The Logical Premise
"Every legal relation" proclaims Pashukanis, "is a relation between subjects". Pashukanis' conceptual account of law begins with the idea of a responsible agent - what he calls "the legal subject".
Property, says Pashukanis, is the basis of the legal form, but only capitalist property that can be disposed of in the market. The subject in law is the expression of the freedom of property, that is, the freedom of alienate property.
Thus the key to understanding law is the contradiction between commodities and subjects.
Commodities according to Karl Marx relate to each other as values, that is exchange takes place on the basis of equivalent amounts of labour-time embodied in commodities passing between buyers and sellers.
Contract is both logically the central legal premise on which all other aspects of law are based, and also the highest form of expression of the commodity owning subject. This is because it is the relations of contract that are crucial for commodity production society since the contract is the necessary legal expression of commodity owners' ability to use their commodities in the market. For Pashukanis, all other forms of legal relations in capitalism flow from this.
Read more about this topic: Commodity Form Theory
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