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

production process itself; the relation of capital as value whichappropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing asmachinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the USevalue of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, thevalue objectified in machinery appeats as a presupposition"Capital here-quite unintentionally-teduces human labout,expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will rednd tothe benefit of emancipated labour, and IS the condltlon of. .its emanCIpatlOn. " 26against which the value-creating power of the individual labourcapacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude."25Thanks to the accumulation of science and the general forces ofOcial intellect, Marx repeats, labor becomes superfluous. Capital,Its purest form, tends to eliminate human labor in its immediate,matenal form as much as possible, in order to replace it with the'The time of immediate labor becomes quantitatively irrelevant, ifd ro an elaborate automated system. The reduction ofcompareY labor time and therefore the progressive elimination ofnecessarworkers, is seen by Potere operaio as a jolly perspective: in Compo­.. I·St discourse it translates into trusting the auto-assertiveSltlOncapacities of rhe intellect against its capitalistic use.technological use of science. The development of this trend virtualltakes the productive global system out of the paradigmatic orbit;the modern capitalist system. A new paradigmatic system needs tobe found, if we Want to understand and, more importantly, liberatethe new constellation of human activity, technologies, interfacesand social interactions. But a paradigmatic shift has a differenttiming from that of the technological and productive potentialitiesof general intellect. It gets tangled in the slow time of culture, socialhabits, constituted identities, power relations and the dominanteconomic order. Capitalism, as a cultural and epistemic, as well aseconomic and social, system, semiotizes the machinic potentialitiesof the post-industrial system according to reductive paradigmatichnes. The heritage of the modern period, with all its industrialclanking as well as with the clanking of its mental habits and ofits aggressive and competitive imaginary, Weighs on the developmentof new perspectives as an insurmountable obstacle preventing''As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the greatwell-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to beits measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be themeasure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceasedto be the condition for the development of general wealth, justas the non-labour of the jew, for the development of the generalpowers of the human head. With that, production based onexchange value breaks down, and the direct, material productionprocess is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.The free development of individualities, and hence not thereduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour,but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour ofsociety to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic,scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time setfree, and with the means created, for all of them.""the deployment of a redistribution of wage-earning labor andits extension.The alliance between technological power and general socialknowledge meets the resistant power of the capitalist model, which62 I The Soul at WorkLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 19608 / 63