Karl Marx, “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” [1859], in Robert C. Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). In the name “of the general interest”, Social Democrats deprive the unemployed of their welfare payments, help in reducing wages, and encourage shooting at workers’ demonstrations. We, however, say the opposite. Marxist theory develops in part because people need more than political instinct to steer by when they want to improve their situation. The doctrine of socio-economic formations is particularly important to Marx’s theory of state and law, because it provides the basis for the precise and scientific delineation of the different types of state and the different systems of law.Bourgeois political and juridical theorists attempt to establish a classification of political and legal forms without scientific criteria; not from the class essence of the forms, but from more or less external characteristics. V.I. As Engels showed, “they consider public and private law as independent areas, which have their own independent development and which must and may be subjected to independent systematic elaboration by the consistent elimination of all internal contradictions.” [6]. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program.There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. The criticism and unmasking of this eructation is necessary for the purpose of eradicating this bourgeois ideological infection. 51–68. Ideology as Law and Law as Ideology. This respected scholar consciously introduces confusion, consciously ignores the concrete historical conditions under which the working people actually can exercise administration of the state, acting as organized collectives. Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2013 [1983]); Tithi Bhattacharya (ed), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Kirstin Munro, “‘Social Reproduction Theory’, Social Reproduction, and Household Production” (2019) 83 Science & Society 451. Here we meet with a phenomenon whose form is relatively indifferent to its content, but it is improper to conclude from this that in civil law we have a “faceless instrumentality” which must be used independently of the economic class content of the relationships which it implements. According to Lenge, the brilliant and cynical reactionary of the eighteenth century, the spirit of the laws is property. As Shlomo Avineri points out, despite its disorganised nature, Marx’s 1843 Critique of the Philosophy of Right (hereafter 1843 Critique) is his most systematic work on political theory.5 Marx’s engagement with German philosophy generally, and Hegel’s PoR specifically, was premised on his understanding that what Germany lacked in social and economic development it made up for in philoso… Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Brendan McQuade, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). There is no doubt that the formulation and conformation of social relationships to the means of production is basic to law. The criticisms often levelled against the Marxist view of the state, as well as the Marxist rebuttal of the critique are also highlighted. In the legal superstructure, these relationships appear as property relations and as relations of domination and subordination. Discussions of the state in the Marxist tradition have generally been situated amidst specific disputes about the strategies that working-class movements and parties should adopt in the face of organized political power. In common with important figures in other intellectual disciplines, such as history, in late 1930 Pashukanis undertook a major self-criticism which was qualitatively different from the incremental changes to his work that he had produced earlier. oC . Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [1848], in Robert C. Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 475. The problem is that the Marxist thesis seems to imply the non-existence of relief for the poor, but in fact relief is there. The apparatus of coercion, however it was organized, belong to the slave-owners and assured their mastery over the slaves with the help of armed force, assured the right of the slave-owners to dispose of the labour and personality of the slaves, to exploit them, to commit any desired act of violence against them. A Marxist theory of the state would have to produce an explanation that worked across the entire spectrum of capitalist regimes, including the Western European ones. This definition stresses three aspects of the matter. This small book, first published in 1924, has now been translated into several Western and Eastern languages, but the English translation of the first edition appears for the first time below. PRIVACY POLICY. Marx can be thought of as having offered two sets of ideas, the first of which we can accept if we wish to, without having to accept the second. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992). Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. This classification is very typical of the confusion which bourgeois scholars consciously introduce into the question of the state. Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Conrad Schmidt” [1890]. The legal superstructure exists and functions because behind it stands an organization of the ruling class, namely the apparatus of coercion and power in the form of the army, the police, court bailiffs, prison guards and hangmen. I intend to address the topic by exploring the related ques Marxist theory of state the most protruding theory. The proletariat, having overthrown the bourgeoisie and consolidated its dictatorship, had to create Soviet law in conformity with the economy, in particular the existence of many millions of small and very small peasant farms. The dependence of law on the state, however, does not signify that the state creates the legal superstructure by its arbitrary will. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971 [1892]); Karl Kautsky, “Parliamentarism and Democracy” [1893], in Ben Lewis (ed), Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Leiden: Brill, 2020). This chapter begins with a discussion of Marxism, which is a theory about the meaning of history. Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. Law (and the state) appears with the division of society into classes. On the contrary, the two “abstract” forms – statute and legal ideology as Stuchka expresses it – are the essence of “the manifest superstructure”. It then addresses the question of whether there is a Marxist theory of law. P.I. The book argues that the main purpose of a Marxist theory of law is to expose the belief in the Rule of Law as being a subtle and pervasive ideology which serves to obscure the structures of class domination within the State. The claim to equal political rights made during the French Revolution was the apex of the separation that had emerged between the universal political identity of the citizen and the actual social standings of the individual in civil society. A discussion of the state from a Marxist standpoint is thus confronted with at least three obstacles: the incomplete character of Marx’s theorization of the state; the question of whether the state is adequately represented by the metaphor of the productive “base” and the juridical and political “superstructure”; and how, and how much, it can justifiably be said that law and the state maintain … Pashukanis was merely one of a dozen authors in the Soviet Union to publish on the Marxist theory of law and state during the years 1923 to 1925. To study law only as totality of norms means to follow the path of formalism and dogmatism. This result is not achieved automatically by laissez faire, in the same way that prices are established under free competition. Instead of class law, philosophers such as Stammler dream up abstractions, “pure forms”, general human “ideas”, “whole and durable bonds of will” – and other entirely shameless things. Eduard Bernstein,22Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken, 1961 [1909]). From Evgeny Pashukanis, Selected Writings on Marxism and Law (eds. Here, we merely emphasize the fact that without the work of legislators, judges, police and prison guards (in a word, of the whole apparatus of the class state), law would become a fiction. In the preface to Anti-Dühring, Engels formulated this thought still more clearly, indicating that “the only real definition is the development of the essence of the matter, and that is not a definition”. The equation of social relations with production relations in this case is understood purely mechanically. It is obvious that the practical part of this role developing especially luxuriantly in the litigious circumstances of bourgeois society – has nothing in common with a scientific theory of law. In connection with this, we also find the theory of bourgeois jurists-which now has been adopted in its entirety by the Social Democrats whereby the state is viewed as an agency acting in the interests of the whole society. We need decisions of cases, not formally, but in their essence; the state of the working people, as distinct from the bourgeois state, does not hide either its class character or its goal – the construction of socialism. Every law is the law of the ruling class. Class interests directly reflect their relationship to the means of production. Its principal theme is the Marxist critique of the ideal of the Rule of Law. The reader will perhaps discover that The Marxist Theory of State and Law is a text imbued with these tensions. Marx traced the growing separation between civil society and the state as part of the transition from the estate and guild societies of the late medieval period to the consolidation of mercantile capitalist society in eighteenth century northwestern Europe. Bourgeois property includes in a masked form the same relationship of domination and subordination which, in feudal property, appears chiefly as personal subordination. Marxist Theory of Law. In accordance with the three basic socio-economic formations of class society, we have three basic types of legal superstructure: slave-owning law, feudal law and bourgeois law. Yet if we allow that ownership of the means of production and relations of wage labour are always already politically and juridically mediated social relationships, then this explanatory primacy of the base cannot be maintained.27Ellen Meiksins, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 2016 [1995]). Reevaluations of the legacy of Marxist debates about the state from the 1990s onward have attempted to forge a more coherent account on the basis of existing theories or else to clarify divisions between these theories.39Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (Cambridge: Wiley, 1990); Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Wiley, 2002); Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis (eds), Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neomarxist, Postmarxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Clyde W. Barrow, Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate after Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Raju J. Das, “State Theories: A Critical Analysis” (1996) 60 Science & Society 27–57. The feature of power, or coercive power, also tells one exactly nothing. A transaction of purchase and sale can hide the most diverse economic content. As such, it was “the product of society at a particular stage of development”, having “arisen out of society but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it”.18Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Penguin, 1986 [1884]). Law and State. Marxists fight for: (a)The retention and extension of democratic rights under capitalism. Only in this manner can the real relation of form and content be established and can one be convinced that it is far from identical in different instances. Thus, the law is the means of formulating and consolidating the production relationships of class society and the social relationships which are connected with them. Such crises present big problems for the ruling class because the state, and the constitutional laws that surround it, are deliberately mystified. 221-232. When General Theory first appeared it is doubtful that anyone, least of an Pashukanis himself, could have foreseen its immediate success and the meteoric rise of its author withi… David A. Basic Marxist theory holds that the superstructure serves the ruling classes, thus the state passes laws which support ruling class interests. Thus, the real fact-concentration of the means of force and coercion in the hands of a particular class-is concealed and masked by the ideology of the bourgeoisie. They thus transform law into a supra-historical category. In studying bourgeois revolutions, French restorationist historians – Guizot, Mineaux and Thierry – concluded that the leitmotif of these revolutions was the class struggle between the third estate (i.e. Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. There is agreement that the state has a material existence, as a set of institutions but also as a collection of political, ideological, legal, economic, and social practices. Soviet law, like any law, will cease to exist if it is not applied. Given the failures of communism it is difficult to see what the alternative to Capitalism might be. They turn law as an empty abstraction into a universal concept devoid of historical content. Stammler proposes that the concrete study of legal phenomena is entirely unable to provide anything in the understanding of the essence of law. Passing through a long path of development, full of revolutionary leaps and qualitative changes, law and the state will wither away under communism as a result of the disappearance of classes and of all survivals of class society. Withering away of the law can only occur simultaneously with the withering away of the state. P.I. He tried to remove the gloss on law and Marxism as experimented by the Marxist state. For law under the proletarian dictatorship has always had the goal of protecting the interest of “the working majority, the suppression of class elements hostile to the proletariat, and the defence of socialist construction. The civil service in particular, composed of qualified professionals and open to entrance from all ranks of society, was tasked with upholding the “universal interest of the state”.2G. They appear, in particular, as relations of an ideological nature, i.e. Together these strands of research continue to revamp and adapt the tradition of Marxist thinking about the state, contributing to its ongoing development as an explanatory theoretical framework. Others have pointed to at least two different understandings of the relationship between the economically dominant class and the state, which left unresolved the question of what under what conditions it could be claimed that the state acted in its interests.14Ralph Miliband, “Marx and the State” (1965) 2 Socialist Register 278; Axel van den Berg, The Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the State of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Here the real significance of the legal superstructure appears. “As far as I am concerned”, he wrote. 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