From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2005 - 03:20:07 EDT
Thanks for this important article Jerry. > a contract that left them with a pay freeze for last >year and no definite increase for 2005... > > > >reluctantly voted to approve a pay freeze in the first two years of her >union's three-year contract > > unionized workers to accept a three-year pay freeze, warning that the plant would be closed otherwise. For these contracts to be binding, someone had to have signed them freely. But who exactly signed them? Actors, ghosts, masks. The existence of juridical persons whose formal equality and formal freedom--though having no real content--is necessary for the sale and purchase of labor power. Of course the equality is a fiction, the freedom a deception. And the juridical person who appears in this relation is nothing more than an outward mask of a human being. While in reality it is mere appearance--indeed it is for Marx a phantasmorgia--but in the law there is no other reality. See Lawrence Krader Dialectic of Civil Society, p. 232 In Beirne and Sharlet's summary, Pashukanis argued that in in civil society individuals are interpellated as legal subjects, posited as free and equal with each other; forced to assume a persona which in Roman jurisprudence originally derived from the function of an actor's stage mask; the mask enabling the actor to conceal his real identity and to conform to the role written for him. Transposed into modern civil society, man must assume a legal mask in order to engage in the activities regulated by legal rules. The Subject is a mode of subjection, a reification and self-reification of persons. Rakesh
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