Contracts

This isn't the (eagerly awaited I'm sure) addition to my previous post. Just a few quotes on contract. Briefly, then, contract is the notion at the centre of the law, and the bourgeois idology that surrounds it. Henry Maine's famous phrase about the movement from status to contract is constantly bandied about, and people are always banging on about how wonderful they are. The first thing I was told in my Roman law supervision was "and now we live in a contract based society", we have free choice, and everything is wonderful...in response to this wonderful trick ("what could be wrong with voluntarily entering into a relationship?" - gah!):

“The legal person is the economic mask of the property relationship. As a mask it covers the true face and obscures the fact that private property is not only a subjective right but is at the same time the basis of "master-slave relationships". The contract, being the auxiliary guaranty of private property is a contract between free and equal legal persons. But this freedom and equality exists only in the legal sphere. The legal equality of the contractual partners hides their economic inequality. The labour contract in particular is a contract between the legally equal worker and entrepreneur. It's from does not reveal the fact that in actuality the entrepreneur is more powerful than the worker. The Staatsperson alone is supposed to be the bearer of sovereignty, and the positivist theory of the state refuses, therefore, to speak of the sovereignty of an agency or organ. Thus the theory obscures the domination of some men over other men.”
Franz Neumann, The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society

“We are above all obligated to note that a totally non-violent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract. For the latter, however, peacefully it may have been entered into by the parties, leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of ever contract also points toward violence. It need not be directly present in it as lawmaking violence, but it is represented in it insofar as the power that guarantees a legal contract is in turn of violent origin even if violence is not introduced into the contract itself. We are above all obligated to note that a totally non-violent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract. For the latter, however, peacefully it may have been entered into by the parties, leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of ever contract also points toward violence. It need not be directly present in it as lawmaking violence, but it is represented in it insofar as the power that guarantees a legal contract is in turn of violent origin even if violence is not introduced into the contract itself.”
Walter Benjamin, The Critique of Violence

“The worker sells labor power in a free bargain. This is the form called “contract.” A contract involves the exchange of mutual promises by individuals who are each free to accept or reject the terms proposed. In the contract for labor, however, we can see the way in which this formalism is belied by substance. The worker has nothing to sell but labor power. The price is dictated by market forces beyond the worker’s control. The individual is powerless relative to the employing enterprise. The intervention of collective bargaining may help equalize the balance, but only so far. And this is not to speak of the take-it-or-leave it pseudo-bargains that are everywhere in an economy dominated by powerful sellers and buyers.”
Michael Tigar, Laws Lawyers and the Law’s Fake Bargains