States.
Marx’s ideas about law were expressed mainly in the Communist Manifesto, which he published in collaboration with his friend Friedrich Engels in 1848. In that paper Marx contends that “law, morality, religion, are so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” Then he goes on to criticise the whole tradition of government under the rule of law as nothing more than a mere expression of “bourgeois” aspirations:
“Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all; a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class … . The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.”28
According to Marx, the final advent of revolutionary communism necessarily requires “a period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”29 In other words, he contended that dictatorship is the only way in which the ideal of communism can be advanced. On the basis of such a radical premise, V.I. Lenin (figure 2) argued that Marxist law does not seek to protect any human right, but that Marxism regards law only as a mechanism “for holding the other subordinated classes obedient to the one class”.30 The obvious implication of this assumption was summed up in a famous Soviet slogan: “All power belongs to the Soviets.” The same assumption is also revealed in this excerpt from a book published by English-speaking communists in revolutionary Russia:
“The proletarian state … is an organization of the dominating class (the dominating class here is the working class) and an organization of the violence over the bourgeoisie, as a means of getting rid of the bourgeoisie and of putting an end to it. He who is afraid of this kind of violence is not a revolutionist.”31
Marx believed that a regular pattern of evolution controlled the human condition, which would then also lead to a more perfect society of classless individuals. Since the destiny of humankind was considered to lie in the emergency of lawless communism, law was interpreted as not encompassing any universal values or principles, but rather representing a transitional device that merely illustrates “the course of political struggles and the evolution of social formations”.32 In Marx’s opinion, the legal phenomenon is essentially superstructural and, therefore, invariably “dependent for their form and content upon determining forces emanating from the economic basis of society.”33 The legal system of each human society is regarded as a mere superstructure which is always linked with the superstructure of the state. In Marxist theory, explain David and Brieley,
“Law is only a superstructure; in reality it only translates the interests of those who hold the reins of command in any given society; it is an instrument in the service of those who exercise their ‘dictatorship’ in this society because they have the instruments of production within their control. Law is a means of expressing the exploited class; it is, of necessity, unjust—or, in other words, it is only just from the subject point of view of the ruling class. To speak of a ‘just’ law is to appeal to an ideology—that is to say, a false representation of reality; justice is no more than an historical idea conditioned by circumstances of class.”34
Since the idea of law was interpreted by Marx as invariably an instrument of class domination, he argued that the coming of a classless society implied that all laws would have to disappear. Hence in his seminal work, The Communist Theory of Law (1955), legal philosopher Hans Kelsen contends that the “anti-normative approach to social phenomena is an essential element of the Marxian theory in general and of 