ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses pre-capitalist divisions of labour, intended to convey the democratic character of their general intellect. The division of labour is a feature of all cultures, from hunter-gatherers, to relatively self-sufficient households, to clusters of households in villages, to ancient palace cultures, to city-states and pre-modern empires. From Marx's point of view, the division of labour effected through manufacture, while retaining the role of the craftworker as its regulating principle, was already attacking the worker 'at the very roots of his life'. It was the beginning of 'industrial pathology'. As science and technology began to enter directly into the everyday regime of capitalist activity, it became possible to hope for the end of the multidimensional alienation experienced by proletarians. When Hardt and Negri speaks about the 'immaterial' activities characterised by the adjectives 'communicative', 'affective' and 'biopolitical reasoning', they are referring to human capabilities in which are fused those dimensions of human activity split apart, by Fordist capitalism.
