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.
