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

LAhor and AlienAtion in the ohilosonrlV of lhfJ 19608 / 59
We talk about abstract labor when rhe workers give their time for
producing value in conditions of complete indifference to rhe useful
quality of their product.
The abstraction of labor, that is to say the ttansformation of
human activities into empty performances of abstract time, is pro
gressively expanding to all possible forms of social activity. The
final point of this process is the subsumption of the productive
labor of mental activity itself the sphere of value-production, which
results in its ultimate reduction and abstraction.
This second implication present in Marx's Grundrisse (not only
in the Introduction, but also in the section known as "Fragment of
machines") becomes an essential element in the Workerist and
Compositionist theories of the 1960s and 1970s. What finds its
grounding here is the prefiguration of the most advanced tendencies
in the current modes of capitalist production: the subsumption of
mental labor within the productive process and the progressive
reduction of mental labor to abstract labor, labor with no useful
quality and no meaning, mental time serving only for the production
of exchange value.
General intellect and concrete totality in Grundrisse
In the 1960s, Critical Humanism (gravitating around the figutes of
Marcuse and Sartre) had found great energies in Marx's Early
Writings. Human original authenticity was both the starting point
and the teleological meaning of revolutionary engagement.
Althusser's structuralism is most of all an invitation to read
Capital, since the structure of the productive process is considered the
place where a critical comprehension both of the existing world and of
the revolutionaty process leading to its destruction is to be achieved.
Italian Neo-Marxist Workerism inspired by Compositionism
shifts attention to the Grundrisse, Marx's work first published in
Italy in 1968. Social composition and the formation of revolutionary
subjectivity can be explained neither by the idealist
hypostasis of a human narure to be realized through historical
action nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in the
structure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition of
a humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capital
are sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20thcentury
history, on the stage of working class struggles and of
capital's restructuring.
We need to adopt the point of view of labor in its most
advanced manifestations, it is necessary to assume the standpoint of
the refosal to work, in order to understand the dynamics both of
productive transformation and of political revolt. When we do
that, we can finally see that social composition is in constant transformation,
altering the productive, technological, economic and
political contexts. The motor of this constant transformation is the
dynamic of subtraction of lived time from the wage-relation.
Compositionist theory positions itself in an anti-Iaborist perspective:
the Italian Neo-Marxists gathered around the journal
Classe operaia (Working Class) intended to study the constirution
of autonomous collective activity, starting from the subtraction of
lived time from labor, the refusal to work and the project of its
extinction.
From the first page of Capital, Marx states that it is necessary
to differentiate between generic activity, where humans relate to
nature and the society of other humans, and a specific form of
wage-earning labor, that is to say the lending of abstract time in
exchange for a wage.