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

externalisation of the worker in his product means not onlythat his labour becomes an object, an external existence, butthat it exists outside him, independently of him and alien tohim, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power;that the life which he has bestowed on the object confrontshim as hostile and alien.'"In the social situation of the I 960s, with the full development ofindustrial societies, mature capitalism produced goods in growingquantities, created conditions of wealth for consumers, and keptrhe promise of a more satisfactory economic life for all. But thesatisfaction of economic needs was accompanied by a progressiveloss of life, of pleasute, of time for oneself. Millions of people wereexperiencing this in their life: the more powerful the economicmachine, the more the life of the worker becomes miserable. Thisawareness spread largely in those years and Marx's early works wereable to interpret it. The concept of alienation defines this thematicfield and it came to Marx from the Hegelian conceptualcontext, authorizing a Hegelian reading of the entire discourse.The thematic scenery we can perceive behind the Manuscriptsof 1844 is that of Hegelian idealism. And indeed, the discovery ofthis work in rhe 1960s was accompanied by the large diffusion ofthe critical thought of the Frankfurt School and of a humanism ofidealist derivation.The conceptual scheme of alienation is idealist in so far as itpresupposes human authenticity, an essence that has been lost,negated, taken away, suspended. Therefore communism is thoughtby the young Marx as the restoration of an authentically humanessence that was negated by the relation of capitalist production. Inother terms: the communist revolutionary process is conceived asthe restoratl nobliteratlon-'0 of an original identity whose perversion, temporary,, whose «alienation ) ) in other wordS-IS representedby the workers' present condition."Communism therefore as the complete return of man tohimself as a social (i.e., human) being-a return accomplishedconsciously and embracing the entire wealth of previousdevelopment. This communism, as fully developed naturalism,equals humanism, and as fully developed humanismequals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflictbetween man' and nature and between man and man-thetrue resolution of the strife between existence and essence,between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedomand necessity, between the individual and the species.Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knowsitsdf to be this solution,"6The ideological vice of the young Marx's formulation resides entirelyin this presupposition of a generic human essence whose negationwould be represented by the concrete history of the conditions ofthe working classes. But where does this presupposition find itsbasis, if not in rhe idealisric hypostasis of human essence? HereMarx's language reveals its conceptual continuity with Hegel's, andits persistence within the idealistic problematic.In order to better understand the idealistic function of theconcept of alienation, and the connected idealistic machineryrevolving around the notion of a generic human essence-and ofhistoric subjectivity-we need to refer to Hegel's work, to the verydynamic of the Hegelian language:.38 / The Soul at WorkLat)or and Alienation in the pt)ilosophy of the 19608 /39