Revisited Marx: notes on law and state in the early work of Karl Marx

Abstract

This article explores several findings about law and State in the early work of Karl Marx. To fulfill this purpose, identifies some elements of the intellectual context which generated his work and revises his earlier writings. Finally, we present the conclusions of the review and refer the contributions of some of “the new Marxists” who, incidentally, in the twentieth century laid the foundations of “alternative movement of law.” The aim of this review article is to propose a useful teaching tool to enter the work of Marx and his close association with contemporary critical legal studies. As for the working hypothesis, it is proposed that the Marxian assumptions about the State and the law can be read beyond the dichotomy culturalism-economism. The methodology used to develop this work consisted of a literature review of the production of most of the work produced in the youthful period of Karl Marx, which were contextualized by the biographical details found in various sources. Comparing the results of this review, we can say that while some sectors of the early work of Marx in which seemed to suggest some form of economism in the consideration of State and Law, may be due to educational efforts as occurs in the Communist Manifesto, or due to references on special phases of the dialectical process in which the economy can assume special importance. However, by the very nature of dialectical analysis, of which Marx was a connoisseur, it is obvious that there are times when that role is relative.