c: “Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on the subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.”⁴⁷³ This time, therefore, there is a further reversal of the relationship between things and people, bringing things (and hence “productivity”) to a state of subordination. And here the noose is tightened: productivity ought to give way to another form of productivity, now described as “universal development of individuals.” But what lies hidden behind this formula for proud freethinkers? Production—the age-old name for this august, sacred development of Humanity—suggests just one path: to treat humanity itself as “human material.” What will the nascent “omnilateral” man be? He will be a parody of Anthropos: a progressive Anthropos, an appalling hybrid between Monsieur Homais and the alchemical Homunculus, produced by the application of one model (that of productivity as indefinite growth) to the ever more “universal” subjects of society. They will be the only subjects that perpetually improve themselves! And we should remember that improvement was the word Adam Smith used to indicate “development.” On this extremely delicate point Marx always promises some explanation, though each time, for some reason or other, it has to be deferred: “(The latter form of association [based on the “appropriation and control of the means of production”] is not arbitrary; it presupposes the development of material and cultural conditions which are not to be examined any further at this point.⁴⁷⁴)” And this is where we remain. But, as always, the negation is revealing: Marx is immediately eager to move away from the word arbitrary for the very reason that it holds the secret of any “new man,” as though he could already glimpse the repellent features of the positive heroes that would be so zealously produced several decades later. And they were certainly not arbitrary, since they served a purpose. But they were built arbitrarily, like things had once been built by the exchange value.

“In order to secure the exchangeability of the commodity, exchangeability itself is set up in opposition to it as an independent commodity.”⁴⁷⁵ New spices from the East, from that far point of the East that is the purest and most poisonous West: exchangeability arrives on the market, and quickly changes the whole aspect of reality. That same power that was already active in the “arbitrary nature of the sign,” in the practice of convention, in every gesture of substitution (x stands for y), but which had not yet had the impious presumption to present itself as an independent entity, now asserts itself—and it shows that, instead of letting itself be subsumed and absorbed into the context of the other powers, it can itself subsume them, considering them all to be its partial applications. The master Aristotle had already stated: “In reality everything can be used for exchange.”⁴⁷⁶ Certain platitudes lie dormant in history for centuries, but when roused they become gnashing jaws.

“The purely natural material in which no human labor is objectified, to the extent that it is merely a material that exists independently of labor, has no value, since only objectified labor is value; as little value as is possessed by the common elements as such.”⁴⁷⁷