

The author of this book, which has just appeared in French some 30 years atter the last . German edition, tries to deal with such questions in the context of a general Marxist theory of law.

It must be regarded as an important contribution to this sadly-neglected field — despite some obvious shortcomings and a translation into English would certainly be useful.

Pasukanis, who was of Lithuanian extraction (Lithuania formed part of the Tsarist empire), joined the Bolshevik Party as a law student in 1912. After the Revolution he was regarded as the leading Soviet jurist and was entrusted with the elaboration of a new criminal code. Vyshinsky He was a man of considerable talent and of Marxist culture as this book, first written in 1924, shows. It can be regarded as preStalinist work and an effort to apply Marxism in an honest way to the problems of Soviet development.

With the rise of Stalinism his views came under attack; the bureaucracy was particularly sensitive to what he wrote about the status of law and morality in the period of the 'withering away of the state'.

His place was taken by the infamous Vyshinsky, later prosecutor in the Moscow Trials.

A new anti-Marxist legal theory was formulated by this exMenshevik to conform with the needs of socialism in one country'. The discussion Pasukanis had started was closed. He was obliged to repudiate his book and perished in the purges about 1937.

Attack

Pasukanis directs his main attack against the bourgeois theories of law current in the first quarter of this century.

In that sense the book has dated because, as J. M. Vincent points out in his preface, new theories have since appeared on the scene which have been obliged to take account of the scientific socialism must take as its example the critique of bourgeois political economy such as Marx gave us.

"With that end, the critique must go into enemy territory, that is to say it must not simply reject the generalizations and abstractions elaborated by bourgeois jurists in accordance with the needs of their times and their class, but analyse these abstract categories and demonstrate their real significance, in other words, discover the historical conditioning of the juridical form' In a critical article by the German left communist' Korsch, written in 1930, which appears in the volume in the guise ot an Introduction, Pasukanis's work is criticized for being too: pedantic and dogmatic.

More seriously, Korsch charges him, as it were, with not seeing the actual developments in Russia in the 1920s in a materialist way because of his assumption that the transition to socialism had begun.

No doubt the work bears the marks of the contradictions in Pasukanis's own position.

Rigorous, indeed tending to be doctrinaire in his analysis of bourgeois jurisprudence, if he understood the deformations in the law — as well as in other spheres - which were taking place in the Soviet Union, he was either blind to them or concealed them from his readers since, as a high Sovięt official, he either had to do so or to throw in his lot with the Left OpposiBut there is enough in Pasukanis's work to make his book dangerous to the bureaucracyhence his own fate. And, although he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956 his book still remains too dangerous to be circulated.

Accumulation

Just as Marx sees capitalist society as taking the form of an enormous accumulation of commodities, so society as a whole is made up, according to Pasukanis, of an uninterrupted chain of legal relations.

The Marxist conception begins with economic relations: it is only from these relations that a general theory of law can spring. This is the basis for the refutation of 'normative' theories of law: i.e. those which see the legal codes as determining the relations of exchange between individuals and require a corresponding theory about the state.

'It is quite clear,' writes Pasukanis 'that the logic of juridical concepts corresponds to the logic of social relations in a society based upon commodity production. It is precisely in these relations, and not in the support of the public authorities, that the roots of the system of private law must be sought.

'On the contrary, the logic of the roots of domination and dependence only enter in part into juridical concepts.

"That is why the juridical theory of the state can never become a theory and always remains an ideological deformation of the facts.' Even a statement of this kind could be dangerous to Stalinism, because Vyshinsky took up what was, in a sense, a version of what Pasukanis refers to as the juridical theory in order to conceal the role of the bureaucracy Man 4 19.4. al a meeting (miles Parad gentral seid of Imagination 1-1. 'LA THEORIE GENERALE DU DROIT ET LE MARXISME' (The General Theory of Law and Marxism) By Eugeny B. Pasukanis. Translated by J. M. Brohm. Presented by J. M. Vincent. Introduction Karl Korsch.

Etudes et Documentation Descartes, Paris-V. 1970.

and the strengthening of the organs of state power at its at its command.

In developing his general theory Pasukanis bases himself upon Marx's 'Capital' and the Introduction to the Critique of In the chapter entitled "The Commodity and the Subject' he spells out the legal parallel to commodity relations in the clearest terms, although, as Korsch points out, in an abstract way. What he is showing, in short, that 'commodity fetishism' . has as its parallel juridical fetishism'.

This chapter is too closely written to be adequately summarized.

Treating the subject historically, as capitalism arose from feudalism, he shows that only when bourgeois relations had become fully developed did law assume an abstract character.

Only when things took on commodity form, became exchange values, did they become a pure object for the law and the persons disposing of them pure subjects.

Reciprocal

So the contract, the central concept of bourgeois law, arises from a reciprocal act of exchange. In the same way arose juridical concepts of private property.

Capitalist private property is 'basically the freedom to transform capital from one form to another and from one sphere to another in order to obtain the highest profit without working. This liberty to dispose of capitalist property is impossible without the existence of people deprived of property, this is of proletarians'.

With the rise of business companies, capitalist property beBOOKS comes still more impersonal. The company itself has legal personality, the owners (shareholders) have merely a right to dividends without working, and huge masses of capital are controlled by small groups of capitalists.

Pasukanis traces out the rise of the state and its relationship to the law, discusses the relationship between law and morality and concludes with a discussion of crime, guilt and punishment.

Again, the treatment is generally clear, if abstract.

What he is arguing, basically, Is that in the transition period there will be a survival of bourgeois norms which can only be got rid of as the state withers away.

Old forms

It was these sections which became dangerous in the Stalin period and remain so in the For Pasukanis also says that while the proletariat must utilize the old forms inherited from the bourgeois past, that does not mean that they could continue to develop and take on a socialist content.

On the contrary, as that content was realized they would perish. The proletariat thus had to have a clear idea, free from all ideological veils, of the historical origin of these forms.

And Pasukanis continues:

'The proletariat must have a coldly critical attitude, not only towards bourgeois morality and the bourgeois state, but also visà-vis its own state and its own morality. It must be conscious, in other words, of the historical necessity for their existence but also for their disappearance?

Unwittingly he had signed own death-warrant.