Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

690 • Jacques Bidet
The peculiarity of the market, de� ned on the basis of the ‘medium’ of money,
is that it ‘does not in its very de� nition disadvantage anyone involved in
his calculation of utility’. 24 In this systemic context, human beings maintain
a purely instrumental, objectifying relationship, which ‘rei� es’ the whole of
personal and communal life. The ‘pathologies’ of modern society are therefore
to be sought on the side of market abstraction.
In short, the market is the best and the worst of things. However, what is
lacking here is a dialectical concept of the relationship between this best and
this worst: that of the relationship between market and capital developed by
Marx, which assumes precisely what Habermas rejects – the labour theory
of value. In it value signi� es expenditure of labour-power and the capitalist
relationship is understood as appropriation, mobilisation, and consumption
of labour-power and pro� t as an accumulation of abstract wealth, a power
that is ceaselessly sought for its own sake.
It is not that Habermas is of� cially antipathetic to such a view of things. But
his conceptualisation is conducted in terms that disarticulate and neutralise
the relevant concepts of this ‘political-economy’. One cannot assign concrete
labour to the life-world and abstract labour to the economic ‘system’, for these
two categories form a rational unity in the concept of the commodity. And the
distinctively capitalist relationship is to be understood as an internal tension,
an immanent contradiction, in this unity, and not (except by Biblical hyperbole)
as some inconceivable ‘transformation of one into the other’.
In place of a theory, Habermas offers us a ‘critique’ of capitalist society, on
the basis of the categories of rei� cation and alienation. These categories suit
him precisely because they are disjunctive: human being or thing, the ego or
its other, counterposable in the same fashion as life-world and systems-world.
In this conceptual context at least, such a thematic is incapable of articulating
a process of domination which is not that of an object over a subject, or a ‘system’
over agents, but of subjects (or classes) over one another. Habermas, who
has worked so hard for the transition to inter-subjectivity, thus reverts to the
subject-object paradigm that he rejects.
This objecti� cation of the two ‘sub-systems’ separates economics and politics
from one another in liberal fashion. And one cannot but be astonished at
its consequences. Legitimation Crisis in 1973 advocated a public sector of ‘pro-
24 Habermas 1987a, p. 271.