General intellect, according to Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, is capable of becoming a structural force of production. The concept designates a combination of technological expertise and social intellect, or general social knowledge (increasing importance of machinery in social organization). The "general intellect" passage in the Fragment on machines, says that, while the development of machinery led to the oppression of workers under capitalism, it also offers a prospect for future liberation.
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👉 General intellect in the context of Communist society
In Marxist thought, a communist society or the communist system is the type of society and economic system postulated to emerge from technological advances in the productive forces, representing the ultimate goal of the political ideology of communism. A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour.
Communism is a specific stage of socioeconomic development predicated upon a superabundance of material wealth, which is postulated to arise from advances in production technology and corresponding changes in the social relations of production. This would allow for distribution based on needs and social relations based on freely-associated individuals. The term communist society should be distinguished from the Western concept of the communist state, the latter referring to a state ruled by a party which professes a variation of Marxism–Leninism.
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General intellect in the context of Grundrisse
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) (German: [ˈɡʁʊntˌʁɪsə]; lit. "Foundations/Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft)") is a lengthy, unfinished manuscript written by Karl Marx in the winter of 1857–1858. Comprising seven notebooks of economic studies, the work represents the first major draft of Marx's critique of political economy and is widely considered the preparatory work for his magnum opus, Das Kapital. The text was written for self-clarification during the Panic of 1857, and remained unpublished during his lifetime. A first edition was published in German in Moscow in 1939 and 1941, but the work only became widely available and influential in the 1960s and 1970s; a full English translation appeared in 1973.
The manuscript's scope is vast, covering all six sections of Marx's intended economic project. It explores key themes such as alienation, the nature of capital as a self-expanding process or "value in motion," and an analysis of pre-capitalist economic forms. It contains the well-known "Fragment on Machines," in which Marx analyses the effects of automation, foreseeing a point where social knowledge becomes a direct productive force, a concept he termed the "general intellect." The work also outlines the dialectical method Marx considered "scientifically correct," which proceeds from simple abstract categories to an understanding of the concrete world as a "rich totality of many determinations and relations."