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.
I want to touch on something however which Reiman doesn't take up there.--that is, Marx's historical materialist explanation of ethical indignation.
In a whole series of different stages in the development of the collective exploitation of nature, it has been possible, and is actually the case, that the lion's share of the results has gone one section of society, with the further result that the remaining section has been little if at all better off. Indeed, whole strata, in whole periods, have been relatively and positively worse off than if they had been animals. It is these facts (1) that the exploitation of Nature becomes historically transmuted into the exploitation of men by men in society and (2) that the exploited are at one and the same time physically, mentally, and psychologically incapable of living *apart from society* and also at the same *materially unable to live* in the given form of society, that provides the positive basis for "moral" indignation and for the revolt against exploitation and oppression, and the fight for Freedom.
Marx also provides an explanation for why the bourgeoisie long ago ostentatioulsy repented itself--in his estimation--of ever having given currency to such words as "Liberty" and "Democracy". That is instead of of conceding to the proletariat "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" in their working class sense, the bourgeoisie would rather scrap--in Marx's interpretation--all its theories, all belief in the power of "right" and "reason" and fall back upon the frank, open and brutal assertion of the actual fact of *possession*.
For Marx, it was the irony of ironies that only from the revolutionary standpoint of the working class could the work of the Bourgeois revolutionaries be either appraised adequately or historically vindicated.
Yours, Rakesh