Marxist Law and the Enemies of the Proletariat

QUESTION: Marxist Law and the Enemies of the Proletariat

ANSWER:

In the Marxist system, those who disagree with the Marxist-Leninist party are guilty of lawlessness. Since the party decides what is legal and illegal, it wields tremendous power in dispensing its form of justice to those who disagree with it.

The 1936 Soviet Constitution affirmed that all citizens are granted certain rights “in conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system.”¹ Thus, citizens are granted certain rights, but they cannot exercise them in ways that would undermine the advance of socialism and communism. Citizens whose actions are deemed unacceptable by the Marxist-Leninist party find themselves without any rights. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago² and Stephane Courtois (et al.) in The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression³ document the loss of rights by those who are deemed enemies of the state.

Marxist Law Must Support Communist Ideology
Vyshinsky believes legal discrimination by the party should be relentless against those who disagree with its political agenda: “The task of justice...is to assure the precise and unswerving fulfillment of...laws by all the institutions, organizations, officials, and citizens of the [state]. This the court accomplishes by destroying without pity all the foes of the people in whatsoever form they manifest their criminal encroachments upon socialism.”⁴ Those who create and enforce laws within a specific ideology cannot tolerate actions that oppose the ideology.

Notes:

Rendered with permission from the book,Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews(Rev. 2^nd ed), David Noebel, Summit Press, 2006. Compliments of John Stonestreet, David Noebel, and the Christian Worldview Ministry at Summit Ministries. All rights reserved in the original.

¹ Cited in John Hazard, Law and Social Change in the USSR (London, UK: Stevens and Sons, 1953), 79.
² Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973–1978).
³ Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Also, R.J. Rummel, Death By Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
⁴ Andrei Y. Vyshinsky, The Law of the Soviet State (New York, NY: Macmillian, 1948), 13. Cited in Raymond S. Sleeper, ed., A Lexicon of Marxist-Leninist Semantics (Alexandria, VA: Western Goals, 1983), 147.