One task for general intellects might be to imagine a kind of common hacker class interest among those whose efforts end up being commodified as some sort of intellectual property: artists, scientists, engineers, even humanist and social science academics. We could imagine all of these as belonging to the same class from the point of view of the commodification of information. We all process information that is part of a complex natural-technical-social-cultural metabolism. But nearly all of us get to see a ruling class of a rather unprecedented kind extract most of the value from the combined efforts of hackers and workers worldwide. As general intellects, maybe we could stick our heads above our little cubicles, look around, and figure out how to cooperate with others who understand different parts of the labor process.

Marx did not have the intellectual tools to think about information as a regulator, and he was only just beginning to grasp how metabolic rifts were opening up due to commodified production’s disregard of its natural conditions of existence. Without input from those with more practical knowledge of those emerging developments, Marx allows his conceptual apparatus to overshoot the available data, and in the end to become a hostage to philosophizing. He constructs a false relation between a partially grasped totality and a future conceived via a merely abstract, formal, dialectical negation. He tries to do alone what only the cooperation of many kinds of general intellects could really do.