Capitalism is reliant on the working class – if they revolt then anything is possible

In the operaist and autonomist traditions, the general intellect has the potential to act as a revolutionary force, as it is the foundation of economic life, embodied in the skills, knowledge, social relations and general know-how of the working class, or, following the later Negri, “the multitude”. This encompasses not only intellectual activity but also general social relations, which today’s “Human Resources” department might refer to as “soft skills7”. Similarly for the Marx of the Grundrisse, the notion of a general intel- lect is the belief that an understanding of civil society and the development of capital within that society rests on a foundation of its shared history, knowledge and practices. The mid-19th century, writes Marx, is “the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations8”. As such, the general intellect is a very human-centered view of economic relations and productivity: the capitalist is utterly reliant on the general intellect in order to achieve economic growth and extract profit. But because ultimately the general intellect is so bound up in the human, it retains revolutionary possibilities: