.......not far from the mountain resort where the dribbling fools 'in charge' of politics and economy in the G8 were holding their pow-wow, Jamie and I drank vodka into the night considering the dilemma of the commons and collective intelligence. Are these partners in the new engine of capital, can it be created and resisted, and what about co-optation?
Karl Marx "Fragment on Machines" (from the Grundrisse)
"The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individuals' insignificant doings as a mighty organism"
(Marx Grundrisse, 693)
"What we call mass intellectuality is living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the "general intellect". Mass intellectuality–as an ensemble, as a social body– is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation… an important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but rather it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force…. The expression designates, rather, a quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era"
(Paolo Virno "Notes on the General Intellect" in Marxism Beyond Marxism ).
