Claudio Napoleoni e la questione della tecnica

In the 1985 Discorso sull’economia politica Napoleoni abandoned any attempt to rethink Marx through his own categories and finds a new theoretical horizon in a Heideggerian-oriented philosophy centered on the question of technique. The two main thesis of this theoretical shift, i.e. the “disappearance of the subject” and the “essence of technique” forces Napoleoni to rethink liberation as the liberation of human beings from their subjective approach to the world. This article aims to show: 1) that the thesis of the disappearance of the subject is the ultimate outcome of abandoning the link between value and labour in the field of economic theory; 2) that this evolution in Napoleoni’s thinking, while providing him with the opportunity to raise extremely topical issues about the relationship between human beings and the world, forces him into a dead end from both a theoretical and a practical point of view; 3) that a revival of the project to reinterpret Marx’s labour theory of value, begun by Napoleoni in the early 1970s, is potentially capable not only of refuting the criticisms of the Marxian perspective advanced by Napoleoni himself in the 1980s, but also of providing more convincing and practicable answers to the very questions he raised in the context of the Heideggerian turn.