Marx never developed a systematic theory of Law as such.

But he gave lot of insights

scattered throughout his writings from which we can understand his views on Law.
Some insights are:
 Base and the superstructure – economic base of social relations versus law as a
superstructure
 The critique that law is a false universal – it claims to universally articulate the
reasons and interests of all of the members of the society but it in fact represent a
particular class of the society – the bourgeoisie.

There are number of insights such as these which we will group together and
understand as a Marxist theory of Law.
His insights collectively have influenced in the later developments of the philosophy
of law such as critical legal theory.

Marx’s ideas on law may be seen within the framework of the perspective of
historical materialism..Historical materialism - is a viewpoint towards society that
conceives of history as an outcome of opposing forces. He borrowed this conception
of history from the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, but with some changes. The
only point where his theorizing diffrered from Hegel is that Hegel gave an idealist
perspective and Marx gave a materialist theory of society. His perspective is not just
economy his perspective was on society itself. Thus, the political, cultural, and socio-
historical conditions of a society are explained as the outcome (synthesis) of opposing
forces (thesis and antithesis) that are of an economic nature. Marx defended the
viewpoint that, on the basis of a dialectical analysis, all things existing should be
criticized in order to contribute to laying bare the injustices that exist in society and
thus work towards the bettterment of society. He said that philosophy should have a
practical intent and be guided by explicitly political motives. Theory and praxis have
to come together in order to explain as well as to change the world.

Marx argued that the essence of modern society lay in its economic transformation
from feudalism to capitalism. Whereas feudal societies were predominantly
agricultural and centered around the power of landowners over serfs, capitalism
developed from a gradual concentration of the means of prodcution in technologically
advanced factories. The owners of these means were relatively few in number but
extremely powerful in being able to control the labor of a relatively large number of
workers and dtermine their wages. The owning class can thus create enormous
amounts of wealth, which do not have to be shared with the large class of workers
who are powerless and alienated.

In this passage from the Communist Manifesto where Marx writes:

Your very ideas are but the outgrowth that the conditions of your bourgeois
production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your
class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economical conditions of the existence of your class.
So the problem is a very clear problem here – that the bourgeois is consciously
manipulating the state to universalize its law and that the nature of jurisprudence and
law is the natural outgrowth from the existing social capitalist relations.

Worker alienation under capitalism takes on at least four forms:

(1) alienation from the product of one’s labor because the product does not belong to
the worker;
(2) alienation from labor itself because labor, under
conditions of a division of labor, constitutes but a fragment of the production process;
(3) alienation from social relations because they are valued only in terms of market
conditions; and
(4) alienation from oneself because one’s entire existence is dominated by the
demands of capitalism.

Marx’s theory is not to be understood merely as a theory of the economy, for his
analysis of capitalism is meant to provide the basis for an analysis of society. The
economic organization of society is its material core from which all other social
developments in matters of politics, culture, and law can be explained.

This is summarized in Marx’s famous dictum that the infrastructure of a society

determines its superstructure. Thus, the division between the economic classes of
owners and non-owners appears at the societal level as a class antagonism between
the relatively small but powerful bourgeoisie and the relatively large but powerless
proletariat.The bourgeoisie can articulate its economic power also at the political,
cultural, and legal level because of its control over all important institutions of
society, such as government, the legal system, art, science, and education. The
economic interests of the bourgeoisie, therefore, also become articulated at the
societal level as the dominant interests that count for society as a whole. Because the
basic conflicts of a society are always economic, according to Marx, only the
destruction of capitalism in favor of a communist mode of production, whereby the
workers collectively own and control the means of production, would ensure a
,successful revolution of society into a more just social order.
Congruent with his materialist perspective, Marx asserts that the economic conditions
of society determine what type of state will develop, which in a capitalist society
implies that the state will be controlled by the bourgeoisie as an instrument to secure
economic rights and to moderate class conflict. “The executive of the modern state,”
Marx writes, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.” Thus, the capitalist state represents and secures the power of the
dominant economic class which now also becomes the politically dominant class.
Interestingly, Marx argues that the democratic republic, rather than being a more
egalitarian form of government relative to centralized autocratic regimes, is the most
advanced form of the capitalist state, for it totally disregards the property distinctions
that have arisen under capitalism.
Similar to Marx’s notion of the state, his perspective on law is instrumentalist and
views the legal system in function of its role as an instrument of control serving
bourgeois interests. Rather than abiding by a principle of the rule of law that holds
that it is just for the law to be applied equally and fairly to all, Marx maintains that
capitalist law actually enhances the conditions of inequality that mark capitalist
society. Specifically, Marx contends that the capitalist legal system contributes to, as
well as legitimates, the inequalities that exist as a result of capitalist economic
conditions. In the practice of law, it is revealed that the legal system contributes to
inequality because capitalist law establishes and applies individualized rights of
freedom, which benefit those who own while disfavoring those who are without
property. The formal equality that is granted in law by treating the various parties that
are in contract with one another or with the state as equal contributes to sustain and
develop the economic inequalities that exist among legal subjects. Legal doctrine,
moreover, justifies the practices of capitalist law on the basis of a notion of justice
claimed to be universally valid but which in actuality serves the interests of only the
dominant economic class. As such, the law takes on the form of a bourgeois ideology.
In its ultimate triumph, moreover, the ideology of capitalist law becomes widely
accepted, even among those members of society who are economically disadvantaged
and thus additionally subject to the inequalities brought about by the legal system.

The very essence of the theory of historical materialism implies that Marx did not
devote much separate attention to law as one element of the superstructure of
capitalist society. “There is no history of politics, law, science, etc.,” Marx writes in
The German Ideology (Marx 1846). Yet, in a few instances Marx did write about
aspects of law, albeit only briefly and clearly within a materialist framework that
placed a premium on the economic conditions that underlay the constitution of law.
For instance, in a series of essays published in the Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper
which Marx edited for a number of years, Marx (1842) critiqued the new law on the
theft of wood that had been promulgated in Prussia in 1842. The law prohibited the
gathering of wood in the Rhenish forests although it had been a customary practice for
peasants to pick up and use for their own benefit whatever wood had fallen on the
ground. The official grounds for the law were that it would protect the forest and
allow for natural regeneration. Marx debunks this official story in favor of a
materialist analysis that starts from the observation that wood had become an
important commodity in the development of capitalism as wood was used for
shipbuilding, for the development of railroads, and for the construction of machines.
Thus developed the need to control the production of wood and make the gathering of
wood in forests illegal. The law benefited the bourgeois class also in a direct way
because the forest owners received the fines that were collected by a specialized forest
police from those who violated the law.

The ownership of these Woods by noble families represented in some respects the
basic liberal paradigm of private property. So what the State did was under the
banner of protecting a universal interest which is private property, they implemented a
regime that didn’t allow the poor to collect fallen, broken wood.
What Marx realized at this moment that something that claims to be universal like the
State’s interest in protecting private property (none of us want to be robbed), the
State’s universal interest is in fact is applied in a particularistic manner. So the
claimed universal is in fact monopolized by a particular class- the Bourgeoisie in
order to protect its own interest.
In other words, Marx concludes that the Law on the Thefts of Wood is merely an
instance of a more fundamental privatization of the State by the bourgeoisie.
He has put it in a very eloquent way-
“The wood thief has robbed the forest owner of the wood but the forest owner has
made use of the wood thief to rob the state itself.”

So through this argument, Marx is claiming that:

The private property owners make use of supposedly universal principle like the
‘protection of private property’ to own the State. The State too results to be in hand of
the vested private property interests.

In a short essay on the right of inheritance, Marx (1869) similarly turns to an analysis
of economic conditions to critique the reforms that had been proposed on inheritance
laws whereby property can be passed down from one generation to the next. Some
socialist reformers had suggested to abolish this right because it concentrated wealth,
but Marx argued that such a proposal was utopian because it could not possibly alter
existing economic conditions. Instead, Marx argues, any truly revolutionary proposal
in the context of a capitalist society would have to start with a change of the economic
conditions. “What we have to grapple with,” Marx writes, “is the cause and not the
effect – the economical basis, not the juridical superstructure”.

Grundrisse-
In this study, Marx is first trying to tackle the liberal myths that are grounding our
conception of rights and laws. He refers to these as Robinsonades. (he is making a
joke of Robinson Crusoe that every individual is atomized)
By Robinsonades he is making a joke about the novel of Robinson Crusoe and that
every individual in the contemporary liberal state is just another ‘Robinson Crusoe’ –
in other words we are atomized individuals who then negotiate on ‘level playing field’
and that the system of right is the system of rules according to which we negotiate our
atomic individuality.
The critique of these robinsonades lies in the argument that Marx puts forward that
this natural pre-social man is just a figment of our imagination. You can think of it in
terms of Hegel’s philosophy of right- the portions where Hegel too critiques the idea
of social contract. The basis of a contract is for two autonomous adult people to
engage in a free and equal exchange but where do you get the autonomous adult? You
get such an autonomous adult after a long process of journey into that autonomy and a
journey into that adulthood. Either 1 year old or a 10 year old or even a 15 year old
cannot sign a contract. You have to wait for this moment of autonomy which is
generally granted at 18 years and sometimes even 21 years.
If that is the case, according to the reality of the situation, how do we project that the
formation of the state was a result of an agreement between autonomous adults. You
cannot have autonomous adults without the State. So Hegel points out that there is a
‘self contradiction’ projected in social contract thinking.
Marx takes that self contradiction and says that it is not an unconscious or accidental
contradiction. Rather it is a purposeful one constructed by liberal bourgeoisie thinkers
in order to naturalize the unnatural specifics of the nation-state which is designed to
favor a particular class.
So if we were to rely on early Marx and we see that what the law is and what abstract
right is in fact not universal but the particular interests of the class, then we can see
that the political philosophy that argues for the justification or legitimacy of that law
through ideas like the social contract is nothing but a projection that naturalizes
( make to appear natural) what is actually artificial and favor a particular class is
effected through things like Robinson Crusoe – the argument that we are all naturally
free and individuals and engage in cooperative society in order to pursue the ‘greater
good’. That’s liberal philosophy but liberal philosophy is superstructure and its
ideology generated out of the base which is capitalist social relations. The truth of the
matter is we are not engaged in contemporary society for the good of all, we are all
victims of exploitation of the capitalist system which favors the property owning
class- the capitalists.