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

contribution consists in the reformulation of the issue of political
organization in terms of sodal composition.
Compositionism redefines the Leninist notion of the party as
collective intellectual, leaving behind the very notion of the intellectual
while proposing a new reading of the Marxist notion of
"general intellect." Marx had written of general intellect in a passage
of his Grundrisse known as the "Fragment on the machines":
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human
industry: natural material transformed into organs of the human
will over nature, or of human participation in nature [...). They
are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the
power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital
indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become
a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions
of the process of social life itself have come under the
control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance
with it. To what degree the powers of social production
have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also
as immediate organs of social practice, of the rcal life process.'"
At the time of the communist revolutions, in the first part of the twentieth
century, the Marxist-Leninist tradition ignored the concept of
general intellect, therefore conceiving the intellectual function as exteriority
and as a political direction determined within the purely spiritual
domain of philosophy. Bur during the post-industrial transformation
of production the general intellect emerged as a central productive
force. At the end of the 20th century, thanks to digital technologies
and the constitution of a global telematic network, the general social
rocess is redefined as "general intellect," and the Leninist idea of the
Parry is forever put aside. Grarnsci's notion of the organic intellectual
is also losing its concrete reference, since it is based on the intellectuals'
attachment to an ideology, while nowadays what is important is
the creation of a new social sphere, that we might want to call "cognitariat,"
representing the social subjectivity of the "general intellect."
If we want to define the crux of today's mutations, we must focus on
the social function of cognitive labor. Intellectual labor is no longer
a social function separated from general labor, but it becomes a
transversal function within the entire social process, it becomes the
creation of technical and linguistic interfaces ensuring the fluidity
both of the productive process and of social communication.
Subjectivity and alienation
In the 1960s, we could find three tendencies within the field of
Marxist thought:
The first emphasized the young Marx's thought, his humanistic
vocation, and the issue of subjectivity: it underlined its continuity
with Hegel, specifically with his The Phenomenology of Spirit.
The second focused mainly on Capital, and on Marx's work
after his epistemological rupture with Hegelianism: this tendency
can be linked to structuralism.
The third tendency discovered and emphasized the importance
of Grundrisse, therefore the concept of composition and general
intellect, while maintaining conceptual links with phenomenology.
Karl Marx's early works were published and distributed by the
institutions assigned to their scholastic and dogmatic conservation