This is not intended to be a forensic analysis of the concept, just some notes on what seem to be key features of the concept, mainly drawing on Paolo Virno’s work on the General Intellect. It all starts with a passage in Marx where he builds on the idea that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, becomes productive for capitalism at one remove from the human labour process as it is embedded and embodied in machines. This has consequences for human labour since, as the labour process becomes intensified via knowledge and machinery, the position of many workers becomes more precarious through deskilling, technology substitution and becoming surplus to requirements.

However, as the capitalist means of production develops the knowledge component of the means of production, this  is not limited to scientific forms of knowledge. It also includes the all the forms of knowledge developing socially within the institutions of the capitalist system by workers. Marx refers to this as the ‘general intellect’ developed through social life and which becomes, under the conditions of capitalism, “a direct force of production”.

A key point here seems to be that the general intellect is not necessarily or inevitably contained within and restricted to its development as a force of production, i.e. in the service of the system of production and its legitimation. The general intellect has the potential, presumably under certain conditions, to become critical of the system and its role within the system.

Containing as it does  science and other forms of knowledge,  including common sense, art and cultural production generally, the general intellect can be both a force in production (of commodities for the market) and also a source of material for the process of commodification as well. The process of the commodification of knowledge that can be sold as a factor in production or as a commodity bought for its use value is well known. It is under conditions of post-modernity that this process fully explores the potential for commodifying culture and experiences. Free, leisure and private time, i.e. outside of the labour process of production, becomes another sort of labour, the labour of consumption, of enjoyment, of status building and maintenance, and so on. In this way culture and all aspects of the life-world are brought into the web of capitalist economic and social relations.

What is learned, carried out and consumed in the time outside of labour is then utilised in the production of commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is computed as profitable resource. Even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into labouring task. [...] The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labour and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul. The matrix of conflict and the condition for small and great ‘disorders under the sky’ must be seen in the progressive rupture between general intellect and fixed capital that occurs in this process of redistribution of the former within living labour. (Emphasis added).

But, as noted above, the general intellect is not irrevocably tied to the process of production and consumption.

Mass intellectuality is the composite group of Postfordist living labour, not merely of some particularly qualified third sector: it is the depository of cognitive competences that cannot be objectified in machinery. Mass intellectuality is the prominent form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The scientific erudition of the individual labourer is not under question here. Rather, all the more generic attitudes of the mind gain primary status as productive resources; these are the faculty of language, the disposition to learn, memory, the power of abstraction and relation and the tendency towards self-reflexivity. General intellect needs to be understood literally as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think, rather than the works produced by thought – a book, an algebra formula etc. (Emphasis added).

Some insight is given into this potential for mass intellectuality to become radical and how this can be promoted in an address given in Barcelona January 2009 by the activist, writer and curator Marco Baravalle. He points out that a great deal of cultural work in Venice, in the private galleries and museums, is done without a wage by interns, often doing other badly paid jobs as well in the tourist industry. In both cases they are employed, paid and unpaid, for their knowledge at various levels.

Today, in Venice, on the side of the technical composition, we are facing  that famous full exploitation of life (quoting Paolo Virno and others) that involves language, affects, creativity, relationships.

The typical type of worker exploited by the ‘culture factory’ in Venice is

… white, female, young, qualified (usually with a master’s degree in arts or human sciences), employed in a second job linked to touristic economy and with a lot of experience of not remunerated labour in other cultural institutions (the system of trainings). This not remunerated labour is a plague that can last far beyond the end of the educational career of the worker, in a perverted system in which the illusion of a hiring in the cultural factory, pushes the young precarious to work more and more for free.

And, rather in the way Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism) demonstrates capitalism’s abiliy to exploit seemingly anti-capitalist tendencies, either by commodifying them or subverting them in the cause of legitimating itself, Baravalle notes:

… living in a culture factory means to face a kind of capitalism eager for uniqueness, authenticity, alternative ways of life, etc. A kind of capitalism that tends to parasite informal cultural production and  peculiar forms of life in order to trigger monopoly rent, in order to make money out of real estate speculation, for example. This process of putting to value the collective symbolic capital is based on the necessity to find new marks of distinction attached to a place, included those formed by local resistances, media-activists and social centres.

The process is parasitic because it is merely a process of:

… capturing, trapping and exploiting what subjectivities creates. Postfordist capitalism, with its articulated devices of governance, is characterized by a total incapability of creating . That’s why it is correct to describe the capitalistic process of valorisation of the immaterial dimension as parasitic.

And herein lies one of the contradictions that is capable of producing a critical consciousness within the general intellect. What is needed, according to Baravalle, are:

…  institutions of the common [whereby] the institutionalisation of our spaces and practices responds to the need of collectively organizing something that is more than a personal action and that can break the process of capitalistic governance and valorisation.

This needs a clear analysis and bringing in to mass intellectuality a recognition of how the culture factory works. We need to

…  look at the latter as a factory, [as a] means to underline the importance of the relationships of production that structure it. It means to study who’s taking advantage of the value socially produced in the metropolis and who’s being exploited and how it happens. But it means also to analyze the power of the different types of metropolitan workers to reclaim that socially produced value, it means to be aware of the existing  subjectivities and to empower them, or to work with the goal of creating and organizing new ones.

I have recently beome more involved in reading Zygmunt Bauman and discussing his ideas, particularly with respect to the contribution of sociology to understanding contemporay society and what a leftist agenda and programme might be – the practical contribution of his sociology. This is in addition to returning more explicitly and systematicall to a marxist account of capitalism and the current finacial crisis and a renewd discussion with my colleague, Richard Kilminster, on Norbert Elias’s theories. Which of these three, Bauman, Elias or Marxs, gives us the best understanding of our prblems – social, economic and political – and the best basis for developing political and personal strategies ? It seems to me that there is no simple answer and in any case it may be a mistake to assume any one social thinker is sufficient. This is my current position – Bauman for his continued belief in the values of socialism and his coherent account of how sociology should still be politically engaged, Elais for theoretical and conceptual rigour, and Marx for his diagnosis of capitalism.

Hedge funds accused of gambling with lives of the poorest as food prices soar refers to a report on how trading in food commodity derivatives inflates and destabilises food prices with devastating consequences for the poorest communities globally.

Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: “Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving. “Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world’s poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable.” The group used figures in Goldman Sachs’ annual report to estimate that the bank made a profit of $1bn (£650m) through speculating on food last year.

This report follows the issue blogged on here on July 2nd – How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world’s poor – and won.

David Harvey calculates that the global capitalist economy has to aim, for a variety of structural and systemic reasons, for about 3% growth per annum. As a result capital is always looking for forms of investment to achieve this. As one set of opportunities collapses or becomes exhausted – for instance the dot.com boom and bust 1995 to 2000 – capital looked elsewhere. When the dot.com bubble burst capital moved into property eventually leading to the toxic debts underlying the current economic crisis. More recently it has moved into commodity futures, destabilising markets such as energy and food. Regulations to control speculation on food prices were dismantled about 5 years ago spawning the food derivatives industry. Perhaps the latest money spinner for the speculators and casino capitalist will be carbon cap and trade. The full story has a number of components that need investigation – commodification, marketisation and financialisation, deregulation and the development of speculative derivatives markets. All of this is connected with privatisation, the loss of accountability and the erosion of democratic controls.

For a brief history of bubbles and burst see  The Great American Bubble Machine.

I have been in email correspondence with my colleague Richard Kilminster following on from some very interesting and constructive comments on a draft article I am writing on critical pedagogy. The discussion concerns various issues around the marxist underpinnings and the normative basis of critical pedagogy as developed from the Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its successors, Habermas for instance. Richard’s main issue is that it all still depends to some extent on Kantian transcendental categories and a prioris that act as founding assumptions rather than empirically substantiated concepts. To this extent sociology generally is still in the thrall of philosophical forms of thinking, to its detriment. Richard strives for a post-philosophical sociology and to this end is developing the work of Norbert Elias who recognised the problem and made significant progress towards this goal.

Richard pointed me towards an article by Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh where he demonstrates how in practice  sociological analyses and diagnoses often look for the causes of the state of affairs of interest  in order to produce an explanation and, perhaps, help develop a plan of action or set of policies to alter that state of affairs. Often, in practice, these diagnoses and explanations take the from of  finding something to blame for the condition. This can then lead to a ‘personalisation’ of the causes in a manner not dissimilar to other sorts of pre and non-scientific orientations to the world. From a scientific point of view this is an obstacle to knowledge as this form of attribution of cause and explanation  “implies that one has to isolate the action(s) of one identifiable entity, whether individual, group or reified (and at the same time often personalised) ’cause’, from a complex sequence of events”. He gives examples of ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernisation’ being used in this way. This form of thinking, or at the very least this style of writing, is still prevalent in contemporary sociology. In a forthcoming article Richard gives a number of examples of this quoting from well known and influential current sociologists, for example  -  “modernity ‘is coming of age’ and is now ‘consciously abandoning what it was unconsciously doing”; “Post-modernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious of its true nature – modernity for itself”; ” What happens when modernization, understanding its own excesses and vicious spiral of destructive subjugation begins to take itself as object of reflection”? – and others.

With respect to ‘capitalism’ Richard points out that  ‘capitalistic’ social relations cannot exist without being embedded in “a whole socio-genetic complex of interdependencies that makes them possible. The specifically ‘capitalistic’ aspects may not in fact be the most instrumental in producing what are perceived as the undesirable consequences of contemporary global developments”.

This implies that ‘capitalism’ cannot be a singular foundational unit of analysis based on the notion that ‘it’ is the primary cause of what appear to be, or are assumed to be, ‘its’ effects and consequences. If this is a mistaken orientation than solutions may be misdirected and may exacerbate conditions rather than improve them, amounting to, perhaps at best, an amelioration of the condition rather than changing the system – like an aspirin ‘cures’ a headache without having any transformational effect on the underlying causes. In fact it can make things worse by developing new forms of subjugation, dependence and the reproduction of the very system we are seeking to change.

What is the broader sociological context that must be factored into an analysis of globalising capitalism for activists who want to do something about inequality, exploitation and the destruction of the environment? It will be interesting to see how Norbert Elias’s sociology conceptualises and constructs ‘capitalism’, its apparent contradictions and contemporary neoliberal ideology. If the analysis is too general and too synthetic it may be difficult to draw political and policy conclusions from it. In which case, pragmatically, where do we go?

Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh (1986) The Improvement of Human Means of Orientation: Towards Syntheses in the Social Sciences in Development Studies: Critique and Renewal Eds R Apthorpe and A Krahl

Most, but not all, of this article is available on Google Books

Austerity drive will hand billions to private sector guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 21.50 BST

This report seems to confirm that the outcome of the ConDem’s budget and economic policy, intentionally or otherwise,  will be the front door, back door and side entrance privatisation of everything the corporations can lay their hands on that will turn a buck for their directors and shareholders. This surely compromises even more the fragile political democracy we still have with more and more services being managed from the unaccountable private sector. This has already taken a hit with the proposed integration of (unelected) business leaders directly into a business friendly and private profit orientated government. Why the former BP boss’s new government job is beyond parody Independent Friday, 2 July 2010.