p Being a form of social consciousness typical of a class society, legal consciousness is the totality of people’s convictions concerning the justified or unjustified nature of acts, rights and duties of society’s members and concerning the justice or injustice of laws.

p Legal views are class-conscious by nature. Every class has its own legal views and legal 446 consciousness. For example, the exploitation of the working people and mass unemployment are quite justified from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, but a crime from that of the proletariat. On the other hand, the struggle for the interests of the working people, for the abolition of exploitation and for the establishment of the new socialist society is just from the point of view of the proletariat, while the bourgeoisie considers it a crime.

p It is the legal views of the ruling class that dominate in society. These views are entirely permeated by class interests and express attempts to establish a legal order to the liking and advantage of the ruling class. A legal order is nothing more than an order of human relationships in society, expressed and consolidated in laws and regulations, whose totality constitutes the law of the given society.

p Though in a class society each class has its own legal views, the law in a society is one and binding for all classes and for all members of society. For the law to be observed by all, both those in whose interests it is enacted and those against whom it is aimed-it is enforced by the state and the state power. “For law,” Lenin wrote, “is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the standards of law.”  [446•1  This shows that the state and law are inseparablethey emerged at the same time and always exist together.

p As distinct from customs and moral rules, which 447 come into existence spontaneously, without any state form of codification or endorsement, legal rules must be endorsed by the will of the state and by the conscious activity of government. These rules are established or sanctioned by the state and are expressed in a special form-in the form of a law.

p Taking all this into account, law may be defined as the totality ot rules for people’s behaviour in society which express the will of the ruling class and which are established or sanctioned by the state with the aim of safeguarding, consolidating and developing the social relations and public order advantageous to the ruling class.

p The exploiting classes have always endeavoured to prove the non-class nature of law and legal order. In feudal society, the legend of the divine origin of law and of the sanctity and immutability of the existing legal order was widely circulated. Bourgeois ideologists stripped law of its divine halo and produced mundane reasons for its origin, but both they and their revisionist henchmen allege that law is above class and that it equally expresses and protects the interests of all classes, i.e. of the working people and the bourgeoisie alike. Reality, however, testifies to the contrarybourgeois law serves the exploiters by expressing their interests and will, and is directed against the working people. Bourgeois law safeguards, in particular, private ownership of the means of production and legalises the exploitation of man by man, as well as the oppression and plunder of the workers.

p As a reflection of surrounding reality and under the influence of Marxist ideology, the proletariat and the non-proletarian working masses form their own legal consciousness, which radically differs from that of the bourgeoisie. The working people begin to realise that the legality existing in bourgeois society protects the interests of the bourgeoisie and is directed against them.

p Since the bourgeois legal system is geared to establish a public order to the liking and advantage of the ruling class, i.e. the bourgeoisie, and, in the first place, to safeguard private property, it is demolished in the course of the socialist revolution. “The era of utilising the legality created by the bourgeoisie,” Lenin wrote, “is giving way to an era of tremendous revolutionary battles, and these battles, in effect, will be the destruction of all bourgeois legality, the whole bourgeois system...”  [448•1 

p The proletarian state which comes into being as the result of the socialist revolution replaces the demolished bourgeois legality and law with its own socialist legal order and socialist law corresponding to the legal consciousness of the working people.

p Will socialist legality survive under communism? The future of socialist legality is intimately linked with that of the socialist state, for law is nothing without an apparatus to enforce it, i.e. without a state. As for the state, it will, of course, wither away when society develops into a full 449 communist system (provided there are no capitalist states left by that time). It will be replaced by organs of public self-government which will have no machinery of coercion at their disposal and which will rely entirely on moral public authority.

The abolition of the state will bring in the era of the abolition of law and legal consciousness, but this does not mean that, in communist society, there will be no social rules of human behaviour Or Views tor explaining and evaluating  these rules. Certain social rules will remain to regulate tfte  relations among the members of society who are sure to observe them consciously and of their own free will. All these rules will, however, lose their legal character, since they will not require any protection from a special apparatus of coercion. The sole guarantee of their enforcement will be public opinion. This being so, they will not be treated as legal rules but rather as moral rules or customs, and will therefore, be associated not with legal but with moral consciousness.