Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 146

that Autonomists found the possibility of new forms of revolution-
ary praxis. They found inspiration in the Grundrisse , the notes Karl
Marx wrote between in which he grappled with many

of the themes for which he would later become famous on the
publication of Das Kapital . Split between the sixth and seventh of
these notebooks is a consideration of the effects of the application
of machines to the processes of production. In a now famous
passage, known as 'The Fragment on Machines' Marx suggested that
the general social knowledge or collective intelligence of a society, or
what he describes as the 'general intellect', of a given period can be
embodied in machines as well as humans, and with the burgeoning
development of automation, is likely to be so. 36 Marx, optimistically,
saw the increasing embodiment of intelligence in fixed capital,
machines, as likely to bring about a fatal contradiction in capitalism
that would inevitably usher in an era of communism. 37 Autonomist
theorists chose to interpret the concept of the 'General Intellect'
as the diffusion of intellectual knowledge through society as a
whole and as a necessary aspect of technological development in
relation to the restructuring of capital. 38 Autonomists began to talk
of the 'mass intellectual' or 'diffused intellectual' in order to discuss
the proliferation of new subjectivities. 'Mass intellectuals' are those
whose living labour consists in 'creativity' and 'social communi-
cation', also sometimes known as 'immaterial labour'. 39 The term
covers many different kind of workers other than the traditional
factory worker, including, for example, computer programmers,
advertising copywriters, graphic designers, workers in roboticized
factories, art workers and so on. Out of this situation Toni Negri
developed an analysis of what he called the 'prerequisites of com-
munism' immanent to post-Fordist capitalism. 40 By this term Negri
referred to those institutions and arrangements that emerge out
of struggles and antagonism and continue to be developed by work-
ers' antagonism in the face of exploitation. For Negri and others the
most important 'prerequisite' of communism is the fact that capital-

1857 and 1858