Chapter 1: Communism and Law
1.5. From Law of Exchange to Law of Distribution
Here, we would like to look at the system of commuist law from the metaphysical dimension of justice in law. In doing so, we shall return to Aristotle's theory of justice, which is often used as the most basic criterion in discussions of legal philosophy even today.
Aristotle's achievement was to dichotomize the phases of justice into "commutative (exchange) justice," as in crime and punishment or benefit and consideration in contracts, and "distributive justice," meaning distribution according to the value of each person.
In this respect, bourgeois law clearly consists of the former, exchangeable justice, as the main axis of justice. Bourgeois law in a developed capitalist society is, in a sense, at the point of arrival of exchange justice.
The central body of bourgeois law is contract law. This is a natural conclusion given that a capitalist society dominated by commodities is legally based on sales contracts. The very essence of legal justice there is the equitable regulation of the exchange relationship between benefits and consideration.
However, the progressive bourgeois law also incorporates, to a certain extent, social law that aims at distributive justice, taking into account the power relations between contracting parties, but this is not an essential part of the law, and is only a corrective supplement.
In bourgeois law, this conception of distributive justice is not limited to private law, but extends to criminal law as well, where a balance between crime and punishment is sought. There, the ancient idea of revenge is transformed into the legal concept of retributive punishment and clothed in the garb of legal justice. On the other hand, distributive justice, which aims to improve and rehabilitate the offender according to his or her individual characteristics, is sometimes relegated to the background and ideologically rejected.
In contrast, justice in communist law axes on the aspect of distributive justice. Even if the idea of an exchangeable contract does not disappear completely, the abolition of the monetized economy at least eliminates the monetary consideration relationship, thus significantly reducing the significance of contract law. *
Instead, a legal system centered on distributive justice will be constructed, and social law will no longer be a mere supplemental law. Rather, the distinction between social law and private law becomes relative, and the principles of social law are embedded in private law.
In the field of criminal law as well, the idea of balance of crimes and punishment based on exchange justice will recede into the background, and instead, individual and educational principles based on distributive justice will come to the forefront. The ultimate goal is the abolition of the essentially exchangeable legal system of punishment itself, the details of which are described in the corresponding chapters.
*Barter exchange contracts are expected to flourish under communist law, as barter is allowed even under communist law, which abolishes the monetized economy. However, barter is expected to be governed by the principles of a more cultural and ritualistic exchange relationship, unlike money sales contracts.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
