General intellect, according to Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, is capable of becoming a structural force of production.
The "general intellect" passage in the Fragment on machines, says that, while the development of machinery led to the oppression of workers under capitalism, it also offers a prospect for future liberation.
According to Marx, the development of the general intellect manifests in a capitalist society, in the control of the social life process.Thus, for Dyer-Witheford, the vision laid out in the Fragment “is eminently recognizable as a portrait of what is now commonly termed an ‘information society’ or ‘knowledge economy’” (1999, 221).
[5] According to Matteo Pasquinelli, Marx took the expression 'general intellect' from William Thompson's book An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824), an early text written on mental labour.
According to Pasquinelli, the concept disappears in the transition between the Grundrisse and Capital as it is replaced by the notion of collective worker or Gesamtarbeiter.