General Intellect

Quick definition: "Marx uses the term to refer to the general social knowledge or collective intelligence of a society at a given historical period."

"Fixed capital, in particular "intelligent" machines, can thus embody this general intellect as well as humans. Just as collective corporeal power is necessary to complete certain tasks of production (for example to the move the huge stones for the Pyramids), so too collective intellectual power is employed directly in production. Furthermore, as information technologies and cybernetic machines have become more important as means of production, general intellect has become increasingly not just a direct force, but the primary force of social production."

The best introduction to Marx's concept of General Intellect I've come across comes from Nick Dyer-Witheford's recent book "Cyber-Marx":

-- PaulBowman

Marx introduces the concept of "general intellect" in a passage in the Grundrisse known as the "Fragment on Machines"[1]. In these pages he departs from his customary emphasis on the role of work in creating the surpluses needed for social progress. Rather, he suggests that at a certain point in the development of capital the creation of real wealth will come to depend not on the direct expenditure of labour time in production but on two interrelated factors: technological expertise, that is, "scientific labour", and organisation, or "social combination"[2]. The crucial factor in production will become the "development of the general powers of the human head"; "general social knowledge"; "social intellect"; or, in a striking metaphor, "the general productive forces of the social brain"[3].

The main expression of the power of "general intellect" is the increasing importance of machinery - "fixed capital" - in social organisation.

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 have been transformed in accordance with it.[4]

There are two forms of technology Marx particularly notes as signaling capitalism's mobilization of "general intellect". One is the development of production systems based on "an automatic system of machinery ... consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages"[5]. The other, to which his allusions are more scattered but equally persistent, is the network of transport and communication integrating "the world market". The development of human-eliminating, globe-spanning machines indicates the degree to which "general intellect" has been successfully mobilized and mastered by business, and "the accumulation of knowledge and skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain ... absorbed into capital"[6].

However - and this is the whole point of Marx's analysis - such a level of technological advance, which seems at first a capitalist utopia, contains within itself the seeds of a capitalist nightmare. By setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social cooperation, capital ultimately undermines itself. This occurs for two reasons. First, as advances in machinery and organization reduce the requirement for direct labour in production, the need for people to sell their labour power - the very basis of capitalism's social order - is systmatically eroded. There arises a monstrous disproportion between individual labour time and the forces set in motion by organized science.

This is reinforced by a second tendency, the increasingly social nature of activity required for technoscientific development, which unfolds not on the basis of individual effort but as a vast cooperative endeavor. As this becomes more and more apparent, highlighted by the diffusion and integration of communication and transport networks, both private ownership and payment for isolated quanta of work-time appear increasingly as irrelevant impediments to the full use of social resources. Automation and socialization together create the possibility of - and necessity for - dispensing with wage labor and private ownership. In the era of general intellect "capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production"[7].

Today, "The Fragment on Machines" seems simultaneously astoundlingly prescient and sadly anachronistic. In its extrapolation of capital's techno-scientific trajectory it is surely prophetic. What Marx describes is eminently recognizable as a portrait of what is now commonly termed an "information society" or "knowledge economy", in which the entire intellectual resources of society, from shop-floor production teams, to university-industry partnerships, to the regional "innovation milieux" of microelectronic and biotechnology companies, is mobilized to produce the technological wonders of robotic factories, gene splicing, and global computer networks. Yet any suggestion that this development of the productive forces leads automatically to the advent of socialism appears definitively refuted. Instead, we seem to be witnessing a triumphant reorganization of capitalism that is deploying the new technological innovations to solidify an unprecendented level of global domination. What - if anything - can now be made of the revolutionary optimism of Marx's account of "general intellect"?

From Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx (University of Illinois Press, USA, 1999), pp. 219 - 221.

Notes:

Reminds me a bit of TeilhardDeChardin's NooSphere concept?

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