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ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS

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# GENERAL INTELLECT (2006)
## Akseli Virtanen

**Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill**

**[An Excerpt from *Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy* (Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki 2006.]**

Marx’s “Fragment on Machines”, which is the logical culmination of the *Economic Manuscripts 1857-1858* or the so called *Grundrisse*, expounds on the “natural development” of capitalism where the labor that produces material objects and even the working class itself will be displaced from the core of the production of wealth. (352)

The evolution of capital will proceed to its “final phase” because capital itself, instead of the working class, causes a change in the nature of the production of value – a change that will lead to the dismantlement of the organization of production based on exchange value. According to Marx, the reason for this change is that abstract knowledge and thinking become immediate productive power. They will replace direct labor and its fragmented and monotonously repetitive tasks, or industrial labor and the society based on division of labor in the traditional sense.

As a result, the “great foundation-stone of production and of wealth” will no longer be the immediate labor performed by men (modification of natural resources, manufacture of goods), or even the time used for this (work time). Instead the “forces of social combination”, the “development of the general powers of the human head ” and the “development of the social individual” as a whole will now take this role.

For Marx, the foremost expression of the power of this general intellect, or general social understanding, is the increasing importance of machines and systems of machinery – i.e., of fixed capital – in production:

*“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”.* (353)

Faced with the power of this objectified knowledge, the human worker is displaced from the core of the work process. In Marx’s words, workers become mere conscious organs (bewusste Organe) of the system of machinery: “an automatic system of machinery […] set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious organs”. (354) This displacement becomes possible when science, chemistry and the “more generally accumulated experience” of science are attached to production. According to Marx, in addition to the automatic machinery, the general intellect will be mobilized in the logistics and communication networks, which will integrate the “world market”. The development of these super-human machines reveals how thoroughly the general intellect has been harnessed and the “the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital”.(355)

All this makes it impossible to think work as the labor of a single individual, or even as the labor of a single group working under the same roof, because work now contains labor that is not “present”. Collaboration is no longer limited by the boundaries of the factory; it now encompasses all social forces and processes, for instance scientific research, educational and logistical systems, which become indispensable for the process of production: production becomes social.

As it evolves as a method of capital, capitalism both limits and stretches labor. It strives to limit direct labor into a simple part of the machine and, at the same time, it puts the whole of social knowledge and co-operation into work. A simultaneous limitation and expansion of labor is the result of reducing labor into abstract labor (exchangeable and measurable work time) and of the attempt to make the social forces that are irreducible to wage labor “productive” from the point of view of the capital.

“The Fragment on Machines” outlines the consequences or the logical culmination of this concrete process: On the other hand, this entrance of social forces into works of capital turns economy into the production of this society. The historical mutation of labor from handcrafts to large-scale industry was not merely a transition from the human body to the system of machines; it also signified a fundamental reorganization of knowledge. When work is deterritorialized and looses its social attachments, knowledge is deterritorialized as well: it detaches from the human hand, from tradition, way of life or the “mysteries” of crafts, which was the name for trades until 18th century. According to Marx, into the secrets of these mysteries “none but those duly initiated could penetrate. Modern industry rent the veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The principle which it pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man, created the new modern science of technology”.(356) With this change, changes the very nature of productive labor. When a product changes from the immediate product of a single producer into the social product of a collective worker, into a common product or the product of a laboring community, in order to labor productively “it is no longer necessary for you to do manual work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the collective labourer”. (357)

As it evolves as a method of capital, capitalism both limits and stretches labor. It strives to limit direct labor into a simple part of the machine and, at the same time, it puts the whole of social knowledge and co-operation into work. A simultaneous limitation and expansion of labor is the result of reducing labor into abstract labor (exchangeable and measurable work time) and of the attempt to make the social forces that are irreducible to wage labor “productive” from the point of view of the capital.

“The Fragment on Machines” outlines the consequences or the logical culmination of this concrete process:

*“To the degree that labour time – the mere quantity of labour – is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production – of the creation of use values – and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side – a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.”* (358)

By employing general intellect and collaboration as a means of production on the limited foundation of capital, capital engenders the seed of its very destruction – for in fact “they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high”. (359) Work time – the measure and time of abstract labor – is a necessary condition for the production of exchange value and surplus value, or the mechanism of mediation through which work becomes “productive” from the viewpoint of the capitalist system. Yet the evolution of the system of machinery – driven by the desire to extract more relative surplus value and to increase productivity – actually decreases the importance of work (work time) in the production process, consequently reducing people’s need to sell their labor, which is the foundation of the capitalist way of production and of capital as a social relationship. In addition, as the societal character of knowledge and production and collaboration as its foundation become increasingly important as factors of production, private property and the pay for a single amount of work time begins to appear a non-essential hindrance from the production’s point of view. The societal time and the collective dimension of labor lack commensurability; their time is not homogenous and divisible. That is why capital is a “moving contradiction”: it strives to reduce work time to a minimum while establishing work time as the only source and measure of wealth. In other words, capital destroys its very foundation in making itself unnecessary and in creating a new subject independent from capital.

This matter is so central to our argument that a long quotation is in order:

*“Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.
In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis”.*(360)

Direct labor ceases to be the foundation of production, firstly because it turns into an activity of supervision and regulation. But this happens above all because the product ceases to be the product of isolated, direct labor, and because it is now the combination of social activity that becomes the producer. In relation to this autonomous power, to this social individual, all mechanisms of mediation separate from this power of the very body of the society, all particular reasons, purposes, and forms through which it must pass to become “productive” for the capital, turn out to be anti-production limiting now the powers of production. Unmediated collaboration and relationships, not the mechanisms of mediation or particular products, produce (and enjoy) wealth and value. Or, in Marx’s words: “Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty”.(361)

As use value and exchange value diverge, Marx draws the logical conclusion that the “law of value” – according to which the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor time that went into it – holding the capitalist society together collapses and that after this mechanism of mediation has proven to be miserable, society begins to organize in some other way.

For Marx, this other way was communism, “the free development of individualities […] the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. (362) For “ what is wealth other than […] the absolute working-out of [human] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick […] where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality [… and] strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming”. (363)

# The State of Lawlessness

Today, Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” appears both amazingly prophetic and amazingly failed. As Paolo Virno notes, what immediately strikes in the “Fragment on Machines” is the actual realization of what it describes: knowledge and social collaboration have become the foremost factor of production. (364) Yet, capitalism has not disappeared, nor has any change of direction towards a “free development of individualities” or communism, as evoked by Marx, taken place. Rather, the entrance of revolutionary forces and of knowledge and collaboration into production has become a solution to the crisis of the industrialist Fordist economy and its institutions. It is as if knowledge economy had rescued capital from the limiting forces, meanings, and impasses of the old industrial economy.

Also Marx does remark that despite the factual change that capital now “calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse”, it still measures the giant social forces thus created by the labor time – which these forces were initially called out to reduce – i.e. the measure of “real production”, which is the measure of its own, limited foundation of production. It confines them “within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value”.(365) It is thus possible for labor time to remain the measure of value as a pure political standard, despite the fact that it no longer has nothing to do with creation of value. Although it no longer is a unit of production, labor time remains valid as a unit of measure.

This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that in capitalism the question is no longer the cruelty of life, terror and horror, but “post-mortem despotism”, a union of cynicism and hypocrisy actualized after the death of the despot and of the despotic signifier, where the faith in the sign and the meaning is gone and the despot has turned into a vampire: "Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” (366)

This means that although the law of value has collapsed, although it has become a mere empty and groundless form, a mere formal constraint of limited wealth, it still exerts a strange influence because it still stands and functions even after its formal invalidation. In its final phase, capitalism functions in a state of lawlessness, devoid of “the law”, or after “the law” has been overturned. We must therefore distinguish between the groundless law of value and the force that maintains it even after its invalidation. We can write this strange force technically as the force-of-~~law of value~~. The value form is an empty, miserable foundation. It is groundless, yet functional. Functional, yet arbitrary (devoid of grounds).

The final phase of the development of capitalism can therefore be justly called a state of exception, where the law is upheld but not enforced. This means a law of value without law and power, or groundless power to maintain it in function after its groundlessness has been exposed.

We must now examine this strange equation of cynicism and hypocrisy and the new autonomous subject and its governance a little more closely.

**FOOTNOTES**

352) The fragment was written in the end of February 1858; it covers the end of Notebook VI and the beginning of Notebook VII. Marx & Engels (1983), Werke. Band 42. Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/1858, p. 595–609; Marx (1973), Grundrisse, Notebook VII: “Machinery and living labour”; Ks. Negri (1991), Marx Beyond Marx, s. 138.

353) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, “Machinery and living labour”, p.702. Marx uses the expression general intellect in English as if to underline it. General intellect may be a comment about Rousseau’s concept general will, as according to Marx it is intellect, not will, that organizes the productive forces; or it could be the materialization of Aristotle’s nous poieitikos (the poietic, productive intellect). See Virno (2004), A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 38.

354) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, “Fixed capital and the development of the productive forces of society”, p. 690, translation modified; see also Marx (1867), The Capital, Vol. I, Part IV, Ch. 15: Machinery and modern industry, Section 4: Factory.

355) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, p. 690.

356) Marx (1867), The Capital, Vol. I, Part IV, Ch. 15: Machinery and modern industry, Section 9: The Factory Acts.

357) Marx (1867), The Capital, Vol. I, Part V, Ch. 16: Absolute and relative surplus value.

358) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, p. 701.

359) Idem. It must be noted that the idea is very “un-Marxist”. While for example in the Communist Manifest and even in some parts of The Capital capitalism meets its end by producing a starved an impoverished mass that has nothing loose but its chains (proletarization), in the Fragment on Machines the reason for this is an informed work force that is willing and able to collaborate (socialization of knowledge and production).

360) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, p.702.

361) Idem.

362) Idem.

363) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, Notebook V, Chapter On Capital: Forms which precede capitalist production, p.471-513.

364) Virno (1996), “Notes on General Intellect”, p. 267.

365) Marx (1973), Grundrisse, p.702.

366) Marx (1867), The Capital, Vol. I, Part III, Ch. 10: The working-day, Section 1: The limits of the working day; Deleuze & Guattari (1984), Anti- Oedipus, p. 228.

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See other notes by Akseli Virtanen:

[**Oikos, polis, nomos**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/B10RPOCV2)

[**From arbitrary power to morphogenesis**](https://https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/B133TY0N2)

[**General Intellect**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/HkdzRAE0s)

[**Sign machines**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/ryfHa1aLh)

[**Modulation**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/rytPIeTL3)