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

(mainly by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism) very late. Marx'sManuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1957, in Karl Mal'J(and Friedrich Engels' Werke, published by Dietz Verlag in Berlin.This work was considered a scandal, as the revelation of anotherMarx, different from the severe author of Capital. Economicaterialism was dilured by a consideration of the workers' subjectlVltythat was absent from the geometric Structure of Marx'smajor works.The atmosphere created in 1956 by the twentieth Congress ofCPUS opened the way to a revaluation of the currents of criticalMarxism, radical Hegelianism, and so-called humanistic Marxism.Beginning in the 1950s, Same had led a critical battle against"The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces,t h e more his production increases in power and extent. TheWOf k er becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more comrnod mes . , he produces . The devaluation of the human worldgrows 1 'n d,'rect proportion to the increase in value of the worldof things. [. . . J The worker is related to the product of labouras to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to thispremise, the more the worker exertS himself in his work, themore powerful the alien, objective world becomes which hebrings into being over against himself, the poorer he and hisinner world become, and the less they belong to him.'"dogmatism and determinism within Marxist studies, opening theway to a humanistic formulation and a revaluation of subjectivityagainst dialectic reductionism. Bur Sartre's philosophical point ofdeparture Was a radically anti-Hegelian existentialism.Even within the Hegelian dialectical field there had beeninstances in favor of a revaluation of subjectivity. The new interestin Hegel's thought, first in the 1920s, then through the srudies ofthe Frankfurt School and finally with the Hegel Renaissance of the1960s, led to the emergence of the issue of subjectivity and of thespecifically human Within the historical process.In order to understand the progressive emergence of the themeof subjectivity, we can start rereading Marx's early work, so relevantduring the 1960s in Marxist studies and, more generally, in theMarx's attention is focused on the anthropological consequences ofworking conditions within the structure of capitalistic production.What happens to the human being trapped in a wage-earning productiverelation? This is what essentially happens: the more thewage earner's energy is invested in productive activity, the moreslhe reinforces the power of the enemy, of capital, and the less isleft for oneself. In order to survive, in order to receive a wage,workers have to renOunce their humanity, the human investmentof their time and energies.The concept of alienation derives from Marx's ongoing meditationon the religion question and on the thought of LudwigFeuerbach:field of critical culture.At the center of young Marx's thought-and significantly atthe center also of the political and philosophical problems of the1960s-is the notion of alienation. Let's try to understand themeaning of this word:"It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, theless he retains within himself. The worker places his life inthe object; but now it nO longer belongs to him, but to theobject [ . .. J. What the product of his labour is, he is not.Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The36 I TrlB Sou) at Work