the Marxian theory of law in particular.”35 Because Marx believed that law arises from class conflicts, he concluded that the need for law would cease to exist with the advent of classless communism. Such a promise of lawlessness that leads to “perfect justice” was correctly interpreted by Kelsen as being “a utopian prophecy”.36
Since lawlessness is elevated by Marxism to represent the final stage of communism—which according to Marx necessarily predates “a period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”—it is not unreasonable to explain the undercurrent of extreme violence manifested in Marxist regimes as being little more than the projection of such political ideas. In other words, the mass killings which have constantly occurred in communist countries may actually represent a mere by-product of the foundations of lawlessness laid by Marx himself. Since the Marxist state assumes authoritarian forms and frees itself from any constitutional checks and balances, “this leaves out of account … very powerful impulses to state action generated from within the state by people in charge of decision-making power.”37 As a result, says Freeman,
“ … those holding powerful positions in the state may be interested in power, status, privilege … and money. They will not express themselves in terms of personal interest, but rather in terms of ‘national interest’ and those who seek state power usually find it to convince themselves and others that their achievement of power is synonymous with the ‘national interest’.”37
Marxism and human rights
The main objective of classical Marxist jurisprudence is not to promote human rights or to support the separation of governmental powers, nor even equality before the law, but to criticise these very ideals of the rule of law and to reveal its putative structures of socio-economic domination. Thus in his Principles of Communism, Engels described such values as individual rights and equality before the law as fraudulent masks worn by the bourgeoisie for economic supremacy and exploitation. In fact, all the most cherished values of democratic societies were denounced by Engels as merely being ideological tools for legitimising an exploitive system that would serve only the dominant economic group.38
With this idea in mind, Marx argued that basic human rights are not fixed but rather are constantly evolving according to the progressive stages of class warfare. In On the Jewish Question, Marx explained that in his opinion, the so-called rights of man are “simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.” He saw liberty as not founded upon the relations between free and responsible individual citizens, but “rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation.”39 For him, its practical application was the right to property. “If power is taken on the basis of right”, commented Marx and Engels in The German Ideology,
“ … then right, law, etc., are merely the symptoms of other relations upon which state power rests. The material life of individuals … their mode of production and form of interest which eventually determine each other … this is the real basis of the State … . The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have to give their will … a universal expression as the will of the State, as law.”40
Photo by Adam Carr, wikipedia.com
Figure 3. Well over 500,000 people died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign in the 1970s. The extermination of political adversaries and of entire social groups is a normal practice amongst communist regimes. Such a bloodbath is the by-product of a materialistic worldview that deems the most powerful to be the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.
Can Marxists then believe in the universality of human rights whilst remaining faithful to Marxism? After all, Marx talked about the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” having to be eliminated in its entirety. What i