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

capital semiotizes the technological process according to a code (that
of economic valorization) rhat is inadequate to its material and social
meaning. The social content of capitalist production contradicts its
own semiotic framework. Therefore it produces a system of misunderstandings,
contradictory injunctions and perverse juxtapositions.
Let's think of the so-called problem of unemployment, fo r
instance. In realiry, technological development tends to make manual
labor useless and its evaluation in terms of wages impossible. But
since rhe relational context where rhis message and rhis process are
inserted is that of capitalism, which is founded on wage-earning
regulations and labor's centraliry, a double bind starts functioning.
The concept of a double bind has nothing to do with dialectics.
Double binds are resolved only when the relational context is
redefined, starting from the level of enunciation.
No total overturning is possible in the face of the capitalist
double bind, since as a matter of fact there is no positive or negative
totaliry in the social history of capitalism.
Hans-Jiirgen Krahl's theory: science, work and technique
Hans-Jiirgen Krahl died in a car accident one night in 1970.
Though not even thirry, he was one of the most influential thinkers
of the anti-authoritarian German movement. The movement had
exploded in the streets since 1967, when a young student aged 26,
Behno Onesorg, was killed by the police during an anti-imperialist
rally against the Persian Shah. After that other students rapidly
jOined the movement, fighting for the democratization of German
sociery, protesting against the Vietnam War and denouncing, with
astonishing acrions of revolt, the mediatic overloading operated by
the newspapers belonging to the Springer group.
From its origins, rhe German movement-rhen mainly organized
along rhe lines of rhe SDS (Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentbund, Germall
Socialisr Student League)-was attracted by two differenr
hyporheses: rhe "organizational" and the "spontaneous." In the following
years rhe first would be grouped in the Rote Zellen [Red
Cells] of Marxist-Leninisr inspiration, the second in the multiform
experiences of the yourh movements, rhe Jugendzentren and the
Autonomen collectives.
In rhe two years period before his death, Hans-Jurgen Krahl elaborated
the general lines of a post-Leninist revolutionary rheory. In his
book Konstitution und Klassenkampf" (Constitution and Class Struggle)
he questions rhe possibility of reducing rhe new social composition of
intellectual labor to rhe political and organizational categories of rhe
traditional workers' movements. His meditations start from the
Frankfurt School rheories, specifically Adornds, developing rhem wirh
respect to rhe praxis of industrial alienated labor and anti-aurhoritarian
struggles. Krahl is rethinking rhe question of rhe relation between
social composition and avant-garde political organization. Lenin
answered rhe question in the subjectivist and voluntaristic way that
was to dominate the revolutionary landscape of the century, but in
the 1960s the movements had started looking for other solurions.
"The traditional theories of class consciousness, especially the
ones derived from Lenin. tend to separate class consciousness
from its economic elements. They neglect the meta-economic,
constitutive role played by productive subjectivity in the
creation of wealth and civilization:'3!
The analytical separation between the levels of the economy and of
consciousness had a legitimate grounding in a time when productive