was very different from conceptions prevalent in the West. The state was considered to be the source of human rights, conditionally granted to the individual, whereas Western law claimed the opposite. Therefore, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government. Extensive extra-judiciary powers were given to the Soviet secret police agencies and in practice, there was virtually no separation of powers. Marxist humanism In contrast, adherents of Marxist humanism consider Marxism to be a normative philosophy grounded in a moral sentiment of secular humanism. They reject the positivistic interpretation of Marxism as an objective social science and instead see it as an ideological product of class interest in itself with a motivated goal of human emancipation and reconciliation from alienation. Marxist humanists derive many of the philosophical foundations that they use to orient the human subject's relation to history from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which were not published until 1932, well after the canonization of Marx's works by Soviet authorities. These texts provide a critique of capitalism on the basis of its alienating properties from a static conception of human essence. Many humanists also emphasize Marx's doctrine of the unity of theory and practice, and therefore reject the mechanistic determinism of Soviet Marxism, providing a space for human agency in the development of history, and viewing socialist revolution as the "realization of philosophy". For Marxist humanists, Marx articulates a concept of species-being (Gattungswesen), according to which Man's essential nature is that of a free producer, engaging in labor to reproduce his own conditions of life. In capitalist society, and in prior economic arrangements, the freedom of the individual is hindered by wage-labor and emasculating relations of production that can only be overcome by participation in class struggle and eventually, revolution. For humanists, history is the process by which Man acquires more and more control of blind natural forces and produces a humanized natural environment, thus externalizing his inner essence for one another. In a classless society, therefore, ethics thus lose their class-relative nature and broad interests become unified amongst all human beings, therefore producing an ideologically homogenous system of ethics that contributes to maximize human thriving through the principle of reciprocity, as is the immaterial purpose of material liberation. References Bibliography Howard Selsam. Socialism and Ethics. New York: International Publishers. 1943. Howard Selsam. Ethics and Progress: New