Chapter 1
Labor and Labor Power
All forms of life sustain themselves on their natural environment; thus all conduct activities for the purpose of appropriating natural products to their own use. Plants absorb moisture, minerals, and sunlight; animals feed on plant life or prey on other animals. But to seize upon the materials of nature ready made is not work; work is an activity that alters these materials from their natural state to improve their usefulness. The bird, the beaver, the spider, the bee, and the termite, in building nests, dams, webs, and hives, all may be said to work. Thus the human species shares with others the activity of acting upon nature in a manner which changes its forms to make them more suitable for its needs.
However, what is important about human work is not its similarities with that of other animals, but the crucial differences that mark it as the polar opposite. “We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal," wrote Marx in the first volume of Capital. "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."' \*
\* Thus labor in its human form was called by Aristotle intelligent action; Aristotle, despite his vain effort to find a single cause underlying all the products of nature, animals, and humans, gave the earliest form to this distinctive principle of human labor: “Art indeed consists in the conception of the result to be produced before its realization in the material."² In recent times, the artistic mind has often grasped this special feature of human activity better than the technical mind; for example, Paul Valéry: “Man acts; he exercises his powers on a material foreign to him; he separates his operations from their material infrastructure, and he has a clearly defined awareness of this; hence he can think out his operations and co-ordinate them
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