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

production process itself; the relation of capital as value which
appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as
machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the USe
value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the
value objectified in machinery appeats as a presupposition
"Capital here-quite unintentionally-teduces human labout,
expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will rednd to
the benefit of emancipated labour, and IS the condltlon of
. .
its emanCIpatlOn. " 26
against which the value-creating power of the individual labour
capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude."25
Thanks to the accumulation of science and the general forces of
Ocial intellect, Marx repeats, labor becomes superfluous. Capital,
Its purest form, tends to eliminate human labor in its immediate,
matenal form as much as possible, in order to replace it with the
'The time of immediate labor becomes quantitatively irrelevant, if
d ro an elaborate automated system. The reduction of
compare
Y labor time and therefore the progressive elimination of
necessar
workers, is seen by Potere operaio as a jolly perspective: in Compo­
.. I·St discourse it translates into trusting the auto-assertive
SltlOn
capacities of rhe intellect against its capitalistic use.
technological use of science. The development of this trend virtuall
takes the productive global system out of the paradigmatic orbit;
the modern capitalist system. A new paradigmatic system needs to
be found, if we Want to understand and, more importantly, liberate
the new constellation of human activity, technologies, interfaces
and social interactions. But a paradigmatic shift has a different
timing from that of the technological and productive potentialities
of general intellect. It gets tangled in the slow time of culture, social
habits, constituted identities, power relations and the dominant
economic order. Capitalism, as a cultural and epistemic, as well as
economic and social, system, semiotizes the machinic potentialities
of the post-industrial system according to reductive paradigmatic
hnes. The heritage of the modern period, with all its industrial
clanking as well as with the clanking of its mental habits and of
its aggressive and competitive imaginary, Weighs on the development
of new perspectives as an insurmountable obstacle preventing
''As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be
its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the
measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased
to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just
as the non-labour of the jew, for the development of the general
powers of the human head. With that, production based on
exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production
process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.
The free development of individualities, and hence not the
reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour,
but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of
society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic,
scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set
free, and with the means created, for all of them.""
the deployment of a redistribution of wage-earning labor and
its extension.
The alliance between technological power and general social
knowledge meets the resistant power of the capitalist model, which
62 I The Soul at Work
Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 19608 / 63