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

contribution consists in the reformulation of the issue of politicalorganization in terms of sodal composition.Compositionism redefines the Leninist notion of the party ascollective intellectual, leaving behind the very notion of the intellectualwhile proposing a new reading of the Marxist notion of"general intellect." Marx had written of general intellect in a passageof his Grundrisse known as the "Fragment on the machines":"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electrictelegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of humanindustry: natural material transformed into organs of the humanwill over nature, or of human participation in nature [...). Theyare organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: thepower of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capitalindicates to what degree general social knowledge has becomea direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditionsof the process of social life itself have come under thecontrol of the general intellect and been transformed in accordancewith it. To what degree the powers of social productionhave been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but alsoas immediate organs of social practice, of the rcal life process.'"At the time of the communist revolutions, in the first part of the twentiethcentury, the Marxist-Leninist tradition ignored the concept ofgeneral intellect, therefore conceiving the intellectual function as exteriorityand as a political direction determined within the purely spiritualdomain of philosophy. Bur during the post-industrial transformationof production the general intellect emerged as a central productiveforce. At the end of the 20th century, thanks to digital technologiesand the constitution of a global telematic network, the general socialrocess is redefined as "general intellect," and the Leninist idea of theParry is forever put aside. Grarnsci's notion of the organic intellectualis also losing its concrete reference, since it is based on the intellectuals'attachment to an ideology, while nowadays what is important isthe creation of a new social sphere, that we might want to call "cognitariat,"representing the social subjectivity of the "general intellect."If we want to define the crux of today's mutations, we must focus onthe social function of cognitive labor. Intellectual labor is no longera social function separated from general labor, but it becomes atransversal function within the entire social process, it becomes thecreation of technical and linguistic interfaces ensuring the fluidityboth of the productive process and of social communication.Subjectivity and alienationIn the 1960s, we could find three tendencies within the field ofMarxist thought:The first emphasized the young Marx's thought, his humanisticvocation, and the issue of subjectivity: it underlined its continuitywith Hegel, specifically with his The Phenomenology of Spirit.The second focused mainly on Capital, and on Marx's workafter his epistemological rupture with Hegelianism: this tendencycan be linked to structuralism.The third tendency discovered and emphasized the importanceof Grundrisse, therefore the concept of composition and generalintellect, while maintaining conceptual links with phenomenology.Karl Marx's early works were published and distributed by theinstitutions assigned to their scholastic and dogmatic conservation