But capitalism or any other system could not survive if it did not respond to human desires in some way. Though he uses the singular masculine pronoun in the last sentence, he is not talking about the individual worker but about workers in general, including intellectual and cultural producers. The social individual is the subject of this knowledge not in the sense that one individual can know everything but in the sense that each individual contributes to the general fund of knowledge that becomes the basis of production and 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. Exchange value is the value of an object in the marketplace, its value as a commodity.
Use value is the value of an object in so far as it serves human needs.
For example, a Jaguar and a Honda Civic have very different exchange values, not only because of the difference in quality but also because of the prestige and social status associated with the ownership of a Jaguar. 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. In other words, as capitalism develops, more people have access to education and disposable time and can develop their intellectual abilities in order to make a contribution to the general fund of human knowledge. Increasingly, this general fund of knowledge becomes the foundation of the production of wealth. However, it must be understood that, while fewer people may engage in the direct production of surplus value through physical labor, such labor is nonetheless an essential ingredient in the production of human knowledge.