Welcome to Marx in Moments 05. These are three-minute reads examining key Marxist concepts in a clear and accessible way. This week we focus on the The General Intellect—exploring why the social brain of humanity is capitalism’s next enclosure.
Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
—Marx, EPM, Third Manuscript
Every word you know was taught to you. Every skill you have was passed down. The algorithm your phone runs on, the language you’re reading right now–none of it was invented by a single person. It accumulated. Across generations, across cultures, across centuries of collective human effort, a vast social brain was built. Marx called it the General Intellect.
The concept comes from the Grundrisse, Marx’s notebooks from the late 1850s. As capitalism develops, Marx observed, direct human labour becomes less and less central to production. Machines do more. Automation spreads. But here’s the contradiction: if living labour is the source of value, and living labour is being systematically replaced, where does profit come from? Marx suggested the General Intellect: the accumulated stock of science, knowledge, technique, and culture that humanity has collectively produced. This is the foundation of wealth in a developed capitalist economy. Not just the individual worker’s effort, but the social brain that makes any individual effort possible in the first place.
The General Intellect is not abstract. It is language. It is mathematics. It is the internet, the archive of everything humanity has written, argued, created, and shared. It is the infrastructure of thought itself–which was built collectively.
Here is where the logic of capital reasserts itself. Capital cannot generate profit from something it does not own. So, it does what it has always done with common resources and encloses them. Marx described this process in the context of land: ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, the violent conversion of common land into private property that preceded capitalism’s rise. The General Intellect is the new commons, and its enclosure is already underway.
The clearest contemporary example is the Large Language Model. An LLM is trained on the accumulated output of human writing–billions of documents, articles, conversations, books–the materialized General Intellect, scraped from the public internet and converted into a proprietary asset. The collective social brain of humanity is processed and sold back as a private product. The pattern is identical to every enclosure that came before it.
What makes this particularly sharp as an argument is the crisis it reveals. Capital replaces living labour with machinery to cut costs and outcompete rivals. But living labour is the source of new value. Machinery only transfers the value already stored in it–like a battery draining rather than generating. As the ratio of machinery to living labour rises, the system’s capacity to generate profit structurally declines. The appropriation of the General Intellect is capital’s attempted solution to this crisis. A vast new source of social wealth to enclose and monetize. But it cannot actually solve the problem. Privatized knowledge, like a machine, is dead labour. It transfers value. It does not create it.
Capital’s response to its own crisis accelerates the crisis.
Back to the social brain you were born into. You did not earn language. You did not invent mathematics. You inherited them from everyone who came before you, from every teacher, every writer, every thinker whose work accumulated into the world you entered. That inheritance belongs to all of us in the same way that Marx said the earth belongs to all of us: not as owners, but as custodians passing it forward.
The enclosure of the General Intellect is the enclosure of that inheritance. The question it raises is the same one primitive accumulation always raises: who decided it was theirs to take?