268 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYbecomes the activity of a subject controlling all the forces of nature in
the production process.^34
Marx envisaged a time when production would depend not on the
amount of labour employed but on the general level of science and
technology, when wealth would be measured by an increase in production
quite disproportionate to the labour-time employed, and when 'man
behaves as the supervisor and regulator of the process of production'.
Then the true emancipation of mankind would take place:
In this re-orientation what appears as the mainstay of production and
wealth is neither the immediate labour performed by the worker nor
the time that he works - but the appropriation of his general productive
force, his understanding of nature and the mastery of it as a special
force; in a word, the development of the social individual.
The theft of others' labour-time upon which wealth depends today
seems to be a miserable basis compared with the newly-developed
foundation that has been created by heavy industry itself.
As soon as labour, in its direct form, has ceased to be the main source
of wealth, then labour-time ceases, and must cease, to be its standard
of measurement, and thus exchange-value must cease to be the measure-
ment of use-value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be
a condition for the development of wealth in general; in the same way
that the non-labour of the few has ceased to be a condition for the
development of the powers of the human mind in general.^35
These extracts obviously cannot give a full picture of the contents of
the Grundrisse; but they do give a clear impression of Marx's thought at its
richest. The nature of the vision that inspired Marx is at least adumbrated:
communal production in which the quality of work determined its value;
the disappearance of money along with that of exchange value; and an
increase in free time affording opportunities for the universal development
of the individual. The Grundrisse is important not only as a vital element
for the understanding and interpretation of Marx's thought. The contem-
porary relevance of Marx's views on the ambivalent nature of technology
is sufficiendy obvious.
Thus Marx's thought is best viewed as a continuing meditation on
central themes first explored in 1844 ~ this process culminating in his
writings of 1857-58. The continuity between the Manuscripts and the
Grundrisse is evident. In correspondence Marx himself wrote of the Grund-
risse as the result of fifteen years of research, 'the best period of my life'.^36
(This particular letter was written in November 1858 , exacdy fifteen years
after Marx's arrival in Paris in November 1843.) He also said in the
Preface in 1859 : 'the total material lies before me in the form of mono-
graphs, which were written at widely separated periods, for self-clarifi-