Reading Giblin and Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism and they used a term “freedom of contract” I hadn’t heard before, and which I realized that I have over-valued in my brain.
I’ve already broken through in a few spots, for instance employment contracts can obviously be exploitative and workers have little ability to negotiating the terms on their own.
Or bank loans, not because of the negotiation so much as the moral stigma attached to defaulting on loans. I can see that the bank took a risk, they can take the consequences too. Why add moral consequences to an action that already carries financial consequences?
I think this loans issue comes back to an association of business contracts with social promises, which I’ve spent some time breaking down.
The employment issue is another kettle of frogs. That comes back to consent and whether a person who is not entirely free can consent. I guess that’s the whole point of a revolution though. Any attempt to make contract law fairer to respect the fact that some parties are signing under duress will be thorny, because all people are under duress under capitalism.
There’s barely a question in there, but … thoughts?
Our existing frameworks for consent aren’t very good, probably for these reasons. It’s tough to draw the line between inducements and coercion. Contracts are OK if they’re a fair agreement, but unless the two agents have an equal power balance they’re not going to sign a fair contract. For instance, a job contract will take surplus value for the employer. Presumably, it’s better to approach this by eradicating class than at the individual level of tweaking how contracts work.
Absolutely. I think this is the core of what I need to take from ‘here’s a thing I understand intellectually’ to ‘this is how I feel about the world on a gut level’