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

In the context of the past bourgeois society, in the sphere of
modern Enlightenment, the intellectual was not defined by hislher
social condition, but as representative of a system of universal values.
The role attributed to intellectuals by the Enlightenment was to
establish and guarantee-by the exercise of rationality-the respect
for human rights, equality and the universality of law.
The modern figure of the intellectual finds philosophical justification
in Kant's thoughr. Within that context, the intellectual
emerges as a figure independent from social experience, or at least
not socially influenced in the ethical and cognitive choices slhe
makes. As the bearer of a universal human rationality, the
enlightened intellectual can be considered as the social determination
of Kant's "I think." The intellectual is the guarantor of a thought
freed from any boundaries, the expression of a universally human
rationality. In this sense slhe is the guarantor of democracy.
Democracy cannot stem from any cultural roor or belonging, but only
from a boundless horizon of possibilities and choices, from opportunities
of access and citizenship for every person as semiotic agent and
subject, who exchanges signs in order to have access to universal rationality.
In this sense the figure of the intellectual is in opposition to the
Romantic notion of the people, or rather escapes from such a notion.
Universal Thought, from which the modern adventure of democracy
was born, is indeed an escape from historicity and the territoriality
of culture. Democracy cannot have the mark of a culture, of a
people, of a tradition: it has to be a groundless play, invention and
convention, rather than an assertion of belonging.
Both historical and dialectical materialism assert a completely
different vision: the intellectual becomes the agent of a specific
historic message, destined to descend from the history of thought
to the history of social classes. In the eleventh of his Theses on
Feuerbach, referring to the role that knowledge must have in the
historical process, Marx wrote:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it."!
Marxist intellectuals conceive themselves as instruments of a historical
process aimed at producing a society without classes. The
Communist project makes theory a material power and knowledge
an instrument to change the world. Only insofar as slhe takes part in
the fight towards the abolition of classes and wage-earning labor does
the intellectual in fact become the agent of a universal mission.
The role of intellectuals is crucial in 20th-Century political
philosophy, specifically in Communist revolutionary thought,
beginning with Lenin. In his book What is to Be Done? Lenin
attributes the task of leading the historic process to the intellectuals,
in the interest of the working class. The intellectual, being a free
spirit, is not the agent of a social interest but serves the emerging
interest, slhe identifies with the party which is the ultimate collective
intellectual. For Lenin, intellectuals are not a social class, they
have no specific interest to support. They can become agents and
organizers of a revolutionary consciousness stemming ftom philosophical
thought. In this sense, intellectuals are closest to the
pure becoming of the Spirit, to the Hegelian development of selfconsciousness.
On the other hand, the workers, despite being the
agents of a social interest, can only move from a purely economic
phase (Hegel's self-consciousness of the social being) to the conscious
political phase (self-consciousness per se) through the
political structure of the party, which embodies and transmits the
philosophical heritage.
30 / The Soul at Work
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