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.
