Kessler on Authoritarianism in Marxist Thought

Jeremy Kessler, Columbia Law School, has posted The Problem of Authoritarianism in Marxist Legal Thought, which is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook on Law and Authoritarianism, edited by Cora Chan, Madhav Khosla, Benjamin Liebman, and Mark Tushnet:

The more that contemporary scholars of authoritarianism seek to distinguish between, on the one hand, competitive authoritarianism and authoritarian legality and, on the other, the liberal and democratic deficits of ostensibly liberal democratic regimes, the more they will be retracing the immensely creative if often tragic steps of Marxist legal thought. This chapter sets itself two tasks. First, to provide an overview of Marxist legal theorists’ relationship to authoritarianism, both in its liberal democratic and more avowedly illiberal, anti-democratic forms. Second, to make some sense of an intellectual tradition that began by criticizing authoritarianism, came to defend it, and then spent decades in the wilderness – if not the grave – trying to rectify its errors. 

The chapter is organized in a chronological series of vignettes, each of which aims to capture a stage in the Marxist encounter with authoritarianism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on bourgeois legality and the dictatorship of the proletariat; Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on the relationship between democracy and proletarian dictatorship; Evgeny Pashukanis and Pyotr Stuchka’s debate about the practical possibility and political tendency of “proletarian law”; Franz Neumann and Ernst Bloch’s reconsiderations of the relationship between socialism and natural law; and Nicos Poulantzas and the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s return to Luxemburg and Pashukanis as means of making sense of authoritarian tendencies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

Taken as a whole, the chapter argues that Marxist legal thought was ahead of its time in emphasizing the authoritarian potential of liberal democratic institutions under conditions of capitalist hierarchy and atomization. Contemporary trends in the study of authoritarianism are rediscovering this basic Marxist insight. At the same time, when it came to confronting the authoritarian tendencies of anti-capitalist movements and regimes, Marxist legal thought oscillated between denial, denunciation of law and the state as such, and rediscovery of the virtues of capitalist and pre-capitalist legal and political forms. Whether that oscillation testifies to human society’s inability to transcend capitalism or its inability to transcend more fundamental facts about human nature is the question that continues to divide Marxist from liberal and conservative legal thought. However one answers that question, the problem of authoritarianism remains. Now more than ever, law appears capable of making that problem better or worse, depending on underlying social conditions. To that extent, at least, Marxist legal thought has often seen things more clearly than its liberal and conservative antagonists. 

Other contributions to the volume include essays by my Georgetown Law colleague Mark Jia and by YLS's Taisu Zhang.

--Dan Ernst

Holdren’s First Post -- My book and my plans for future posts

I want to thank the editors of the Legal History Blog for having me as a guest blogger. It’s an honor and I’m delighted to have my words on here. As Professor Tani mentioned in her introduction, I recently published a book and I want to tell you about it.

My book is called Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. It's my first book and is based on my dissertation. I think of the book as a study in the intellectual life of governance - how power relationships are conceptualized, mostly by powerful people, and what concepts are implied within power relationships, whether or not anyone actually thought them explicitly. In my view, inquiry is enriched by emphasis on both of these facets, the actual thoughts of people and the implicit logics enacted within institutional practices. I’m aware that this all sounds pretty abstract. In addition to talking about abstract matters, I also tried to foreground the real human beings who died, suffered, and lived despite all the harms to which working-class people are subjected. In my view, that dying and suffering was (and still is) largely organized by the kinds of abstractions I talk about in the book.

Hasegawa on Crime & Punishment in the Russian Revolution

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, UC Santa Barbara, has published Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd with Harvard University Press. From the publisher: 

Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s monarchy. One year later, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd’s deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution’s anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight.

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.

The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.

Praise for the book:

“Hasegawa is one of our leading historians of the February Revolution… [He] makes a strong case that the catastrophic social breakdown, most especially the violent crime that pervaded life in Petrograd after the collapse of the monarchy, ‘served as a stepping-stone toward the creation of the pervasive instrument of terror that became an integral part of the Communist dictatorship.’” -Joshua Rubenstein

“This book makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the Russian Revolution by revealing the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution in the capital city. In a narrative full of colorful characters and stories, Hasegawa gives us a street-level view of the collapse of state authority that cleared the way for the Bolshevik seizure of power.” -Eric Lohr

“Hasegawa addresses the very important, largely ignored thus far, role of crime and the breakdown of social order and public safety. In doing so he changes the way we think and write about the Russian Revolution, making this one of the more original things I have seen in a very long time.” -Rex Wade

Further information is available here.