The possibility of the privatization of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect - based on collective knowledge and social cooperation - increases in postindustrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labor expended in its production. The result is not the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor into rent appropriated through the privatization of knowledge.