Politics and Labour in the Works of Hannah Arendt and Paolo Virno

Changes in the economy at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s influenced the formation of movements of autonomist Marxism and cognitive capitalism. One of the widespread theoretical moves was attempts to consider production and labor spaces as sources of potential politicization or depoliticization of individuals. If earlier the connection between labor and politics was formed on the basis of confrontation between the sphere of work and leisure (Gramsci), the post-operatives find structural similarity with politics already in the work itself. In this regard, I appeal to the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno and his reception of Hannah Arendt's thought. Analyzing the work of both, I come to the conclusion that the philosophy of Arendt, with its clearly expressed intention to breed labor and politics, must be rethought in the light of those intuitions that were expressed by post-operatives. The consideration of labor in Arendt as something transitive and not touching the boundaries of the political must be called into question.