The Concept of Legal Relations in a Marxist Perspective

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of theoretical and legal understanding of legal relations. The subject of the study is bifurcated – the general attitudes of the post-Soviet mainstream discourse in this area are compared with the marginalized ideas of the Marxist theory of legal relations, supplemented by the ideas of the modern Marxist theory of society, which are significant for its concretization in modern conditions. The article's main goal is to problematize the methodological foundations of the understanding of legal relations that prevails in the post–Soviet theory of law, and to draw attention to the potential of Marxist methodology. The methodological basis of the work is the authentic and early Soviet Marxist theory of law and the modern concept of a global class society. Representatives of the post–Soviet mainstream theory failed to make a breakthrough in understanding legal relations and comprehend one of the most pressing problems of post-Soviet law and order - the gap between positive legal models of legal relations and the practice of their implementation. Theoretical understanding of legal relations has a chance to break out of the vicious positivist-neo-Kantian circle, within which legal relations are understood as a derivative of the norm of positive law, and thinking gets bogged down in the dichotomy of due and being, if the tools of Marxist theory, cleared of ideological layers, are restored. An important role in the dialectical understanding of legal relations is played by the distinction between material and volitional relations, the understanding of legal relations as a type of volitional relations that simultaneously act as a form of other social relations, while the legal relations that are actually developing are understood as the most concrete form of law. In modern conditions, the scientific understanding of legal relations requires distinguishing between different types of material and volitional relations – orthocapitalist and paracapitalist – within the framework of a global class society. Their difference explains the "gap" that has arisen in the post-Soviet space between positive legal models of legal relations, constructed largely on the model of orthocapitalist relations, and real legal relations, which by their nature are paracapitalist.