Chapter 1.2.

Chapter 1: Communism and Law

1.2. Mode of production of law

The issue of "how law is produced" is hardly considered in bourgeois legal theory, but in communist law, which is a law that is produced together, how law is produced becomes an important concern.

In this respect, the most suitable production methods for communist law may be considered to be citizen initiatives and referendums, which are systems of "direct democracy" that do not involve representative bodies.

However, a communist society led by the Commons' Conventions is not a "direct democracy," but rather a "representative system." In other words, the center of legislation is the Commons' Conventions based on the delegate lottery system - although it is "semi-direct" insofar as it is based on a lottery rather than an election - and the Commons' Conventions are, so to speak, the factories where laws are produced.

Therefore, referendums, which can be called direct legislation by citizens, are basically rejected as they risk destroying the principle of representative system. However, the possibility of holding a referendum when enacting, amending, or abolishing the Charter of the Commons' Convention, which is equivalent to the constitution that governs the entire legal system, cannot be ruled out.

Although it is based on representative production methods, if the commons, who are the main actors of society, are placed completely outside the law production process, the process will not be much different from the law-making process of the bourgeois parliament. 

In this regard, we should not follow the same example of the former Soviet Union, which introduced the Soviet system, a type of popular assembly, where the people were effectively excluded from the legislative process as the Soviet system became a mere facade.

Therefore, in enacting communist laws, citizen initiative must be guaranteed according to the nature of each law. Here, the nature of each law refers to its content attributes in addition to the distinction based on the area of application (juridiction) of the law.

The area of application of the law is the World Commonwealth that encompasses the entire world, the Grand Zone that includes the multiple Zones continentally within that, the Zone that is the constituent subject of the World Commonwealth, and admistrative areas within the Zone such as the Zonelet (semi-zone), Provincial Area, Regional Area, and Commune.

In this regard, for World Commonwealth law (world law) and Grand-zonal law (grand law), which are in the nature of transnational law beyond individual Zones, the initiative should be led by a pre-registered official civil society organization - the equivalent of a current NGO. This is because transnational law should be both specialized and universal.

With regard to domestic laws that are applied to the individual Zones, there is room to allow the initiative of civil society in specialized legal fields such as environmental law and human rights law, but in the case of general zonal laws, in principle, it is desirable to use the right to petition with binding force.

On the other hand, the self-governance laws established independently by each local Commons' Convention within the Zone concern the daily life administration of the local residents, and are therefore suitable for the introduction of direct initiative by the residents. However, even in this case, it is necessary to be aware of the balance with the representative principle.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Chapter 1.1.

Chapter 1: Communism and Law

1.1. Law produced together

In this series, we will use the term "communist law," but in addition to its formal meaning as an abbreviation for "law of a communist society," this term also has the substantive meaning of "law that we produce together." In other words, in a communist society, it is implied that not only material production but also spiritual production such as law is carried out collaboratively.

In that respect, bourgeois laws in capitalist societies are usually enacted by parliaments that claim to be the representative body of the people, and are enforced by the government. Although this process is called democracy, it is an open secret that government bureaucrats or stakeholders are in fact in charge of enacting laws, as there is a limit to the legislative ability of members.

Furthermore, since a capitalist government is a community of interests that operates mainly to secure the profits of capital, the laws enacted by parliaments have the primary purpose of protecting the profits of capital, either directly or indirectly. The protection of citizens' interests is at best a secondary objective, or at worst ignored.

Such "laws" have the characteristics of norms managed by the state (national norms) rather than socially shared norms (social norms). In this sense, bourgeois law is a rule enforced from above that is alien to citizens, and it can sometimes feel hostile to citizens, even like an obstacle that arouses their desire to transgress. 　

On the other hand, communist law is a norm established by the commons working together to maintain order in the society in which they live and to fairly protect the interests of all citizens. These are norms that are voluntarily established and jointly managed by the commons, and are truly social norms.

As shown in On Communism, in a communist society, the commons' representative body, the Commons' Convention, has a legislative function, enacts laws, and applies the laws itself through its subordinate organs. If we reconsider the process from a legal perspective, we can say that it is a co-operative process of law.

By the way, in bourgeois state law, the application of law is precisely a process in which the state invokes and enforces enacted laws from above, but in communist law, the application of law is itself a content of the process of communalization of law through the accumulation of the application of individual laws.

In a sense, communist law with these characteristics resembles customary law, which is an accumulation of social customs, but as I pointed out in the preface, communist society is not an anarchic society without statutory laws; It is a society governed by statutory law.

However, the significance of the statute is relativized. In other words, statutes will be a collection of core legal principles, and detailed matters will be flexibly regulated by loosely normative guidelines such as policy guidelines. To that extent, the legal absolutist concept of rule of law is not appropriate for a communist society.

＊The counterpart of communist law is capitalist law, but since there is no unique legal system of capitalist law, but its foundation is in bourgeois legal system created by the bourgeois revolution, we will call it bourgeois law in this series.

👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.

Preface

Although I have referred to the communist system of law as much as necessary in my earlier series On Communism, I have not presented the system of communist law in a concrete form in this series, which aims to present an overall picture of a possible communist society.　

In this respect, Marx and other communists in the past were eager to criticize the bourgeois capitalist legal system centering on contract law and commercial law, but they did not discuss the crucial communist legal system in concrete detail. In fact, there is little prior literature on the subject that is worth referring to.

For classical communism, it was as if the appropriate customary law was autogenously formed in communist societies and social control by statute law was unnecessary. One reason for this is that traditional communism, while sharply opposed to anarchism, was partially influenced by anarchism, such as the "annihilation of the state" thesis, and was therefore reluctant to exercise legal social control.

On the other hand, in the former Soviet Union, which publicly proclaimed its aim to build a communist society, the development of its own legal system had progressed since the Russian Revolution, and at its peak it formed an example of a socialist legal system. However, reflecting the nature of the former Soviet system, it had a strong element of being an instrument of authoritarian social control to support the one-party rule system.

The communist society that should be aimed at by nature is one in which social order is maintained through democratic and rational enactment of laws.

The following is an overview of the overall picture of communist law.

First, there is the Charter of the Commons' Convention, which stands at the top of the entire legal system and is positioned as the supreme normative law. Next, there is the Environmental Law, which encompasses environmental regulations to ensure the sustainability of the global environment; then there is the Economic Law, which regulates the organization of production activities and the nature of labor; the Civic Law, which deals with legal relations related to everyday civil life; the Offences Code, which deals with the legal effects imposed on offences in violation of the law; and finally the Litigation Law, which provides for judicial procedures in the handling of legal disputes. 

The Charter, Environmental Law, Economic Law, Civic Law, Offences Law, and Litigation Law constitute the six basic communist laws, which at this point already differ considerably from the six bourgeois laws, which are the Constitution, Civil law, Criminal Law, Commercial Law, and both Civil and Criminal Procedural Law.

This series of articles will begin with a general overview of the significance and functions of law in communism, and then proceed to examine each of the above six basic laws in turn.