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Italian Autonomia
The Italian radical movement of the 1970s that produced the theoretical tradition — Operaism, Autonomism — from which Berardi's analysis of cognitive labor and semiocapitalism emerged.
Italian Autonomia was a heterogeneous movement of radical workers, students, intellectuals, feminists, and cultural experimenters that peaked in Italy between 1973 and 1977. It emerged from the earlier Italian Operaist tradition (operaismo) — a heterodox Marxism that had begun investigating changing conditions of factory labor in the 1960s — and extended Operaism's analysis beyond the factory to every dimension of social life. Autonomia's insight was that post-Fordist capitalism was reorganizing not only the workplace but the entire texture of daily existence: education, domestic labor, cultural production, media, communication. The struggle against capitalism, therefore, could not be confined to the factory gate. It had to extend to the social factory that capitalism was constructing in the spaces of everyday life.
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The movement's distinctive intellectual contribution was the concept of immaterial labor — work that produced not physical commodities but affects, meanings, relationships, information, and signs. Autonomist theorists — Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Berardi himself — argued that