Spring 2026
Evgeny Pashukanis text on fascism
Submitted by Noa on Wed, 2025-09-17 10:47
The Marxist legal theorist Pashukanis wrote a 1927 article 'Toward a characterization of fascist dictatorship' (in the journal Vestnik Kom. Ak., 1927, pp. 62–91). Obviously it's about Italian fascism's first 4 years of rule. Maybe at this moment it's useful to quickly publish it, as it might be relevant for today's discourse in the US. My point of linking it here is that some comrades might forward to someone who is skilled in online/ai-translation-apps, so that they could easily/quickly turn this text into readable English (even if they don't read Russian themselves). pdf-file of whole (already OCR'd) issue:upload.wikimedia.org It was translated in German, but apparently not yet in English: Paschukanis, J ., “Zur Charakteristik der faschistischen Diktatur,” Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, 1928, 2, pp. 282-315. Pashukanis is best known for his 1924 book The General Theory of Law and Marxism, which seems pretty general. But his text on fascism looks to be a more concrete study.
By the way, another soviet book on bourgeois law is Ilya Ilinsky's 1927 book (on the decline/crisis of bourgeois law), which although rather short (120 pages), is also more concrete.
ToC:
Foreword. .. .3
- Continuity of law-order and revolution. .
- The heyday of capitalist democracy. ... ... ... .
- Revival of the classical school in the sciences of criminal law. ... 58
- Struggle of contradictions in bourgeois civil law. ... .. ... ... 78
- The clash of the bourgeois and Soviet legal order. .... 100
Subject-nominal index. ... ... .119
There are some fragments online (eg some headings going into details of various countries, in the post-WW1 era). Il’inskij [Bruk], Ilja Davidovich 1927, Krizis burzhuaznoj jurisprudentsii: Ocherki raspada burzhuaznogo prava v kriticheskuyu epochu kapitalizma [The Crisis of Bourgeois Jurisprudence: Essays on the Disintegration of Bourgeois Law in the Critical Epoch of Capitalism], Moscow: Jurizdat. Obviously the theme of decline/crisis of bourgeois law, would fit in with a theory of capitalist decline.
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I tried one of those sites
I tried one of those sites that does whole pdf translations (for free without sign-up) in one swoop. They also give a "mindmap" (visual summary) of the article (so you don't have to read the whole thing). Here's a link to the image:
h ttps://postimg.cc/k24fhwY5
You could also ask the site to do a summary. These ai-translations sites can also translate whole books, so all issues of those Soviet journals that are found online (eg Under the Banner of Marxism; _Journal of the Communist Academy_, and many, many more), which are often a couple of hundred pages each, could be translated by letting it run 10 minutes, even if one doesn't speak Russian. It's crazy that nobody of the vast world of online-communist posters has done this yet.
Anyway, in Pashukanis's original text there are 5 sections. But as you hopefully see, the ai-translation site I used created a "mindmap" with 11 sections (with each 4 sentences/points).