Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

8 • Jacques Bidet
All this can be related to those elements in Marx’s Marxism that are bound
up with Enlightenment traditions of the social contract and political economy,
Rousseau and Adam Smith. Moreover, in a sense, it is indeed to these traditions
that Marx pays homage at the start of Capital, when he begins his exposition
by referring to what constitutes the presupposition of the modern form
of society. Marx begins by considering that which, of� cially at least, presents
itself as the most general feature of capitalist society: market relations of production,
based on exchange, in which everyone eo ipso considers the other as
a free, equal, and rational individual, and thereby enjoys the status of citizen
in a polity based on the social contract. Marx then shows how, in reality, this
framework of production for exchange, in so far as it is generalised, turns
labour-power itself into a commodity, bought by capitalists with a view to
pro� t – that is to say, at a lower price than the value it will produce. There -
after, social relations can no longer be analysed as simple relations of exchange
between individuals, because they are at the same time relations of exploitation
between classes with con� icting interests. And the class that is economically
dominant is also the class which is politically dominant, in a state whose
institutions, in this respect, are non-contractual, are such as to reproduce and
maintain the class structure. The aim of the remainder of Capital is to demonstrate
that this form of society is historically transient, leading to its own
supersession. In fact, it has an irresistible tendency to the concentration of
capital, such that large � rms gradually replace small ones, to the point where
the working class, increasingly numerous, educated, and organised by the
production process itself, becomes capable of taking over management of it
and replacing the logic of the market by democratically organised planning,
so that a logic of concerted discourse can henceforth replace the blind mechanisms
of the market.
It might be thought that there is much truth in Marx’s analysis. And we
have seen that during the twentieth century the working class, allied with
other categories of wage-earner and elsewhere with peasant masses, demonstrated
its ability to promote alternatives to capitalism, to impose limits on the
omnipotence of the logic of the capitalist market, to establish non-market conditions
for the employment of labour-power, and to appropriate in a national
form a proportion of the production of goods and especially services. Even
so, when attempts were made to substitute the ‘organised’ (or planned) form
of society for the ‘market’ form in the USSR and China, it displayed a similar