Chapter 4: The System of Economic Law
4.1. The Significance of Communist Economic Law
Generally, economic law is a legal system that regulates economic activity, regardless of the economic system. Under a capitalist system, it often includes a wide range of laws related to the regulation of economic activity, with the antimonopoly law, which is the basis of a free economy, at its core.
However, since capitalism bases economic activity on ownership and sales contracts (so-called private autonomy), the starting point of the legal system is civil law that regulates these, and economic law remains a secondary legal system. Since areas where private autonomy is applicable remain in communism, civic law equivalent to civil law is enacted separately, but its position is subordinate to economic law.
Economic law in a communist society is second only to environmental code in importance. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the communist legal system, environmental code has priority second only to the Charter, which is the highest law, and thus economic law is also placed under the discipline of environmental law.
These can be broadly divided into three areas: economic planning law, business organization law, and labor relations law. The first, economic planning law, regulates the system of planned economy that is the basis of a communist economy, and forms the core of the communist economic legal system.
Next, business organization law regulates the nature of various business organizations under a planned economy, and is the equivalent of company laws in capitalism, but since there are no profit-making companies in a communist society, business organizations of all types are non-profit organizations.
The third, labor relations law, is a law that guarantees the rights of workers, centered on the Labor Standards Act, but unlike capitalist labor law, which is premised on the separation of labor and management, in a communist economy where the principle is that labor and management should coincide (my article), labor relations law is also positioned as a field of economic law.
In actual legislation, these three areas are not enacted as separate laws, but are all combined into a single code, the Economic Code. This is also very different from most capitalist economic laws, which are merely the aggregation or generic name of a number of codes.
Note that the Land Administration Law, which stipulates the management of land, which in a communist society becomes an unowned property, also regulates the right to use land and is a law that lies somewhere between civil law and economic law, but as it is broadly included in economic law, it will be dealt with in this chapter.
👉The table of contents so far is here.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
