ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how historical materialism can help us understand the natural-seeming rule of law and transform it into conscious and collective rule by the people. It contains some of Karl Marx's fullest discussions of specific bodies of law: labour legislation from the 1349 Statute of Labourers to the Factory Acts of his own time. In general, Marx analyses specifically legal forms of regulation — that is, the enforcible adjudication of disputes between contending parties on the basis of an established body of rule and/or precedent, a form the criminal law shares. In the chapter the author's argues that Marx saw the phenomenal and categorial separations of the 'economic' from the 'political' and 'legal' in commodity-producing society as characteristic forms of existence of production relations themselves. Marx details various of the cruel, but doubtless effective, statutory instruments of 'the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour' — branding, mutlilation, flogging, hanging, which is wholly given over to the theme.