> reform and rev >by Rakesh Bhandari > > > >>CB: I am not familiar with Pashakunis' liquidation specifics, >>although I believe it was after the Bolsheviks were dissolved into >>the CPSU. > >How convenient that you are not familiar with the history of the >Soviet Union that you have defended on email lists for six years!
If it were isolated event, no. > > >CB: The workers' are not the main owners of private property in >capitalism. Nonetheless, what do you think is the important >contribution in Pashakunis' writing ? Pashukanis seems to me to have demonstrated that legal relations do have some objective basis in the relations of exchange. He overstates the case, and he does not understand the connection to production. But drawing from Roger Cotterrell, I wrote on LBO a long time ago: Especially interesting, though I think incorrect, is his critique of Pashukanis's reduction of the autonomous Kantian subject to the codified illusion of the juridical subject (a dramatis personae) who since she presumably can freely dispose of whatever she happens to own can and should be bound by the contracts into which she enters. That is, legal reasoning cannot conceive of a contractual relationship except as a formally free agreement of wills. The fact that the actual freedom to negotiate is often non existent in contractual situations (in particular of course for the working class) does not allow us to dismiss this fundamental legal principle as irrelevant mystification because it is through this assumption, in defined circumstances, of free agreement that the general justification for making contractual terms binding is found and the binding obligations arising from the contracts are fixed in a predictable manner according to general principles. As soon as the idea of compulsory 'contract' is introduced--that is, as Pashukanis notes, agreement which the parties are compelled to make in furtherance of a plan imposing obligations on both or all of them--it becomes extremely difficult to fix, through contractual rules, the limits of their reciprocal obligations. > >What would be grounds for murder ? I am against capital punishment. rb
