Judicial Conflicts of Interest in Marxian Socialist States

Abstract

Marxian socialists hold one truth above all others to be self evident: that private ownership of productive wealth creates in the owner a conflict of interest inimical to what communists are trying to do. Those who wield power, including the judges, cannot be capitalists. Lenin put this into law at his first opportunity. When his Bolsheviks had dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 and established the Soviet system as the permanent government of the new Russia, he had his Congress of Soviets enact the rule that must belong wholly and exclusively to the toiling masses.' The principle was soon incorporated in the first constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of July 10, 1918.2 Seven years later it was given even more precise form in the second constitution of the Republic by its Article 69 denying to employers and middlemen the right to vote and to hold office.3 Lenin's first judges in his newly created Courts were to be elected by the executive committees of the county and city soviets, and this meant that as instruments of the dictatorship of the proletariat they were to be selected with regard to their presumed loyalty to the cause.4 All Marxian socialist states have followed this rule in naming their judges. Even the reprieve granted to national capitalists by the constitution of the People's Republic of China' kept them from power. Conformity to the rule, although in different form, was made clear by a Polish legal scholar who has explained that although Polish legislation establishes nothing like Article 69, it provides other guarantees designed to impede achievement of power by class adversaries, and these are to be found in the method of choosing candidates for election.6