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

civilization. Only the estrangement from labor makes liberatory
dynamics possible, shifting the flow of desire from (industrial) repetition
towards (cognitive) difference. The concept of estrangement
implies an intentionality that is determined by an estranged behavior.
capital.
Estranged from what? From all forms of labor dependent on
Workers do not suffer from their alienation when they Can
transform it into active estrangement, that is to say, into refusal.
r f humanity and not as the condition of those who are forced
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to renounce their essential humanity.
Trond writes of the working class as a "rude pagan race,"
addressing Marcuse's idealism and the irrelevance of the humanistic
and theological perspectives that it projects onto the reality of
proletarian social composition, its working conditions, but also on
the process of socialization and struggle that workers are able to
effectuate in metropolitan areas.
"The working dass confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostile
force, as an enemy-this is the pOint of departure not only
for the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.
If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highly
revolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is the
only possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneity
of the dass. The goal remains that of refusal, at a higher
level: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a
mass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate task
of working-class organization is to overcome passivity , ) 1 2
The alienation Tronti discusses is not described in humanistic terms
(loss of the human essence) but a condition of estrangement from the
mode of production and its rules, as refusal of work. The Workerist­
Compositionist thinking style distinguishes itself for this overturning
of humanistic connotations: what is seen by the negative thought of
humanistic derivation as a sign of alienation, is seen by the Workerist­
Compositionists as a sign of estrangement, a refusal to identifY with
the general interest of the capitalistic economy. That is to say, it is seen
as the condition of those who rebel assuming their partial humanity
as a point of strength, a premise of a higher social form, of a higher
Tronti and Marcuse
In one of his most influential books, One Dimensional Man, published
in the U.S. in 1964, Herbert Marcuse foresees for the working
class a destiny of integration into the capitalistic system. Consequently,
he sees the necessity, for those willing to change the social
order, of shifting their political attention towards the domain of
extra-productive marginalities and away from the direct domain of
the productive relation. Marcuse's analysis had consistent effects on
the youth culture of the time, since it seemed to anticipate the
student movements as a leading force of the anti-capitalistic struggle
in order to replace an already integrated working class that is already
irretrievable for the purpose of revolutionary conflict.
"In Marcuse's book, the youth of 1968 fOund the topics and
the words needed to give definite form to an idea that had
already been circulating in Europe for a while, but in a less
articulate way. It was the idea that European societies, only
twenty years after Fascism and war had ended, were already
blocked societies. [. . . J They were blocked even at the level of
hope for future changes, since youth considered the major
46 / The Soul at Work
Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s / 47