Abstract：China’s criminal law, represented by the Eleventh Amendment to the Criminal Law, is going through a “reform era”. The criminal law thought in Marx and Engels’ classics is the fundamental guarantee for promoting the modernization of China’s system and capacity for law-based governance.The criminal law thought contained in Marx and Engels’ classics has gone through four stages and three links with the relationship between three theories and three basic categories. Through criticism of the preventive criminal law, Marx conducted an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the law and freedom, put forward the objectivist behavior theory based on the subject and the theory of criminal object of social relations, and re-established the principle of people’s sovereignty in criminal legislation. Engels put forward the conditions for the rationality of criminal judicial interpretation and discussed that the root of the crime was the ultimate economic interest conflict under private ownership-competition. Marx and Engels jointly elaborated a series of important criminal law thoughts, such as the concept of the criminal penalty in terms of human nature, the formation of morality, the essence of the law, and the essence of the crime. Through the interpretation of Marx and Engels’ classics, this paper reveals the theoretical contribution of Marx and Engels’ criminal law thought to the transformation of criminal law in contemporary China, and reexamines China’s anti-terrorism legislation, the application of death penalty for intentional homicide, the corporate crime and the legal subject status of artificial intelligence, thus making these classics glow with new theoretical vitality in the new era.The innovation of the study lies in the following aspects. First, it deconstructs Marx’s criticism of the double logical errors of the Prussian government in defining criminal acts, namely, the logical errors of the cause and the logical errors of the fact, and on this basis, it analyzes Marx’s objectivist behavior theory based on the object. Secondly, rested on the idea that the ontological foundation of Marx and Engels’ criminal law thought is the material lifestyle, this paper proposes to declare the value of the legal interests that need to be protected in advance by stating the facts of the crime, aiming at changing people’s cognition of the specific lifestyle in the sense of criminal law, and constructing a clearing criminal legislation strategy rather than a blocking one. Thirdly, through the analysis of Marx’s theory of human nature, it is proposed that, at the ontological level, AI is the product of the “object ontology” of the alienation of human nature and must become a subject of “object subjectivization” which is created and regulated by the human law; on the practical level, it is an inevitable choice for AI to become an independent legal subject in the age of intelligence when the labor form has changed from “alienation” to “freedom”, which has reflected the strength of human beings; on the level of realism, with the development of AI, the new social relationship involving intelligent machines, from the virtual relationship between “humans-humans” to the intelligent relationship among “humans-machines-humans”, to the intelligent relationship between “machines-machines”, has determined that it has been irreversible for AI to become the legal subject adjusting social relations.
赵东. 马恩经典文本中的刑法思想阐释及其当代价值[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2023, 53(5): 107-123.
Zhao Dong. An Interpretation of Criminal Law Thought in Marx and Engels’s Classics and Its Contemporary Value. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2023, 53(5): 107-123.
2023, Vol. 53 
