Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination Franco Berardi (bio) Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia (bio) I. Leninism Cannot Explain the Metropolis Hans Jürgen Krahl died one evening in 1970, in a car accident. He was not yet 30, but he was already one of the most influential thinkers of the German anti-authoritarian movement, which had exploded in the streets in 1967, when, in the course of an anti-imperialist demonstration against the Shah of Iran, a 26 years-old-student, Behnno Onesorg, had been killed by the police. The movement had spread rapidly among the students, who were fighting for the democratization of German society [End Page 57] while protesting against the Vietnam War and denouncing, sometimes with clamorous activities, the media intoxication produced by the newspapers belonging to the Springer group. The German movement—which at the time was mostly organized within the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, German Socialist Student League)—was split, from the very beginning, between two theoretical poles, one believing in centralized organization and the other promoting "spontaneous" action. The first pole would give birth, in the following years, to the Marxist-Leninist Rote Zellen, while the latter would animate the multifaceted experiences of the youth movement, from the Jugendzentren to the Autonomen collectives. In the two years before his death, Hans Jürgen Krahl had been elaborating the foundations of a post-Leninist revolutionary theory. The situation of those years has been described by his collaborators in their introduction to a collection of Krahl's essays entitled Constitution and Class Struggle.2 The impossibility of making a systematic elaboration of the theoretical problems raised by Krahl is not due entirely to his death; rather, the unfinished state of his work is the direct expression of a political situation where the traditional theories concerning workerist movements were being contradicted by praxis, but still in the absence of an adequately elaborated theory of revolutionary movements in late-capitalist metropolitan environments.3 In this book, composed of dense philosophical fragments, Krahl questions the possibility of reducing the new social composition of intellectualized labor to the political and organizational categories of traditional workerist movements, starting from the thought of the Frankfurt School, and of Adorno in particular, and anchoring its critique in the praxis of alienated labor and of anti-authoritarian struggles: The traditional theories of class consciousness, especially the ones derived from Lenin, tend to separate class consciousness from its economic elements. They neglect the meta-economic, constitutive role played by productive subjectivity in the creation of wealth and civilization.4 The analytic separation between the sphere of economics and the sphere of consciousness, which remains valid when productive labor is structurally separated from intellectual labor, tends to lose its meaning when intellectual work becomes a constitutive element of the general production process. Consequently, "the reduction of production to economic elements is a bad feature of the capitalist mode of production." Production cannot be considered as a purely economic process solely [End Page 58] determined by the laws of supply and demand: other, extra-economic factors contribute to it, and they become all the more decisive with the progressive intellectualization of the production cycle. Social culture, contrasting imaginations, expectations and disappointments, hate and loneliness: all these elements modify the rhythm and the fluidity of the production process. The emotional, the ideological, and the linguistic spheres influence social productivity. And this becomes clearer when emotional, linguistic, and creative energies are increasingly involved in the production of value. Hans Jürgen Krahl was able to anticipate all of these developments—and the innovative content of the changes in production characteristic of these last decades, which have seen the obsolescence of the industrial model—at the conceptual level, following the threads of a reflection fully contained within the abstract categories of critical Marxism: Working time remains the measure of value even when it no longer includes the qualitative extension of production. Science and technology make possible the maximization of our labor capacity, transforming it into a social combination that, in the course of the capitalist development of machinery, increasingly becomes the main productive force.5 In his Theses on the General Relation Between the Scientific Intelligensia and Proletarian...