The Production Of Too Many Useful

This passage comes from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a set of notebooks Marx wrote in Paris but did not publish in his lifetime (first published in 1932). In them, Marx developed his theory of alienation: that capitalism causes workers to become estranged from the products of their labor, from the act of production, and ultimately from their own human nature. The line about "useless people" refers to unemployment and social degradation as structural consequences of capitalist overproduction.