Marxist/Leninist Law
by David A. Noebel
Marxist/Leninist law carries the burden of biological evolution, class warfare, and its own demise. The victory of communism brings with it the end of all class conflicts, the elimination of private property, and paradise on earth. Once paradise is achieved, there is no need for law or the state.
The biological theory of evolution plays a most significant role in Marxist legal theory. There are no legal absolutes because mankind is evolving and law is evolving with it. There is no eternal lawgiver, and there are no eternal legal principles. Legal principles that assist man in his evolution are just; all others are unjust.
Marxists generally trace law back to the concept of private property. Thus law has both a biological and an economic heritage. Property, says the Marxist, divides mankind into owners and non-owners—that is, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Law was devised by the propertied class to protect its property. Marxists refer to this as bourgeois law. All bourgeois law is considered unjust, since it stifles the proletariat’s evolutionary destiny. "Your jurisprudence," said Marx, "is but the will of your class made into law."1
While the basis of bourgeois law is to protect private property, the basis of proletarian law is to protect social or state property. Socialist law grants certain human rights but only such rights as assist the advancement of socialism and communism. Socialist law is just law. Bourgeois law is unjust law. Therefore, to violate bourgeois law is proper and not unlawful. To violate bourgeois law on behalf of socialist law is especially proper.
Marxist/Leninists like to think that proletarian law reflects proletarian man and the proletariat. The truth is slightly different. The vanguard of the proletariat is the Marxist/Leninist Party, and the head of the Party is the Dictator of the Proletariat. In the final analysis, socialist law equals proletarian law equals Marxist/Leninist Party law. And since the Party and the state are one, socialist law quickly becomes positive law with an economic twist. "A court," said Lenin, "is an organ of the state." Written into the U.S.S.R. constitution [especially Article 6] is the fact that the Communist Party is the only guide of Soviet society and the only interpreter of its laws. Hence, the Marxist/Leninist Party decrees the law and the Marxist/Leninist Party is the state that enforces the law. Human rights are decreed by the Party, but only such human rights as advance the socialist goal.
Once the full socialist system is victorious, however, the proletariat experiences its victory of communist paradise and law ceases (along with the state), since the initial reason for law—private property—ceases. Once private property ceases, crime ceases, also, and law withers due to the lack of class struggle. All inequality vanishes. Mankind has evolved to a level determined by nature itself, a goal all Marxist/Leninists strive to accomplish.
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, forty volumes (New York: International Publishers, 1976), vol. 6, p. 501.
