2026-02-01_R Alquati on labor - activity

“Alquati also extensively focuses on labor and activity in his notes, some of which were published. He challenges arguments about the end of work that were popular in the late 1990s (such as those held by Jeremy Rifkin and André Gorz). Labor, he tells us, has a strictly capitalist character and defines a way of being in the civilization in which we are situated. Activity is different, as it defines human necessities. Activity is generic, labor is specific. Just as capitalism didn’t exist for most of human history and therefore could cease to exist, the same can be said of labor. But humans can’t fail to engage in activity.”

“Alquati also responds to some vulgarizations of the idea of the refusal of labor: it does not simply mean not working, but subtracting oneself from the capitalist relationship and from the particular needs that capitalism imposes on proletarians with the commodification of their capacity. Activity is, on the contrary, the valorization and satisfaction of the human person. Labor makes us actors, created for and acting for someone else, while activity is created for ourselves, not only as individuals but as a collective.”

“The capitalist tendency aims at modifying activity by turning it into labor, industrializing and separating human capacity as a commodity. But this tendency is not fully realizable for capitalism. The current debate, in which it is held that all labor will become automated, is an ideological rather than a real proposition. There will be parts that become automated, but other parts that cannot be. For example, relational, caring, and reproductive labor, almost always the work of women, and also labor that exercises social control (today there is little understanding of how much these two types of labor overlap and complement each other) cannot be automated, even though they are now organized industrially and can make use of some technologies, largely, but not only, of an organizational kind. Labor defines the capitalist relation: if you abolish labor you would abolish capitalism itself. It is not a question of philosophical dialectics: given that the accumulation of domination and value requires the commodification of human capacity, by abolishing labor you would abolish the possibility of the capitalist class accumulating domination and value.”

• Guido Borio, Italian Operaismo, emphasis mine