Marx On Law
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To mention Karl Marx to a mind uneducated in his work, it would spur thoughts of Russian Communism, dictatorship, no free will, and basic slavery to a tyrannical government. During the cold war, mentioning communism along with a name of a US citizen stigmatized that person as a traitor, spy, and all but convicted them of treason. Extolled in its day as truth incarnate and the inspiration for a life-and-death struggle for mankind's liberation; condemned simultaneously as the vilest of propaganda on behalf of despotism the Communist Manifesto remains today the most potent literary symbol of a century's struggle concerning the form and content of freedom (Bender 1988:viii). But the way Marx has been portrayed in our Society is almost the exact opposite of his views. Marx's theories not only deal with the problems of capitalism and its inherent inequality of classes, the laws which a privileged class uses to control the underprivileged class, and the direction the underprivileged class should go in obtaining their freedom from those who would oppress them, but Natural Rights and Laws that are free from legislative bodies and the privileged class that control them. The way Marx has been portrayed in our society should be a good indication of the content of his work in regards to the threat it contains to the privileged class. A privileged class that controls the very ideas, values, and rules we live by and see in everyday experiences such as watching television. First I will address the problem of classes, how they came about and how laws are used to subdue the underprivileged.
For Marx, class was defined as one's relation to the means of productions. With the transformation from feudalism to capitalism, private ownership emerged along with two classes...