3.5 Socialist School

Core claim: law is a superstructure upon the economic base — in class societies, an instrument and ideology of the ruling class; with the abolition of class, law (as coercive state law) should wither away.Exponents:• Marx and Engels — base and superstructure; law as ruling-class instrument and ideology; the Communist Manifesto's verdict that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class (fuller treatment in Sociology Unit 3.3.2); Engels' later concession of law's relative autonomy.• Lenin — revolutionary practice: law in the transition period as a weapon of the proletariat ("revolutionary legality"); the state — and its law — to be used to abolish the conditions of class, then to wither.• Evgeny Pashukanis — the deepest Soviet theorist: law's form derives from the commodityform — legal subjects mirror property-owning exchangers; with commodities, law goes. (Purged in 1937 — socialism's jurisprudence devoured its theorist.)• Later "socialist legality" — in practice, law as disciplined instrument of the party-state; after Stalin, a formal legality without the withering.Contribution: the sharpest expose of law's material base and of "neutrality" as ideology; critical criminology and critical legal studies descend from it (Unit 4.1); the questions it forces — cui bono? whose property? whose contract? — are permanent equipment. Critique: prediction failed (no withering; party-states were law-saturated); the class frame undercuts rights that actually protect the…