Thus work as purposive action, guided by the intelligence, is the special product of humankind. But humankind is itself the special product of this form of labor. “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature,"wrote Marx.º Writing in 1876, Frederick Engels had worked out, in terms of the anthropological knowledge of his time, the theory that: "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." "The hand," he maintained, "is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. "1º His essay, called “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," was limited by the state of scientific knowledge of his day, and some of its details may be faulty or wrong—as for example his implication that the “undeveloped larynx of the ape" is inadequate to produce speech sounds. But his fundamental idea has again found favor in the eyes of anthropologists, particularly in the light of recent discoveries of stone tools in association with “near-men” or“man-apes." In an article on tools and human evolution, Sherwood L. Washburn says:
Prior to these findings the prevailing view held that man evolved nearly to his present structural state and then discovered tools and the new ways of life that they made possible. Now it appears that man-apes—creatures able to run but not yet walk on two legs, and with brains no larger than those of apes now living—had already learned to make and use tools. It follows that the structure of modern man must be the result of the change in the terms of natural selection that came with the tool-using way of life. . . . It was the success of the simplest tools that started the whole trend of human evolution and led to the civilizations of today."11
Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.
The possibility of all the various social forms which have arisen and which may yet arise depends in the last analysis upon this distinctive characteristic of human labor. Where the division of function within other animal species has been assigned by nature and stamped upon the genotype in the form of instinct, humanity is capable of an infinite variety of functions and division of function on the basis of family, group, and social assignment. In all other species, the directing force and the resulting activity, instinct and execution, are indivisible. The spider which weaves its web in accordance with a biological urge cannot depute this function to another spider; it carries on this activity because that is its nature. But for men and women, any instinctual patterns of work which they may have possessed at the dawn of their evolution have long since atrophied or been submerged by social forms.\* Thus in humans, as distinguished from animals, the unity between the motive force of labor and the labor itself is not inviolable. The unity of conception and execution may be dissolved. The conception must still precede and govern execution, but the idea as conceived by one may be executed by another. The driving force oflabor remains human consciousness, but the unity between the two may be broken in the individual and reasserted in the group, the workshop, the community, the society as a whole.
Finally, the human capacity to perform work, which Marx called "labor power," must not be confused with the power of any nonhuman agency, whether natural or man made. Human labor, whether directly exercised or stored in such products as tools, machinery, or domesticated animals, represents the sole resource of humanity in confronting nature. Thus for humans in society, labor power is a special category, separate and inexchangeable with any other, simply because it is human. Only one who is the master of the labor of others will confuse labor power with any other agency for performing a task, because to him, steam, horse, water, or human muscle which turns his mill are viewed as equivalents, as “factors of production."For individuals who allocate their own labor (or a community which does the same), the difference between using labor power as against any other power is a difference upon which the entire “economy" turns. And from the point of view of the species as a whole, this difference is also crucial, since every individual is the proprietor of a portion of the total labor power of the community, the society, and the species:
It is this consideration that forms the starting point for the labor theory of value, which bourgeois economists feel they may safely disregard because they are concerned not with social relations but with price relations, not with labor but with production, and not with the human point of view but with the bourgeois point of view.
Freed from the rigid paths dictated in animals by instinct, human labor becomes indeterminate, and its various determinate forms henceforth are the products not of biology but of the complex interaction between tools and social relations, technology and society. The subject of our discussion is not labor “in general," but labor in the forms it takes under capitalist relations of production.
Capitalist production requires exchange relations, commodities, and money, but its differentia specifica is the purchase and sale of labor power. For this purpose, three basic conditions become generalized throughout society. First, workers are separated from the means with which production is carried on, and can gain access to them only by selling their labor power to others. Second, workers are freed of legal constraints, such as serfdom or slavery, that prevent them from disposing of their own labor power. Third, the purpose of the employment of the worker becomes the expansion of a unit of capital belonging to the employer, who is thus functioning as a capitalist. The labor process therefore begins with a contract or agreement governing the conditions of the sale of labor power by the worker and its purchase by the employer.
34 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Labor and Labor Power
35
\* Veblen's “instinct of workmanship" can be understood only in a figurative sense, as a desire or proclivity to work well. A British “social psychologist" expresses himself somewhat agnostically on this matter: “Animals work too . . . and do so largely through
instinctive patterns of behaviour, which are the product of evolutionary processes. It is not clear whether man has innate patterns of work behaviour or not." He adds: “It is possible that man's capacity for learnt, persistent, goal-directed behaviour in groups is such an innate pattern."12 But the sum of the wisdom in this statement is that the human capacity to work noninstinctually may itself be called an instinct. This seems to be a useless and confusing attempt to force an assimilation of human and animal behavior.