This is how Marx continues, after the phrase on “human mastery over the forces of nature”: “[What is wealth if not] the absolute working-out of [man’s] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick?⁴⁶⁴ Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality?” Here we see the reappearance of an old obsession: the unit of measure. But the situation is once again reversed: the ancient world had, indeed, as a point of reference, a human canon, and this would seem to be a utopian condition of society, that it possess within itself a degree of perfection; the modern world, on the other hand, has no real use for perfection: its only unit of measurement is work-time, where work is abstract, an empty unit, devoid of any particular feature, but it is this very unit that enables mankind to produce (and note: not reproduce!) itself to an extent unknown in any other world. It is clear, at this point, which part, which side, Marx chooses: speaking here, almost brutally, is his love of modernity, of its capacity to multiply and enhance itself without a plan, in any direction. For its only purpose is everything: the immediate possession of everything, not just a precept that corresponds to everything. To reach totality, elements can be accumulated anywhere, in attics, cellars, drawing rooms. Good and bad, everything is useful, provided it comes in large quantities. Humanity becomes a vast port where spices and foreign produce arrive. No order is required: the only thing needed is for everything to continue multiplying to saturation point.

And when there’s everything? Then humanistic concerns and sensitivities will reemerge: the man who fishes in the morning and plays his flute in the evening, the “omnilateral” man who proudly refuses to let any of his countless tentacles remain idle. Yet, here again, a nasty surprise is waiting to spoil any image d’Épinal. This total man—as Stirner recognized immediately—far from being the virtuous worker, trained in technical schools and in the factory, was destined to blossom into the total, celestial and infernal monstrosity oscillating between Juliette’s Minski and Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin. All the rest is humanitarian kitsch, closer to Homais than to Fourier (though the two, in fact, are not so far apart).

Elsewhere, however, Marx shows his passion: elsewhere we feel his full transparent fervor: before the demonic nature of the process. It is the process—certainly not its result—that fascinates. The construction of the power of the void. And here the fundamental opposition between the two worlds reemerges. Let us reread the last sentence of the passage quoted above: the totality of development in which man “does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality.” The ultimate opposition is therefore between reproducing and producing. Reproduce is the word that belongs to the world of the canon, dominated by rituals that seek each time to restore an order to the process, to reproduce an order, that of the ṛta, which sustains the cosmos as well as society. Produce is the word that belongs to the world of hegemonic exchange, where it is essential to establish a functional strategy such that the process, as it proceeds, carries with it—come what may—an increase of power. This happens precisely because the direction of production is not determinable and is indeed ignored, whereas all concern is focused primarily on the intensification and expansion of production strategies. And it is only in their evolution that any consequence can be gleaned.