Date: Sun, 30 Apr 1995 15:21:29 +0800 From: bandt-AT-cleo.murdoch.edu.au Subject: Marx, law and the corporate form In _On Law and Ideology_ (1979, Ch5) Paul Hirst suggests that Marx, and those writing after him such as Pashukanis and Renner, inadequately conceptualised the relationship between law and the means of production. Through an analysis of the political struggles over the nature of the corporate form in the 18th and 19th centuries in England, Hirst argues that: i) the joint-stock company was not merely a 'natural' expression of the legal relations necessary for capital; ii) that 'productive' and manufacturing capital in particular were not behind the push to create the corporate form; iii) that for Marx (Capital, Vol 3) the growth amongst the population of share ownership (with shareholders as rentier capitalists), and the concurrent separation of management from ownership, was seen as an effect of the increasingly socialised character of the productive forces, albeit under capitalism. The stock market is seen primarily as a speculative arena, characterised by adventurers and 'gung-ho' capitalists. This, says Hirst, is wrong, as the joint-stock company does not represent a sign of dissolution of capitalist relations, and 'the centralisation of financial markets and the credit system has led to the domianation of corporate enterprises, banks and other institutions, holding companies etc., not individual super-capitalist adventurers. Indeed, it is those institutions which are the main means of centralisation.' (p136) Marx's main failings, says Hirst, stemmed from his assumptions that the legal form of economic relations simply arises out of those economic relations, and that Marx comprehends both by understanding capitalists only as indivdiual, anthropomorphic entities who willingly engage in commercial transactions, implying that the change to the joint-stock company represented a 'breaking down' (and socialising) of capital because all the functions of the capitalist were no longer contained in one entity. Pashukanis argued that the legal subject was created to facilitate exchange: that the economic subject (ie person as trader, as capitaliat) preceded and caused the 'rights bearing' subject of bourgeois law. Hirst's objections to the notion of social totality which supposedly explains why Marx and Pashukanis had to understand legal phenomena as effects of the means of production, objections elaborated in Hirst et al.'s _Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today_ go some way to explaining his critique. Even if one can succesfully demolish Hirst's philosophical presumtions, it still leaves unanswered his point that the corporate form cannot simply be 'read off' the means of production. It seems to me that this raises big questions for marxism. Fundamentally, it suggests that law isn't understandable either as part of the relations of production nor the 'superstructure'. If the legal form of the organisation of capital is not simply relatively independent of the forces of production, but can in fact be determining (a fortiori when the legal form is promoted by finance capital which in turn affects manufacturing capital), doesn't this imply not only a far greater emphasis on understanding legal relations, but also a demolition of the works of those like Pashukanis who took the first steps towards such an understanding? I'd be particularly interested to hear responses from people reading Hardt and Negri's _Labor of Dionysus_, as their chapters on the juridical form of labour have an acknowledged (but limited) debt to Pashukanis, but attempt to grapple with both the form of law and its nature as an 'instrumennt' of the state. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005