ABSTRACT
The law and the state are central parts of the superstructure, most directly serving to maintain the existing social-economical relations. Political and legal ideas, general frameworks, and particular laws, are interpreted as generally determined by historical-economic relations of production, and as an instrument used by the dominating class to maintain power. The consequences of such a legal voluntarism of the ruling class were explicitly seen in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European countries, being a part of the Eastern Block. N. Poulantzas starts developing his own account with the polemic against economism and voluntarism. The voluntarist approach ends up fully separating the law from the concrete economic base. The dialectical historical materialism of K. Marx and F. Engels treats history as a field ruled by the same fundamental economic laws in all periods, at least since the period of slavery.
