© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341321 Historical Materialism 21.4 (2013) 1–21 brill.com/hima The ‘General Intellect’ in the Grundrisse and Beyond Tony Smith Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Iowa State University tonys@iastate.edu Abstract In recent publications Paolo Virno and Carlo Vercellone have called attention to Marx’s category of the general intellect in the Grundrisse, and to the unprecedented role its diffusion plays in contemporary capitalism. According to Virno, the flourishing of the general intellect, which Marx thought could only take place within communism, characterises post-Fordist capitalism. Vercellone adds that Marx’s account of the real subsumption of living labour under capital is obsolete in contemporary cognitive capitalism. Both authors regard Marx’s value theory as historically obsolete. I argue that these views rest on a confusion of value and wealth, a neglect of Marx’s account of the role of ‘free gifts’ to capital, an underestimation of the role of the general intellect in the period prior to the rise of post-Fordism/cognitive capitalism, and an underestimation of the restrictions on the diffusion of the general intellect in contemporary capitalism. Keywords capital fetishism, cognitive capitalism, general intellect, post-Fordism, value theory The development of fixed capital shows the degree to which society’s general science, KNOWLEDGE, has become an immediate productive force, and hence the degree to which the conditions of the social life process itself have been brought under the control of the GENERAL INTELLECT and remoulded according to it.1 Many Italian Marxists have long insisted on the importance of the section in the Grundrisse generally known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’, and in particular the concept of the ‘general intellect’ introduced in the above passage.2 This paper examines recently translated essays on the general intellect by Paolo 1.  Marx 1987, p. 92; block words originally in English. 2. Dyer-Witheford 1999, Chapters 4 and 9; Turchetto 2008; Toscano 2007. In the Marx Engels Collected Works the editors assign a different title to this section: ‘[Fixed Capital and the Development of the Productive Forces of Society]’. HIMA_021_04_F3-1-21.indd 1 12/10/2013 2:08:27 PM