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

Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s J 71
had the consequence, within the socialist movement, of
reducing the concept of class consciousness to its Leninist
meaning, which is inadequate to the metropolis."34
Leninism, as a model of organization and way of understanding the
telation between social consciousness and the general labot process
is incapable of reading the metropolitan condition.
Leninism is based on the sepatation between the labor process
and higher-level cognitive activities (that is to say consciousness).
This separation is founded on proto-industtial wotk, since the
workers have knowledge of their own abilities, but no awateness of
the cognitive system structuring society. The roots of this separation
become more and more fragile when the mass wotkets, forced
into an increasingly patceled and alienating wotk activity, develop
their sociality in a dimension that is immediately subversive and
anti -capitalistic.
Finally this sepatation has no furthet grounding when we
discuss the mental fotms of social labor, since when each intellectualized
operator is the vehicle of a specific form of knowledge, slhe
perceives-although in a fragmented, confused and tormented
manner-the social system of knowledge underlying the entite
productive cycle.
Digital Panlogism
In those same years, Marcuse was also addressing the issue of the
relation between forms of thought and forms of social production.
The productive finalization of technology ends up subjugating
the thinking process from the standpoint of its own epistemological
structures.
"The feature of operationalism-to make the concept synonymOUS
with the corresponding set of operations-recurs in the
linguistic tendency 'to consider the names of rhings as being
indicative at the same time of their manner of functioning,
and the names of properties and processes as symbolical of
the apparatus used to detect or produce them' [4] This is technological
reasoning, which tends "to identify things and their
functions)) (5) ."35
Beginning with the idealistic frame pictured in works like Reason and
Revolution and Hegels Ontology, which proposed a totmented vetsion
of Hegelian thought focused on negativity, processuality and
separation, Marcuse writes in his One Dimensional Man:
"The totalitarian universe of technological rationality is the
latest transmutation of the idea of Reason."36
In Eros and CiviliZ4tion, a book published in Italy in 1967, Marcuse
develops a discourse on the Iiberatoty potentialities represented by
technology, while in One Dimensional Man he denounces the reduction
of these same potentialities by functionalism. Marcuse opposed
the dialectics of self-realizing reason to functionalist reductions. His
position remains an idealistic one, and there is no concrete reference
to social recomposition processes in his theory. He understands,
nonetheless, an essential point of the late capitalist process: he sees
the tendency towards a total integration of Logos and production
through technology. At the horizon of the tendency described by
Marcuse we find the digitalization of the world: digitalization as a
paradoxical realization of Hegelian Panlogism in a non-dialectical,
disempowered and pacified vetsion: