Grundrisse

by Marx, Karl (1993)

Key Passage

Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather,
the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.
(What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development
of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as
middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature,
transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it.
He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it
is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather
the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery
over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social
individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien
labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new
one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the
great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange
value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the
condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development
of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down,
and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. (p.705)

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