Abstract: General intellect is a significant concept developed by Marx in his "Fragment on Machines". Etymologically speaking, it may be influenced by Hodgskin and some theories of technology. Social agents play a decisive role in the creation and development of general intellect. Due to different social conditions, general intellect functions in different ways: it is directly united with labor in pre-capitalism; their separation starts in simple co-operation of capitalism, develops in manufacture(general intellect of collective laborers) and fully completes in large-scale mechanized industry(fixed capital). General intellect and its capitalist possession are not the same thing. When he claims that Marxian general intellect is simply the scientific power objectified in fixed capital, Paolo Virno is completely wrong since he has confused general intellect with its capitalist possession. However, Marxian analysis on the relation between general intellect and capitalist value production is not mature in the "Fragment on Machines", and his argument on capitalist collapse is not tenable, which has been overcome in Das Kapital.

Key words: “Fragment on Machines”, general intellect, scientific knowledge, fixed capital, value