Abstract
The article analyses the socio-legal enforcement and reproduction of capitalism. Capitalist accumulation has two contradictory and entangled sides: exchange of equivalents and expropriation. The thesis is that the critique of the legal form of capitalism as formulated by Eugen Paschukanis cannot really understand the development of capitalism, since it examines the position of law only within the framework of the equivalent form and the commodity fetishism. In its expansionist phase, however, the accumulation of capital depends on the commodifying of not yet commodified spaces, that is, on an act of open - and not fetishized - violence capable of imposing capitalist social relations in territories and groups where these relations are still relatively or completely strange. This phase is analysed on the basis of the Marxist account of the primitive accumulation and expropriation. Under these conditions, my hypothesis is that the law appears as explicit legal violence that blatantly prescribes social inequality. At the end, I propose some questions to reflect on the place of this violence in social emancipation.
Keywords:
Capitalism; Equivalent Form of Commodities; Expropriation; Legal Form; Legal Violence