Re: [OPE-L] Falling Fortunes of the Wage Earner

[Gerald_A_Levy@xxxxxxx]

How many questions were asked in the following?  I count
one (1).

In solidarity, Jerry


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rakesh Bhandari" <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <OPE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 3:20 AM
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Falling Fortunes of the Wage Earner


> 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