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

externalisation of the worker in his product means not only
that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but
that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to
him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power;
that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts
him as hostile and alien.'"
In the social situation of the I 960s, with the full development of
industrial societies, mature capitalism produced goods in growing
quantities, created conditions of wealth for consumers, and kept
rhe promise of a more satisfactory economic life for all. But the
satisfaction of economic needs was accompanied by a progressive
loss of life, of pleasute, of time for oneself. Millions of people were
experiencing this in their life: the more powerful the economic
machine, the more the life of the worker becomes miserable. This
awareness spread largely in those years and Marx's early works were
able to interpret it. The concept of alienation defines this thematic
field and it came to Marx from the Hegelian conceptual
context, authorizing a Hegelian reading of the entire discourse.
The thematic scenery we can perceive behind the Manuscripts
of 1844 is that of Hegelian idealism. And indeed, the discovery of
this work in rhe 1960s was accompanied by the large diffusion of
the critical thought of the Frankfurt School and of a humanism of
idealist derivation.
The conceptual scheme of alienation is idealist in so far as it
presupposes human authenticity, an essence that has been lost,
negated, taken away, suspended. Therefore communism is thought
by the young Marx as the restoration of an authentically human
essence that was negated by the relation of capitalist production. In
other terms: the communist revolutionary process is conceived as
the restoratl n
obliteratlon-
'0 of an original identity whose perversion, temporary
,
, whose «alienation ) ) in other wordS-IS represented
by the workers' present condition.
"Communism therefore as the complete return of man to
himself as a social (i.e., human) being-a return accomplished
consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous
development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism,
equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism
equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict
between man' and nature and between man and man-the
true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom
and necessity, between the individual and the species.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows
itsdf to be this solution,"6
The ideological vice of the young Marx's formulation resides entirely
in this presupposition of a generic human essence whose negation
would be represented by the concrete history of the conditions of
the working classes. But where does this presupposition find its
basis, if not in rhe idealisric hypostasis of human essence? Here
Marx's language reveals its conceptual continuity with Hegel's, and
its persistence within the idealistic problematic.
In order to better understand the idealistic function of the
concept of alienation, and the connected idealistic machinery
revolving around the notion of a generic human essence-and of
historic subjectivity-we need to refer to Hegel's work, to the very
dynamic of the Hegelian language:
.
38 / The Soul at Work
Lat)or and Alienation in the pt)ilosophy of the 19608 /39