General intellect is Karl Marx’s term, from the Grundrisse (1858), for the collective knowledge, skills, and social cooperation that become embedded in productive forces. Marx argued that as production depends less on individual labor time and more on the general state of science and technology — on knowledge that is inherently social — the labor theory of value enters crisis. Value becomes harder to measure by time when the productive force is collective intelligence rather than individual exertion.
Operaismo and autonomist thinkers — particularly Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri — revived and extended the concept. Under what they term cognitive capitalism, the general intellect is no longer fixed in machinery (as Marx primarily imagined) but lives in the communicative, affective, and cognitive capacities of workers themselves. Knowledge, language, and cooperation are both the means of production and the product. This makes the general intellect a primary site of value extraction and of struggle: capital must capture and enclose what is inherently common.
The concept connects to questions of knowledge sovereignty: if the general intellect is produced collectively, then its private enclosure — through intellectual property, platform monopolies, and proprietary data — is a form of primitive accumulation directed at the commons of shared knowledge.