ABSTRACT
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously characterised the capitalist state as a 'committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'. The bourgeois state is an instrument that upholds the political and economic dictatorship of the capitalist class. Marx and Engels also pointed out that the rising capitalist classes employed military and dictatorial force at critical stages to establish their socio-economic power in the first place. While holding socio-economic and state power, the capitalist class needed to elaborate legal principles that have the appearance of internal coherence and universality, and to continually adjust those doctrines to meet changing economic circumstances. A theme running through Lenin's relevant writings is that law and the state machinery are not neutral and necessary instruments of social regulation, but historical products of class society. They are essentially mechanisms whereby the most powerful social class enforces its economic and political rule.
