General intellect

General intellect, according to Karl Marx in his Grundrisse, became a crucial force of production. It is a combination of technological expertise and social intellect, or general social knowledge - increasing importance of machinery in social organization.

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it; to what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process."

— Karl Marx, The Grundrisse., 1858.^[1]

According to Marx, the development of the general intellect manifests in a capitalist society, in the control of the social life process. In other words, with the idea of the general intellect, Marx designates a radical change of the subsumption of labour to capital and indicates a third stage of the division of labour.^[2]

References

1. The Grundrisse. Notebook VII. Fixed capital and circulating capital as two particular kinds of capital. Fixed capital and continuity of the production process. – Machinery and living labour. (Business of inventing)
2. Carlo Vercellone. From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 13–36

See also

• Cognitive capitalism

External links

• Paolo Virno, "General Intellect" in Lessico Postfordista, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2001.
• Matteo Pasquinelli, Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine, Theory, Culture & Society, first published on February 2, 2014.
• Tony Smith. The "General Intellect" in the Grundrisse and beyond.