[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
c b cb31450 at gmail.com Thu May 27 15:00:48 MDT 2010 Engels: First labour, after it and then with it speech – these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which, for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect. ^ CB: This seems to be a LaMarckian hypothesis. Of course, LaMarckianism is not anti-natural selection. It is anti-Mendelianism. ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
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
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
All extant anthropoid apes can stand erect and move about on their feet alone, but only in case of urgent need and in a very clumsy way. Their natural gait is in a half-erect posture and includes the use of the hands. The majority rest the knuckles of the fist on the ground and, with legs drawn up, swing the body through their long arms, much as a cripple moves on crutches. In general, all the transition stages from walking on all fours to walking on two legs are still to be observed among the apes today. The latter gait, however, has never become more than a makeshift for any of them. It stands to reason that if erect gait among our hairy ancestors became first the rule and then, in time, a necessity, other diverse functions must, in the meantime, have devolved upon the hands. Already among the apes there is some difference in the way the hands and the feet are employed. In climbing, as mentioned above, the hands and feet have different uses. The hands are used mainly for gathering and holding food in the same way as the fore paws of the lower mammals are used. Many apes use their hands to build themselves nests in the trees or even to construct roofs between the branches to protect themselves against the weather, as the chimpanzee, for example, does. With their hands they grasp sticks to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard their enemies with fruits and stones. In captivity they use their hands for a number of simple operations copied from human beings. It is in this that one sees the great gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both hands, but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no simian hand can imitate – no simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest stone knife. The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini. But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways. In the first place, the body benefited from the law of correlation of growth, as Darwin called it. This law states that the specialised forms of separate parts of an organic being are always bound up with certain forms of other parts that apparently have no connection with them. ^ CB: Spandrel comes from Darwin (smile) ^ Thus all animals that have red blood cells without cell nuclei, and in which the head is attached to the first vertebra by means of a double articulation (condyles), also without exception possess lacteal glands for suckling their young. Similarly, cloven hoofs in mammals are regularly associated with the possession of a multiple stomach for rumination. Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the body, although we cannot explain the connection. Perfectly white cats with blue eyes are always, or almost always, deaf. The gradually increasing perfection of the human hand, and the commensurate adaptation of the feet for erect gait, have undoubtedly, by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts of the organism. However, this action has not as yet been sufficiently investigated for us to be able to do more here than to state the fact in general terms. Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism. It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
http://mehring.com/part-played-by-labor.html In this short pamphlet, written over 130 years ago, Engels presents his understanding of the key factors in human evolution, using the dialectical materialist method and what little was known about human physical and cultural evolution. Engels' insights have been substantially confirmed by the fossil and archaeological records. On a number of other topics, such as the introduction of increasing proportions of meat into the diet as an important factor in brain development, Engels was at the cutting edge, if not ahead of the anthropological thought of his day. He demonstrates an understanding of what we would today call ecology, seeing ecological relationships, including the role of humans, in a dialectical way, which current science still employs largely in an 'unconscious' and limited manner. Author Frederick Engels Publisher Progress Publishers Publication Date 1980 Pages 16 Publication Type Pamphlet Frederick Engels (1820-1895) was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. Together with Marx he elaborated the theory and program of scientific socialism. Engels was born in Bremen in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia, the son of a textile manufacturer. In 1838, due to family circumstances, he quit his studies and went to work as a clerk at a commercial house in the town of his birth. At this time he began studying Hegel and started literary and journalistic work. In 1842 he settled in Manchester, England, working in a commercial firm in which his father was a shareholder. Based on his observations of social realities in Manchester at the time, he wrote his famous Conditions of the Working Class in England. In 1844 Engels met Marx for the first time in Paris. He assisted Marx in writing the Holy Family, which outlined the foundations of materialism and socialism. It would be the start of a friendship that lasted until Marx's death. From 1845-1847 Engels lived in Paris and in Brussels. At that time Marx and Engels were approached by the German Communist League to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of communism; the result was the Communist Manifesto. Together with Marx, Engels participated in the revolution in Germany in 1848. In 1849 Engels took part in an armed uprising in South Germany. After the defeat of the rebels he escaped to England via Switzerland, where he rejoined Marx. Until 1870 he worked in a manufacturing firm where his father was a shareholder. He provided essential financial support to Marx, who was engaged in writing Capital at the time. Engels returned to London in 1870 and continued his close collaboration with Marx until the latter's death in 1883. In addition to assisting in the publication of all three volumes of Capital both before and after Marx's death, he wrote many works during this period dealing with philosophical, political, and scientific questions, including Anti-Duhring, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. He continued to play an active role in the affairs of the European workers' movement until his death on August 5, 1895 in London. On 5/27/10, c b cb31...@gmail.com wrote: 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
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value Contents Section 1 - The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values Section 2 - The Production of Surplus-Value SECTION 1. THE LABOUR-PROCESS OR THE PRODUCTION OF USE-VALUES The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article. The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general character of that production. We shall, therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions. Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments. The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies [1] man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labour. An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims. [2] Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man’s own limbs
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
CB 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). It's chapter one and chapter seven of Volume I that you refer. To be sure, it must be said that animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling places, like the bees, the beavers, ants, etcIt produces in a one-sided way [according to the inclination and instinct of its species] while man produces universally. The animal produces under the domination of immediate physical need while man produces free of physical need and only genuinely so in freedom from such need...The animal builds only according to the standard and need of its species...man knows how to produce according to the standard of any species and at all times knows how to apply an intrinsic standatd to the object. Thus man creates according to the laws of beauty. What enables the human creature to appreciate Truth, Beauty and Goodness? The animal is immediately one with its life activity, not distinct from it. The animal is its life activi5ty. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of will and consciousness...Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from the life activity of the animal. Only thereby is he a species-being. Or rather, he is only a conscious being-- that is, his life is an object for him--- since he is a species-being. Only on that account is his activity free activity. (Manuscripts, Alienated Labour). As such, Marx is returning to a perrennial theme in classical Greek and modern German philosophy: Man is a Zwon echon logon (an 'animal with Reason'). His anthropological comparison between ants, bees, etc. and human beings is almost a word for word reference to Aristotle's Politics, Kant's Theses/CPR, and Mendeville's Fable of the Bees. All this is based upon the notion that Man is a rational animal. This is what enables Marx to claim that the human very own life is an object of will and consciousness--- or, what is tantamount to the same thing, as he says in chapter seven, to be able to raise his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. Indeed, he explains this much not only in the Manuscripts, Ideology, Theses, and Capital, but, Engels does also in the Part Played by Labour. By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and brain, not only in each individual but also in society, men became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect and more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind religion. In the face of all these images, which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background, the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a very early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the primitive family), to have the labour that had been planned carried out by other hands than its own. All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated mens minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour. Part played by labour... Rather than being based upon Darwinian conjectures, as some have suggested, this is fundamentally a paper on Praxis. Hence why he just criticized Darwin by using the understanding of labour, life-activity, praxis, etc. I think these claims can be easily illustrated for any postmodern readers of Marx who have any qualms with such a definition. They do not study Darwin. Nor Marx---those being two of the greatest thinkers of the last 200 years. As Marx says, Darwin did
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
As Marx says, Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the Animal Kingdom. Was Darwin projecting? Yes. Did he commit the same ontological error as the political economists, as the state of nature thinkers? Yes. I understand that R and Cb are fond of Darwinianism, but that shouldn't be confused with Marx's approach. cda CB: Marx was fond of Darwin , too. Marx said that Darwin’s Origin of Species was “the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.” (Here a fairly recent essay I came across in googling the connection on the commonality of Darwin's theory and Marx and Engels http://www.readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/Marx-Engels-Darwin.pdf) I'm not sure what exactly you refer to , but I'm fond of Darwin _in Natural History_. I'm fond of Marx and Engels, historical materialism, in human history. Also, notice that Darwin gets his basic idea of selection upon analogy to human's selecting and breeding in the long historical process of domestication of animals. Darwin's first chapters in _The Origin of Species_ is on human domestication of animals. The origin of domestication of animals is relatively simultaneous with the origin of agriculture ,and the _Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_, or class exploitative society. So, Darwin's projection is evident in that way as well. The Origin of Species Charles Darwin Chapter 1 - Variation Under Domestication Causes of Variability Effects of Habit Correlation of Growth Inheritance Character of Domestic Varieties Difficulty of distinguishing between Varieties and Species Origin of Domestic Varieties from one or more Species Domestic pigeons, their Differences and Origin Principle of Selection anciently followed, its Effects Methodical and Unconscious Selection Unknown Origin of our Domestic Productions Circumstances favourable to Man's power of Selection WHEN we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. When we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, I think we are driven to conclude that this greater variability is simply due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent-species have been exposed under nature. There is, also, I think, some probability in the view propounded by Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly connected with excess of food. It seems pretty clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations. No case is on record of a variable being ceasing to be variable under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still often yield new varieties: our oldest domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification. It has been disputed at what period of time the causes of variability, whatever they may be, generally act; whether during the early or late period of development of the embryo, or at the instant of conception. Geoffroy St Hilaire's experiments show that unnatural treatment of the embryo causes monstrosities; and monstrosities cannot be separated by any clear line of distinction from mere variations. But I am strongly inclined to suspect that the most frequent cause of variability may be attributed to the male and female reproductive elements having been affected prior to the act of conception. Several reasons make me believe in this; but the chief one is the remarkable effect which confinement or cultivation has on the functions of the reproductive system; this system appearing to be far more susceptible than any other part of the organization, to the action of any change in the conditions of life. Nothing is more easy than to tame an animal, and few things more difficult than to get it to breed freely under confinement, even in the many cases when the male and female unite. How many animals there are which will not breed, though living long under not very close confinement in their native country! This is generally attributed to vitiated instincts; but how many cultivated plants display the utmost vigour, and
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
Engels: Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism. It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors. Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, CB: Engels seems to be defining labour as only that done with hands. A hunter tracks his prey for long distances. The legs play a big part in this labour. Humans can trot long distances and wear out their prey. This comes with upright posture too. But the main problem is that , as Marx notes, what is distinct in human labor is imagining and planning. This comes with language and culture, symbolic thinking. ^ and widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects. ^ CB: Here Engels has a little piece of Levi-Strauss' _The Savage Mind_. This discovery was , of course, done mainly with the brain, not the hand. The ability to classify and remember large amounts of information which language gives is critical in _retaining_ these discoveries over many generations. ^ On the other hand (Pun intended -CB) , the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. ^ CB: Well , lets get dialectical and talk of reciprocal causation. The development of labor in the transition from ape to man _was_ its becoming highly social labor. How did laboring with hands more make people come together more, make it more social ? There is no evident reason that laboring with hands more causes it to be more social. No. The increased sociality of labor comes from the inherent sociality in language-culture-tradition-symboling mediating labor, not from using hands more. Recall that _language_ is not just speech. It is ,as CJ points ( gestures) out, gesturing ( I would say with more body parts than the hands , upper body); it is use of stones , sticks, object trouve-found objects of all types, both movable (animals; totemism; clans were named for animal species) and stationary ( sun, moon, stars, mountains, bolders. special trees like in Avatar ) , every_thing_ in the landas concrete lexical items in a language of the concrete. ^^^ In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. ^ CB: Coming to say something to each other , to symbolize to each other in many media not just talking, _was_ the essence of men in the making. ^^^ Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another. CB: Articulate speech is not the beginning of language and symboling. ^ Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to communicate to each other does not require articulate speech. ^ CB: _Human_ labor becomes human labor , becomes distinguished from the labor of bees and spiders, in that it is organized by language. It inherently includes knowledge of the labors of dead generations of humans. ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
Engels: But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. ^ CB: Ahhh but how ? How did the experience of repetition of use of _a_ hand by one individual get transferred to the brains of the next generation and the next , become the experience of _The_ hand ? If Patriarch uses his hands thousands of times his increasing dexterity is based on accumulated experience in that one individual's brain. The next generation's brains goes back to square one at birth and childhood . The only way to accumulate the knowledge across generations is by mediating the learning experience with language, imagination. The only way to stand on the shoulders of giants is to receive messages from them through a system of symbols. ( as in those days there wasn't the technology to take enough pictures) The hand is not the hand of an individual, but The Hand, as a concept, an organi of the species. ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
Engels: First labour, after it and then with it speech – these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which, for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect. CB: The relationships between labour , speech and brain are why I say Engels essay is wrongly titled. It should be The transition of labor in the transition from ape to man. If labour is that done with the hand, the development of the hand's skill , of course, does not accumulate in the hand itself, but in part of the brain that controls the hand. And , as I said, the accumulated experience and learning that an individual gains by using her hands, in practice, does not get transferred to the hand part of the brains of her children or grandchildren or great, great,...great grandchildren without the supplemental process of communicating through symbols from her brain to the brains of those offspring. Demonstrating for imitation can communicate some of it, but the learning is greatly augmented by language communication. But _labour_ , in the process of transition from apes was not just skill of the hand. It was the skill of working in an organized social formation in a hunt or a gathering. This involved standing or running in physical relation to other people during the course of this labour, which involved skill of legs Ok u three go stand behind Yea Olde Oak tree where our great great grandfather first killed a willowbee in the story of the First Killing. You two chase the prey into the trap of the other three Or we will go out on the gathering when the Big Star in the sky first rises This is skill of the eye. Engels: Hand in hand ( Pun intended -CB) with the development of the brain went the development of its most immediate instruments – the senses. CB: I think Engels knew that the hand is an immediate instrument of the brain , too. The increasing skill of the hand is located in the brain, not the hand. Of course, the brain gets the increasing skill by the hand practicing, but the information is not stored and accumulated in the hand. Maybe he didn't know that. Practice is the test of theory. Practice is the source of theory development. But theory is not physically located in the organs of practice. And the organs of practice of more than one human, and generations of humans are the source of theory that is in their several brains. And this is not idealism. At one level is it not idealism because the brain and thoughts are material. So, language and symboling are material. Furthermore, it is not idealism because labor is not constituted soley by the actions of the hands. Labor is of the hands, brain, feet, eyes, legs, head. ^ Just as the gradual development of speech is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of all the senses. The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle. ^ CB: But not based on the experience humans have with their hands, rather from the experience, practice and labor they have with their eyes , the eyes of more than one individual. And experience that is coded in language and shared with other individuals through language. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are definite signs denoting different things. And the sense of touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed only side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labour. ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man Engels: Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. ^ CB: Language would be just as important in enhancing sexual union between males and females. The direct enhancement of sexual union would mean that language developed in that process as well. Enhancement of fertility most directly impacts selective fitness. ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
In re, discussion of difference between apes and man (sic). in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. Yes, but as Marx had said in _Capital_ , human labor is distinguished by its planning in imagination ahead of time, making it thickly social. It is activity saturated with the ideality of the nightmare of all previous generations in it. Charles ^ The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED], 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] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/#n1 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. All extant anthropoid apes can stand erect and move about on their feet alone, but only in case of urgent need and in a very clumsy way. Their natural gait is in a half-erect posture and includes the use of the hands. The majority rest the knuckles of the fist on the ground and, with legs drawn up, swing the body through their long arms, much as a cripple moves on crutches. In general, all the transition stages from walking on all fours to walking on two legs are still to be observed among the apes today. The latter gait, however, has never become more than a makeshift for any of them. It stands to reason that if erect gait among our hairy ancestors became first the rule and then, in time, a necessity, other diverse functions must, in the meantime, have devolved upon the hands. Already among the apes there is some difference in the way the hands and the feet are employed. In climbing, as mentioned above, the hands and feet have different uses. The hands are used mainly for gathering and holding food in the same way as the fore paws of the lower mammals are used. Many apes use their hands to build themselves nests in the trees or even to construct roofs between the branches to protect themselves against the weather, as the chimpanzee, for example, does. With their hands they grasp sticks to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard their enemies with fruits and stones. In captivity they use their hands for a number of simple operations copied from human beings. It is in this that one sees the great gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both hands, but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no simian hand can imitate-no simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest stone knife. The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the
