The Last Great Enclosure: The Crisis of the General Intellect

Abstract

Technology offers us a seemingly limitless range of possibilities to extend human freedom. Yet, as Marx observed in the Grundrisse, technology is as likely to become the servant of capital as it is a tool of liberation. In recent years there has been a wave of interest in what is sometime referred to as cognitive capitalism, in other words the knowledge‐based economy. Cognitive capitalism, especially one based on a “general intellect” or intellectual commons would seem to create new revolutionary possibilities, this was the dream of the Italian autonomist thinkers of the 1970s and beyond, such as Negri, Virno, Lazzarato, and Berardi as well as more recent work by others, notably Raunig, Boutang, and Hardt.Yet this sense of possibility is under threat from a much more basic of capital: primitive accumulation or, borrowing from David Harvey, accumulation by dispossession. Here, we will examine some of the claims for the power of a “general intellect”: its origins, its relationship to contemporary forms of capital and wage relations and its vulnerability to new forms of enclosure. The emancipatory nature of the general intellect takes three forms in contemporary capitalism: the Internet, the university, and the so‐called “intellectual property.” Each of these is actively under threat from enclosure in the shape of state control, privatization, and digital isolation. Does the general intellect still have anything to offer for the twenty‐first century? Can the social body resist this final stage of enclosure? Here, we explore these concepts but make no claim to offer solutions to the crisis of the general intellect.