The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it is an attempt at systematizing a series of reflections elaborated by a number of studies appeared in the last decade. This research comes from scholars in different disciplines, but who identify, even in their internal differences, with a method of analysis rooted in the Italian Workerist thought of the 1960s. On the other hand, it tries to clarify an issue that has provoked much debate in the last few years, especially in the field of heretic and heterodox thought, that is to say, the analysis of the salient characteristics of the current state of capitalism. In the last two decades, innovations in the fields of transportation, language and communication started to gather around a new single paradigm of accumulation and valorization. The new capitalist configuration tends to identify in “knowledge” and “space” (geographic and virtual) as commodities a new foundation for dynamic skills of accumulation. We advance that the contemporary form of capitalism is defined in a univocal way as cognitive biocapitalism. Independently of the dominant convention, contemporary capitalism is always in search of new social and vital circles to absorb and commodify, involving more and more the bare vital faculties of human beings.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the features of the digital labour connected with the so-called platform economy. Many platform-based business models rely on a new composition of capital capable of capturing personal information and transforming it into big data. Starting with the example of the Facebook business model, we explain the valorisation process at the core of platform capitalism, stressing the relevance of digital labour, to clarify the crucial distinction between labour and work. Our analysis differs from Fuchs and Sevignani’s thesis about digital work and digital labour and seems consistent with the idea that Facebook extracts a rent from the information produced by the free labour of its users.

The links between the crisis of subprime mortgages and the so-called crisis of European sovereign debt are sometimes concealed, so as to create a veritable sense of shared guilt meant to sanction the legitimacy of the austerity policies that have been imposed by virtuous Northern European countries on the undeserving countries of Southern Europe. We will analyse three main aspects of the current crisis: (1) we will interpret the austerity policies that today characterize the eurozone as the result of financialization; (2) we will define the state of permanent crisis as an instrument of governance characterized by specific economic policies; (3) we will show how all this unfolds at a stage of capitalist development wherein a new constituent process begins to take shape in a fragmented but nonetheless significant manner, and how this process is reclaimed by the very subjectivities upon which the accumulation of cognitive and relational skills depends in order to reproduce itself: the Welfare of the Common.

(1993). Italian industrial dynamics from the 1970s to the 1980s: some reflections on entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 25-35.

In this essay, we intend to analyze the process of accumulation of contemporary capitalism, in which the regime of valorization derive from the notion of “common” a “results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, information affect, and so forth” (Hardt and Negri, 2009) and from its expropriation. When we deal with the concept of “common,” the reference is made to a heterogeneous category. In this text we refer to two modalities of expression of the “common:” the digital common (section network value) and the common of social reproduction (section social reproduction value or the economy of the interiority and anthropomorphic capital). Regarding the first case study, the concept of “network value” is investigated and defined as a product of individual life in a relational context increasingly controlled and subsumed by the social media and big data industry. Regarding the second, we discuss how the activity of social reproduction of individuals is today central in the process of accumulation of the economy. “Social reproduction” is a useful concept to investigate what we call the “anthropomorphic capital,” that is the capacity by the contemporary labor organizations to capture and make productive the essence of today's life and its complexity. In short, it transpires better and better how all activities are productive, i.e., accumulation generators. We observe the apparent paradox of a generalization of surplus value in the era of the decline of waged employment and with it a tension of capital contemporary to the general mortification of living labor. In fact, we note how capital claims to transform the human being into capital itself, explicitly assuming the whole of human existence as a field from which accumulation can be generated (human being, enterprise or human capital). This is what, at this point, we call anthropomorphic capital or the economy of interiority. In the last section, we report some results of an empirical research “Commonfare-Pie News,” able to underline how life is more and more subsumed to the logic of capitalistic valorization, to the point that today we can speak not only of the subsumption of labor to capital but of a real life subsumption.