The Abolition of Law or Law of the Common(s)?: Pashukanis and the Revolution

In the struggles against neoliberalism, it is difficult to reconcile the language of instituent practices and the language of revolution, the transformation of the present in its totality. This difficult link also raises the problem of law. The production of commons is interpreted as a source of an alternative legality (the law of the commons). But can law be appropriated and used as part of a more general project of radical transformation? What is the relationship between the law of the commons and Revolution? To think of these problematic issues one can revaluate the question of abolition of law in the analysis of the Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis, whose legal theory precisely focuses on the relationship between legal form, transition, abolition of law, and communism. According to Pashukanis, law is only bourgeois law: the revolution is the process of abolition of law. But abolition of law can be presented both as a progressive erosion of legal form and as an antagonistic terrain crossed by class subjectivities. Consequently, the relationship between the law of the commons and the abolition of law can be presented as an open, dualistic dynamic between two aspects of revolutionary transformation.