Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the “Relative Autonomy” of the Law

Abstract

This chapter attempts to outline the essentials of a Marxian theory of law. This theory entails a simultaneous rejection of both an instrumentalist or reductionist approach, and a formalist approach. A commodity, to begin with, is a use-value: it is a qualitatively distinct object which exists to fulfill a qualitatively distinct, concrete human need and has been brought into existence by a qualitatively distinct form of labor, which Karl Marx calls "concrete labor." Insofar as Marx gives a definition of productive labour in general, this is simply labour considered from the standpoint of the product, that is, the process of combination of labourer, means of labour and object of labour viewed as leading to a result: a determinate product. In a sense the whole production process becomes a &s;function of capital&s;, since it is the capitalist enterprises which organise the collective labourer and carry out the application of new technologies.