In contemporary capitalist economy knowledge generating becomes part and parcel of material production and man, as the bearer of intellectual capacities, the principal productive force. In this reality, education came to mean the formation of the "general intellect": the cultivation of mind and the development of consciousness, of its moral, aesthetic and philosophical form. At the same time the "cognitive capitalist" economy undermines and distorts "general intellect" in its effort to subordinate the workers' intellectual activity to the imperatives of commodity production. Therefore the prospects of an authentic knowledge society can only be conceived in terms of transgression of the capitalist mode of production. (Contains 10 footnotes.)