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

LAhor and AlienAtion in the ohilosonrlV of lhfJ 19608 / 59We talk about abstract labor when rhe workers give their time forproducing value in conditions of complete indifference to rhe usefulquality of their product.The abstraction of labor, that is to say the ttansformation ofhuman activities into empty performances of abstract time, is progressively expanding to all possible forms of social activity. Thefinal point of this process is the subsumption of the productivelabor of mental activity itself the sphere of value-production, whichresults in its ultimate reduction and abstraction.This second implication present in Marx's Grundrisse (not onlyin the Introduction, but also in the section known as "Fragment ofmachines") becomes an essential element in the Workerist andCompositionist theories of the 1960s and 1970s. What finds itsgrounding here is the prefiguration of the most advanced tendenciesin the current modes of capitalist production: the subsumption ofmental labor within the productive process and the progressivereduction of mental labor to abstract labor, labor with no usefulquality and no meaning, mental time serving only for the productionof exchange value.General intellect and concrete totality in GrundrisseIn the 1960s, Critical Humanism (gravitating around the figutes ofMarcuse and Sartre) had found great energies in Marx's EarlyWritings. Human original authenticity was both the starting pointand the teleological meaning of revolutionary engagement.Althusser's structuralism is most of all an invitation to readCapital, since the structure of the productive process is considered theplace where a critical comprehension both of the existing world and ofthe revolutionaty process leading to its destruction is to be achieved.Italian Neo-Marxist Workerism inspired by Compositionismshifts attention to the Grundrisse, Marx's work first published inItaly in 1968. Social composition and the formation of revolutionarysubjectivity can be explained neither by the idealisthypostasis of a human narure to be realized through historicalaction nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in thestructure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition ofa humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capitalare sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20thcenturyhistory, on the stage of working class struggles and ofcapital's restructuring.We need to adopt the point of view of labor in its mostadvanced manifestations, it is necessary to assume the standpoint ofthe refosal to work, in order to understand the dynamics both ofproductive transformation and of political revolt. When we dothat, we can finally see that social composition is in constant transformation,altering the productive, technological, economic andpolitical contexts. The motor of this constant transformation is thedynamic of subtraction of lived time from the wage-relation.Compositionist theory positions itself in an anti-Iaborist perspective:the Italian Neo-Marxists gathered around the journalClasse operaia (Working Class) intended to study the constirutionof autonomous collective activity, starting from the subtraction oflived time from labor, the refusal to work and the project of itsextinction.From the first page of Capital, Marx states that it is necessaryto differentiate between generic activity, where humans relate tonature and the society of other humans, and a specific form ofwage-earning labor, that is to say the lending of abstract time inexchange for a wage.