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

political instruments of attack and radical redistribution of social
weal th, if wages are considered a factor in the conflict between
wotkers and capital (at the level of the conflict on the exchange
value of the use value of the labor force), then they end up becoming
the main instrument in a conflict in which economical and political
dimensions are aggressively linked to the perspective of wotket
autonomy from capitalistic development and hegemony,
Workerisr theory refuses the notion of consumerism, since it
considers the workers' consumption in a "pagan" and rude way as
a form of appropriation destined to open a front line of radical and
political clash,
As for the students and their movements, Workerist theory
anticipates an idea that will bear fruit some time later: srudents are
a section of social labor, they are labor in the making, a central
factor in tbe change of capital's organic composition, Therefore the
students' struggle is not celebrated as an ideological fight, and even
less as a substitute for the workers' fight, It is celebrated instead as
specific movement in a social sector internal to the dynamics of
productive labor,
While from Marcuse's perspective students were considered as
agents of an action without causes or direct consequences at the
level of social production, Workerist theory sees the students from
the very beginning as part of the general labor force: labor force in
progress, expropriated of its knowledge just as much as workers are
expropriated of the products of their work.
While humanistic theories, specifically Marcuse's, believe that
it is possible to judge the spontaneity of workers' behaviors in the
name of a principle of human universality, or historical teleology,
Tronti answers that there is no universal principle from which
workers' behaviors derive, or accotding to which the workers'
, d d The workers' position is rather one of
could be JU ge '
.. n.,erneuc , h I ic and general interest
, t'lng itself outSide t e og
SitUa
,tI:an:gernerl"
society,
.;f eap,itail;stIC
d' he journal Classe operaia, wages
develope
In the discoutse m
'd d a political weapon, : th se that immediate class
e sen
m
conSI ere
'bl with capitalist order,
, t compau e
is no
, h odal
bebaviot
'th e Workerist v,
,
' £ unded on the idea that 10 t e s
! SlO ! S o
fi he workers' resistance to capital and the
h mes rst is t
h I ' al
P ro cess w at co
th' el ( olitical apparatuses, tec no OglC
k Every mg se p
to wor
refusal '
th I ' ns of fo rce between classes,
models) depends on e re ano
al' iSm
Structur
and Das Kapital
, f both Marcuse's and Same's
k' t the centel a ,
Marx'S early wor ! S a 'f h develop in ditectlOns
. even 1 t ey
1 meditation,
anthropOloglca
, I Marcuse starts from an
I I pOSite reSU tS,
I
bearing comp ete y op
d h e re conceives the historica
f h ssence an t ererO
0 t e e
anthropology
, a ne ated totaliry, while Sarrre starts
Process as the restorat w
n of g
'ty
as the anthropological
d
d " ,I' henty an scaret ,
from the con mon OJ a
'd both the historical
, b " he conSi ers
Premise of histo n cal ecom1 g
O '
d ' d to a failure from which
'al
as esnne
and the existenn processes
d
f f sionaliry will be save '
,
only rhe moment 0 u
k hiEr in Marxist srudles,
) F Marx mar s a neW S
Louis Althusser s or
h rly works to stress
, ' far away from t e ea
,
focusing ItS attennon
' al b k h t brings Marx's theory-m
, logIC rea t a
instead the epiSternO
t h e
'f' II in Capital-outside
M Xism and specl lca y
mature ar
Hegelian sphere,
, I h major role, since it is not
Structure then, not hiStory, pays t e
a l that the process of
at the historical level, but at the srructur one
knowledge is founded,
50 I The Soul at Work
,
h of the 19605 /51
Labor and Alienation in the ph!iosoP Y