Law is not neutral or above class struggle — it is a tool of class rule
Bourgeois ideology presents law as the embodiment of reason, justice, and the common good — a neutral framework standing above society and impartially adjudicating between its members. Every schoolchild is taught that the "rule of law" is the foundation of civilisation, that without it there would be only chaos. This is one of the most powerful ideological mystifications of the capitalist order.
Marxism-Leninism strips away this mystification. Law is not neutral. It has never been neutral. In every class society, law is the codified will of the ruling class, elevated to the status of universal norm and enforced by the organised violence of the state. The laws of slave society protected the slaveholder's right to own human beings. The laws of feudal society enshrined the lord's right to the serf's labour. The laws of capitalist society protect private ownership of the means of production and the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit wage labour. In each case, the law reflects and enforces the prevailing relations of production.
To understand law scientifically, we must begin not with legal abstractions but with the material conditions from which law arises. As Marx wrote in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." Law belongs to the superstructure of society — it is determined by the economic base, not the other way around.
"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 economical conditions of existence of your class."
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)Idealist philosophy and bourgeois legal theory hold that law derives from abstract principles: "natural rights," "divine law," "social contract," or the pure exercise of reason. Marxism rejects all of these. Law does not fall from the sky. It arises from the material conditions of production, and it changes as those conditions change.
In primitive communal society, where there was no private property and no class division, there was no law in the modern sense. Social regulation was achieved through custom, tradition, and the collective will of the community. Law — as a formal system of rules backed by a specialised apparatus of enforcement — appeared only with the emergence of private property and the division of society into classes. The first laws were laws of property: who owns what, who owes what, and what happens to those who violate the property of the powerful.
Engels demonstrated this with characteristic clarity in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The state — and with it, formal law — arose when society split into irreconcilable class antagonisms. The state is not a force for reconciliation; it is an instrument by which one class suppresses another. Law is the language in which that suppression is expressed and legitimised.
This does not mean that law is a simple, mechanical reflection of the economic base. Marx and Engels were careful to emphasise that the superstructure has a relative autonomy — it can react back upon the base, and legal forms often persist long after the economic conditions that produced them have changed. But in the last analysis, the content of law is determined by the mode of production. When the mode of production changes, the law eventually changes with it — sometimes gradually, sometimes through revolution.
The base-superstructure model is fundamental to understanding law. The economic base (relations of production) determines the superstructure (law, politics, religion, culture). Law does not create property relations — property relations create law. The bourgeoisie did not acquire property because the law said they could; the law said they could because they had already acquired property through the historical process of primitive accumulation.
The history of Roman law provides a striking illustration of how legal forms serve class interests. Roman private law — the jus civile — was the most developed legal system of the ancient world. It codified property rights, contract law, and the rights of slaveholders with a precision that has never been surpassed in the slave mode of production.
When the bourgeoisie rose to power in Europe, it did not invent its legal system from scratch. It reached back across a thousand years and revived Roman law — precisely because Roman law, more than any other ancient system, had developed the concept of absolute private property (dominium). Feudal law, with its complex web of reciprocal obligations, conditional tenures, and communal rights, was an obstacle to capitalist accumulation. Roman law, with its concept of the individual owner exercising unlimited power over his property, was exactly what the bourgeoisie needed.
The "reception" of Roman law in Europe from the 12th century onwards was not an act of scholarly antiquarianism. It was a class project. The rising merchant class and early capitalists promoted Roman law because it served their material interests: it legitimised the enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, the commodification of land and labour, and the absolute right of the owner to buy, sell, and exploit without feudal restrictions.
Marx observed this process directly. In Capital, Volume I, he described how the legal transformation of property relations — the enclosures, the Poor Laws, the Vagrancy Acts — was the juridical expression of primitive accumulation: the violent separation of the producers from the means of production. The law did not merely reflect this process; it actively facilitated it. But it facilitated it in the interest of a specific class.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846)The great ideological achievement of bourgeois law is the doctrine of formal equality before the law. Unlike feudal law, which openly assigned different rights to different estates (nobility, clergy, commoners), bourgeois law declares that all citizens are equal. There are no legal privileges of birth, no formal caste distinctions, no legally recognised class hierarchy. Before the court, the billionaire and the beggar are nominally the same.
This formal equality was historically progressive. It represented a genuine advance over feudal legal relations, just as capitalism represented a genuine advance over feudalism in developing the productive forces. Marxists do not deny this. But formal equality conceals a profound real inequality. The worker who owns nothing but his labour power and the capitalist who owns the factory, the land, and the machines are "equal" only in the abstract legal sense. In reality, one sells his labour to survive; the other buys it to profit.
Anatole France captured this contradiction with devastating irony:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread."
— Anatole France, The Red Lily (1894)This is the essence of bourgeois legal equality. Laws against theft protect the property of those who have property. Laws against vagrancy criminalise those who have nowhere to live. Laws against trespass keep the dispossessed off the land that was stolen from their ancestors. The formal universality of law masks its class content.
The entire apparatus of bourgeois justice reinforces this inequality. Legal representation costs money — and the best lawyers, the most skilled barristers, serve those who can afford them. The worker facing a criminal charge or an employment dispute enters the courtroom at a structural disadvantage that no amount of "equal access to justice" rhetoric can overcome. In Britain, the systematic gutting of legal aid since 2012 has made this inequality even more naked: the poor are increasingly denied even the pretence of legal representation.
Contract law — the foundation of bourgeois commercial relations — illustrates the same point. The employment contract is presented as a free agreement between equals: the worker "freely" agrees to sell his labour for a wage. But as Marx demonstrated, this "freedom" is the freedom of the person who owns nothing to choose between working for a capitalist or starving. The contract conceals the coercion that underpins the wage relation.
Formal equality before the law is one of the most effective ideological tools of the bourgeoisie. By treating fundamentally unequal people as if they were equal, the law naturalises inequality and makes exploitation appear as a voluntary arrangement. This is what Marx meant when he wrote that bourgeois right is, by its very nature, a right of inequality.
Nowhere is the class character of law more visible than in the criminal justice system. Bourgeois criminology treats crime as an individual moral failing, a product of bad character or poor choices. Marxism understands that the vast majority of what capitalism defines as "crime" is a direct product of poverty, alienation, and the social relations of capitalist production.
The criminal law overwhelmingly targets the working class and the poor. Petty theft, burglary, drug possession, public order offences, benefit fraud — these are the crimes that fill the prisons. Meanwhile, the crimes of the bourgeoisie — wage theft, tax evasion, unsafe working conditions that kill and maim workers, environmental destruction, financial fraud on a colossal scale — are either legal, treated as civil matters, or prosecuted with extraordinary leniency.
In Britain, benefit fraud amounts to approximately £2.1 billion per year. Tax evasion and avoidance by corporations and the wealthy amounts to over £35 billion. Yet the state devotes vastly more resources to policing benefit claimants than to pursuing corporate tax evaders. The Department for Work and Pensions employs more fraud investigators than HMRC's entire enforcement division for wealthy individuals. This is not an anomaly — it is the criminal law functioning exactly as it is designed to function: protecting the property of the rich and disciplining the poor.
The police are not a neutral force maintaining public order. They are, as Lenin described them, part of the "special bodies of armed men" that constitute the essence of the state. The police exist to protect private property and to suppress any threat to the existing order. Their violence is overwhelmingly directed downwards: against strikers, against protesters, against racialised communities, against the homeless and the destitute. When police violence is directed upwards — against corporate criminals, against financial fraudsters, against war criminals in government — it is conspicuous by its rarity.
The prison system itself is a class institution. In every capitalist country, prisons are disproportionately filled with the poor, the mentally ill, the racially oppressed, and the economically marginalised. In the United States, the prison-industrial complex incarcerates over two million people — more than any other country in history — and extracts profit from their captive labour. This is not justice; it is class war conducted through legal means.
"The state is a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class."
— V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)Labour law occupies a contradictory position in bourgeois legal systems. On the one hand, every significant labour protection — the right to organise, limits on working hours, health and safety regulations, the minimum wage, protections against unfair dismissal — was won through the struggle of the working class, often at the cost of blood. On the other hand, once enacted, these protections are immediately subject to erosion, circumvention, and outright repeal by the bourgeoisie.
The history of labour law in Britain illustrates this dialectic. The Combination Acts of 1799-1800 made trade unions illegal. Workers fought for decades to overturn these laws, winning the right to organise in 1824. The Taff Vale judgement of 1901 effectively made strikes illegal again by holding unions financially liable for employers' losses. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 reversed Taff Vale. Thatcher's anti-union legislation of the 1980s systematically dismantled the legal protections that the labour movement had built over a century: secondary picketing was banned, the closed shop was outlawed, strike ballots were made compulsory, and unions were subjected to state regulation of their internal affairs.
This pattern repeats across every capitalist country. Labour protections are won through struggle, codified in law, and then eroded as the balance of class forces shifts. The bourgeoisie never accepts labour law as permanent. It treats every concession as temporary, to be rolled back as soon as conditions allow. The gig economy, zero-hours contracts, bogus self-employment, fire-and-rehire — these are all legal mechanisms for circumventing labour protections that formally remain on the statute books.
This demonstrates a fundamental point: law cannot permanently protect the working class within capitalism. Legal reforms are gains worth fighting for — Marxists do not dismiss the importance of the eight-hour day or health and safety legislation. But these reforms are always precarious, always subject to reversal, always dependent on the balance of class forces. Only the overthrow of capitalist property relations and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat can make the interests of the working class the permanent basis of law.
If domestic bourgeois law serves the interests of the national bourgeoisie, then so-called "international law" serves the interests of the imperialist powers — above all, the United States. The entire framework of international law, international institutions, and the "rules-based international order" was constructed by the victorious Western imperialist powers after 1945 and has served their interests ever since.
The United Nations Security Council, with its five permanent members holding veto power, is a juridical expression of the imperialist carve-up of the post-war world. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank impose structural adjustment programmes — privatisation, deregulation, austerity — on the nations of the Global South under the guise of "economic reform." The World Trade Organisation enforces rules written by and for the major capitalist powers, compelling developing nations to open their markets to imperialist capital.
When international law serves imperialist interests, it is enforced ruthlessly. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by claims of "weapons of mass destruction" and violations of UN resolutions — claims that were fabricated. The destruction of Libya in 2011 was conducted under a UN Security Council resolution authorising a "no-fly zone" which NATO immediately interpreted as a mandate for regime change. Sanctions regimes imposed on Cuba, the DPRK, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and dozens of other countries have caused immense human suffering — all in the name of "international law."
When international law conflicts with imperialist interests, it is simply ignored. The United States has never recognised the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over its own citizens. Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country in history, with total impunity. NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was conducted without UN authorisation. The illegal occupation of Palestinian territories continues in open defiance of the International Court of Justice.
The lesson is clear: "international law" is not a neutral framework. It is a tool of imperialist hegemony, invoked when useful and discarded when inconvenient. The working class and oppressed nations can expect no justice from institutions designed to perpetuate their subjugation.
The "rules-based international order" is the legal expression of imperialist domination. The rules were written by the imperialist powers, the institutions are controlled by the imperialist powers, and the enforcement is selective: applied against targets of imperialism, never against the imperialists themselves. See also: Sanctions & Imperialism.
If bourgeois law is the codified will of the bourgeoisie, then socialist law is the codified will of the working class. The socialist state does not abolish law overnight — that would be anarchism, not Marxism. Instead, it transforms law from an instrument of exploitation into an instrument of liberation, defending the gains of the revolution, protecting collective ownership of the means of production, and suppressing the resistance of the dispossessed exploiting classes.
The Soviet legal system, particularly in its early decades, represented a qualitatively different approach to law. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed the right to work, the right to rest, the right to education, the right to healthcare, and the right to material security in old age — rights that remain purely aspirational in even the wealthiest capitalist countries. These were not paper rights; they were backed by the material reality of a planned economy that provided full employment, free education, free healthcare, and guaranteed pensions.
Soviet criminal law reflected the class character of the socialist state. Crimes against socialist property — theft from collectively owned enterprises — were treated more seriously than crimes against personal property, because socialist property belonged to the whole people. The so-called "anti-parasitism" laws, which required able-bodied citizens to engage in socially useful labour, reflected the socialist principle that those who do not work shall not eat — a principle directed not against the disabled or the elderly, but against those who sought to live by exploiting others.
The Soviet court system was also structured differently. People's courts, with elected judges and lay assessors drawn from the working population, handled the vast majority of cases. The legal system was designed to be accessible to working people, not an arcane maze comprehensible only to expensively educated specialists. Legal representation was provided by the state. The adversarial model of bourgeois courts — in which justice goes to whoever can afford the better lawyer — was replaced by an inquisitorial model aimed at establishing the truth.
This is not to idealise the Soviet legal system, which had real deficiencies and which, particularly under the distortions introduced in the Stalin period, sometimes departed from socialist principles. But the fundamental orientation was correct: law should serve the working class, not the exploiters. The task of Marxist-Leninists is not to reject the Soviet legal experiment but to learn from both its achievements and its errors.
"Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people — this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism."
— V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)Marxism-Leninism does not propose that law should exist forever. If law arises from class antagonisms, then the abolition of classes must lead to the abolition of law — or, more precisely, to its withering away, along with the state that enforces it.
Engels expressed this with great clarity: "The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished.' It dies out." Law, as the expression of state power, undergoes the same process. As class distinctions disappear, as the productive forces develop to the point where abundance replaces scarcity, as the habits of communal life become second nature, the need for formal legal regulation diminishes.
This does not mean that communist society will have no rules, no norms, no social regulation. It means that regulation will no longer take the form of law — that is, rules backed by the organised violence of a state apparatus standing above society. Social norms will be maintained by the community itself, through education, custom, and the collective interest, without the need for police, prisons, or courts.
Marx addressed this directly in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), where he distinguished between the lower and higher phases of communist society. In the lower phase (socialism), bourgeois right persists in a modified form: "equal right" still means the application of an equal standard to unequal individuals, which inevitably produces unequal outcomes. Only in the higher phase, when the productive forces have been developed to the fullest and the narrow horizon of bourgeois right has been completely transcended, can society inscribe on its banners: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
"Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)The most important Marxist legal theorist of the 20th century was Evgeny Pashukanis (1891–1937), whose General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924) remains the foundational work of Marxist jurisprudence. Pashukanis went beyond the observation that law serves the ruling class to ask a deeper question: why does class rule take the legal form at all?
His answer was rooted in Marx's analysis of the commodity form. Just as the commodity form is the "cell-form" of capitalist economics, the legal subject — the abstract, formally equal bearer of rights — is the cell-form of bourgeois law. The legal subject is the juridical expression of the commodity owner: an individual with the capacity to own property, enter contracts, and exchange equivalents in the marketplace. The entire edifice of bourgeois law rests on this abstraction.
Pashukanis argued that law, in its fully developed form, is specific to capitalism. Pre-capitalist societies had customs, edicts, commands, and arbitrary exercises of power, but they did not have law in the bourgeois sense — a system of abstract, universal, formally equal rights. This form arose because capitalism requires it: the circulation of commodities demands that buyers and sellers confront each other as formally equal legal subjects, free to contract and exchange. Without this juridical framework, the market cannot function.
The revolutionary implication of Pashukanis's theory is that law cannot simply be repurposed for socialism. Since the legal form is intrinsically linked to the commodity form, the abolition of commodity production must ultimately lead to the abolition of the legal form itself. Socialist legality is therefore a transitional phenomenon — necessary during the period of proletarian dictatorship but destined to wither away as society moves towards communism.
"Law, like the state, is a form of bourgeois society. It cannot simply be filled with socialist content."
— Evgeny Pashukanis, General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924)"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time... This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."
— Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without... Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel."
— The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
"The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable."
— The State and Revolution (1917)
"The legal subject is the abstract commodity owner elevated to the heavens. His will, which in the legal sense is understood as his autonomy and freedom, has its real foundation in the market, in the acts of exchange."
— General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924)
Understanding law requires understanding the state. Explore the Marxist-Leninist analysis of the state, its class character, and the revolutionary path to its abolition.