ventually justify its grip on the means of production and the sources of wealth. As Marx put it,
“I was led by many studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French writers of the eighteenth century under the name ‘civil society’, and that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy [i.e. in economic forces] … . In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructure arise, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.”26
Marxist legal theory
Figure 2. Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920. The Soviet dictator considered that Marxism “subordinates the ethical standpoint to the principle of causality, in the practice it reduces to the class struggle.” As such, Lenin declared 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.”
Darwin’s evolutionary theory had a profound impact on the Western conception of law. Under its influence there proceeded over the nineteenth century a thorough transformation of legal studies as well as a general assumption among the judicial elite that “since humans are allegedly accidents, so are their laws.”27 Following the trend of his time, Marx stood together with other social “scientists” in their absolute rejection of the concept of natural law that had guided and inspired the founders of modern-democratic constitutionalism in the United 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 t