s more, Marx openly denied that any of our most important human rights possess any absolute meaning apart from their historical context. According to Marx himself, human rights exist insofar as the government creates them and allows them to exist. The idea of rights is, therefore, entirely subject to the supreme authority of the state.41
Marx strongly advocated the abolition of all legal and moral rules.42 Communism, as the fundamental good of humanity according to him, would have to eliminate “the conditions of morality and circumstances of justice”.43 Such a view of morality in practice amounts to “a self-consistent attack on non-relativist ethics”. As a matter of fact, says Freeman, “Marx, and subsequent Marxists have singled out [morality] as ideological and relative to class interests and particular modes of production.”44 To Marx and Engels, Freeman comments that
“ … all that ‘basic laws’ would do is furnish principles for the regulation of conflicting claims and thus serve to promote class compromise and delay revolutionary change. Upon the attainment of communism the concept of human rights would be redundant because the conditions of social life would no longer have need of such principles of constraint. It is also clear (particularly in the writings of Trotsky) that in the struggle to attain communism concepts like human rights could be easily pushed aside—and were.”45
Since Marx advocated that morality has no transcendent justification, and as such no independence from socio-economic facts and historical contexts,
“ … in the communist societies which were given impetus by variants of Marxist revolutionary thought and action, law became largely identified with the interests of the revolutionary vanguard or ruling party within the communist state. It did not support to function as a vehicle to protect against oppressive action on behalf of the state. Law was in a sense merely an application of ruling party policy.”46
The Soviet dictator Lenin once explained that in Marxism there is actually “not a single grain of ethics from beginning to end”. Theoretically, he explained, “it subordinates the ethical standpoint to the principle of causality, in the practice it reduces to the class struggle.”47 Thus, in a lecture delivered in Moscow in 1919, Lenin also argued that that “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is ruled, won, and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”48 Indeed, as Tismaneanu points out:
“Communism in its Leninist version (and, one must recognize, this has been the only successful application of the original dogma) was from the very outset inimical to the values of individual rights and human freedom. In spite of its overblown rhetoric about emancipation from oppression and necessity, the leap into the kingdom of freedom announced by the founding fathers turned out to be actually an experiment in ideologically driven unbound social engineering. The very idea of an independent judiciary was rejected as ‘rotten liberalism’. The party defined what was legal and what was not: as in Hitler’s Germany, where the heinous 1936 Nuremberg trials were a legal fiction dictated by Nazi racial obsessions, Bolshevism from the very outset subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. The class enemy had to be weeded out, destroyed, smashed without any sign of mercy.”49
Marx believed not only in the evolution of the races and societies but also that history was invariably on his side. So it was easy for him to consider his political adversaries reactionaries, who deserved no legal right and protection but instead severe punishment for retarding the march of humanity.50 Marxist theory therefore denies that anything can be properly called right unless it advances socialism. In such a manner a radical ideology can be applied with the same catastrophic results that occur when radical ideas are applied to racial issues. From the standpoint of Realpoli