Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

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Labor and Alienation in the philosophy
of the 1960s
Workers and students united in their fight
In the 1960s Marxism was a pole of attraction for different
schools of thought, such as structuralism, phenomenology and
neo-Hegelianism-and the great international explosion of 1968
can be read as the point of arrival fo r a theoretical work that had
been developing on many conceptual levels, as the crossing of
different projects.
In the year 1968, with a synchronicity previously unheard of
in human history, we can see great masses of people all over the
world-workers and students-fighting against both the capitalist
moloch and the authoritarianism of the socialist world.
From this perspective, the 1968 movements were the first phenomenon
of conscious globalization. First of all, internationalism
was present in the consciousness of its agents. At Berkeley you
would mobilize fo r Vietnam, while in Shanghai there were rallies of
solidarity with the Parisian students. In Prague students were fighting
against Soviet authoritarianism, while in Milan the enemy was
the capitalist state-but the positive meaning emerging from the
different movements was the same everywhere.