What about the transition in labor in the transition from ape to man ? This essay uses "labor" in the sense that it is something that apes do. So, it is not the "labor" ( or is it work ?) that produces capitalist surplus value in _Capital_I, but the more general labor that Marx describes in Chapter so and so , where he says the difference between the labor of spiders and bees and that of man is imagining the project as a plan first ( this implies that spiders and bees labor).
So, the implication is that in the transition from ape to man, labor transitioned in part by taking on more mental labor, imagination and planning , as a component. CB The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Written: in May-June 1876; First published: in Die Neue Zeit 1895-06; Translated: from the German by Clemens Dutt; First published in English: by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1934; Transcribed: by direc...@marx.org, Jan 1996. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was intended to introduce a larger work which Engels planned to call Die drei Grundformen der Knechtschaft – Outline of the General Plan. Engels never finished it, nor even this intro, which breaks off at the end. It would be included in Dialectics of Nature. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determinable, of that period of the earth’s history known to geologists as the Tertiary period, most likely towards the end of it, a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone – probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. [1] Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees. First, owing to their way of living which meant that the hands had different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes began to lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more erect posture. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man. ******* CB: Labor of the hand ! _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
