Press Release, 5.12.2022

Sergei Mitrokhin, a member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko Party, a deputy of the Moscow City Duma, and a candidate of political sciences, focused in his lecture on one specific issue: the origins of the rule of law. Where did Karl Marx was wrong? That was one of the topics of Sergei Mitorkhin’s lecture.

Here is a summary of Sergei Mitrokhin’s lecture:

According to Karl Marx, the “bourgeois law” is a product of the capitalist formation. Winning, capitalism gives rise to it as one of the elements of the ideological “superstructure”.

However, according to Max Weber, the opposite is true. Western systems of legislation, formed in line with the tradition of legal rationality and dating back to Roman law, were not the products of capitalism, but the prerequisites for its formation in Europe. The rule of law, therefore, is not a “superstructure”, but the “basis” of capitalism as a system of social relations.

In Western Europe, the legal basis of the capitalist economy began to take shape as early as the Middle Ages as a result of the reception of Roman law.

The high “density of legislation dealing with individual rights, property and contracts” is the most convincing explanation for the fact that the West has become the “birthplace of capitalism”.

In the 1990s, Russia tried to build capitalism according to Marx, and not according to Weber. It was considered that distribution of state assets into private hands would create a basis on which democracy and the rule of law would “build up” by themselves. The reformers were not interested in law so much that huge amounts of property were distributed not according to the law, but according to a “hand-scribbled” decree. The ugly oligarchy with “traditional values” that emerged instead was not even capitalism according to Marx.

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In his next lecture Sergei Mitrokhin will speak about the causes of legal nihilism. The first lecture by  Sergei Mitorkhin out of the series has been published on the Yabloko YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFwHMpmgySM&t=0s ).