Law

A form of social consciousness, important component part of the superstructure, the sum total of rules (norms) which regulate men’s acts formulated or recognized by the State, embody the will of the ruling class, prescribe people’s rights and duties, the implementation of which is guaranteed by the coercive force of the State.

The thought of law has deep historical roots. In ancient China, the two words Fa and Xing were commonly used. “Fa: was punishment, leveled as even as water, zhi [the legendary animal] would strike those who are not upright and remove them”. (Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi), “Law (lǜ) means to completely cover”, is a format, standard to be followed unanimously. In the pre-Qin period, there were expositions on law, with thoughts such as “Laws and decrees are rules and standards both for officials and common people.” (Guanzi Qichen Qizhu—Seven Ministers and Seven Rulers), “Law is exercised in common by the prince and his ministers.” (Shang Junshu [The Book of Lord Shang]—Cultivation of the Right Standard), “Not value righteousness but value the law” (Shang Jun Shu [The Book of Lord Shang]—Policies), “Law is the only basis” (Han Fei Zi [Writings of Master Han Fei]—On Pretensions and Heresies), and “Law is the only teaching” (Han Fei Zi –Five Vermin: A Pathological Analysis of Politics). Ancient Greek thinker Plato put forth that “law is the maintenance of justice”, Aristotle emphasized the part played by law in the city-state, and Cicero has inherited the Stoic thought of natural law and was the first to expound the relation between natural law and positive law in a fairly systematic manner. Marx further put forth that the natural law is the basic idea of value formed by men in the process of intercourse in social life; positive law is the objectification and concretization of the natural law, the “semantic explanation” of the natural law made by people, out of their needs of social intercourse, and that “the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, of human reason.” He pointed out that the early Roman law formulated by the slavery states of ancient Rome in Europe was “the first world law of a commodity-producing society”, the completest elaboration of law based on private property, and that the oldest written Roman law handed down was the Twelve Bronze Table Law promulgated in the middle of the 5th century B.C. The modern bourgeois Enlightenment thinkers advocated the conclusion of a social contract to safeguard the rights of man and emphasized that the law embodies the will of men and has supreme authority; what they had in common was that they denied the class nature of the law and the determining part played by the conditions of the material life of society on the law.

As an ideology, law is determined by the conditions of material life of the ruling class. It is the concentrated manifestation of certain economic relations or relations of material interests, and in turn maintains and develops these relations, which the ruling class sanctifies in the form of law. In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx pointed out that neither legal relations nor political forms can be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the conditions of material life. In his criticism of bourgeois ideas in The Communist Manifesto, he pointed out that your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all. He also clearly pointed out that property is the entire content of law and the state, i.e., law is the form of outward appearance of property relations, and property relations are the real content of law. “Private law, which indeed in essence only sanctions the existing economic relations between individuals which are normal in the given circumstances.” Moreover, law has a relative independence, and it is possible to retain in the main the forms of the old feudal laws while giving them a bourgeois content; in fact, directly reading a bourgeois meaning into the feudal name.

Law is a product of history. It appeared with the appearance of classes and the State. In class society, law has a class nature, and it is one of the important instruments of class dictatorship. Any state power is held by a certain class. In any class-antagonistic society, the will of the State is the will of the ruling class that holds the state power. The ruling class defines, consolidates and develops the social relations and the social order beneficial to the class through laws, so as to maintain its rule. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels pointed out that, “the individuals who rule in certain conditions [of material production]—leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state—have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law”. “Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on conditions of life which as they develop are common to many individuals, and the continuance of which they have to maintain that they are holding good for everybody. The expression of this will, which is determined by their common interests, is the law.”

Historically, there have been two laws that are fundamentally different in nature, i.e., the law of the state of exploiting classes (the law of the slave state, the law of the feudal state, and the law of the capitalist state) and the law of the socialist state. The law of the state of exploiting classes maintains the relations of domination and exploitation based upon private property. The law of the socialist state maintains, consolidates and develops the social relations and social order with socialist public property as their mainstay, and at the same time suppresses their enemies, punishes criminals, protects the people, safeguards socialist democracy, pushes forward the socialist revolution and construction, and embodies the common will of the vast number of laboring people who hold the state power and are led by the working class.