{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":33,"pdf_page":29,"physical_index":29,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b87458c60e1b2717d3f66fe6b3d3496c2c44fe9f93dfd2d382c5394b789a4dee"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Human work is conscious and purposive, while the work of other animals is instinctual.\\* Instinctive activities are inborn rather than learned, and represent a relatively inflexible pattern for the release of energy upon the receipt of specific stimuli. It has been observed, for example, that a caterpillar which has completed half of its cocoon will continue to manufacture the second half without concern even if the first half is taken away. A more striking illustration of instinctual labor is seen in the following:\n\nThe South African weaverbird builds a complicated nest of sticks, with a knotted strand of horsehair as foundation. A pair was isolated and bred for five generations under canaries, out of sight of their fellows and without their usual nest-building materials. In the sixth generation, still in captivity but with access to the right materials, they built a nest perfect even to the knot of horsehair.\n\nIn human work, by contrast, the directing mechanism is the power of conceptual thought, originating in an altogether exceptional central nervous system. As anthropologists have pointed out, the physical structure of the anthropoid ape is not entirely unsuited to tool making and tool using. The ape's hand is an adequate, if relatively coarse, instrument, and because the lower limbs as well as the upper are fitted with opposable thumbs, it has been said that the ape has four hands. But it is not, first of all, in the hands or posture that the human advantage lies. Among the physical differences between humans and apes, it is the relative enlargement of nearly all parts of the brain, and especially the pronounced enlargement of the frontal and parietal parts of the cerebral hemispheres, which is most important in accounting for the human capacity for work well-conceptualized in advance and independent of the guidance of instinct.\\* “Men who made tools of standard type,\" as Oakley says, “must have formed in their minds images of the ends to which they laboured. Human culture . . . is the outcome of this capacity for conceptual thought.\"7\n\nIt is true, as experiments in animal behavior have shown, that animals are not entirely devoid of the power to learn, or to conceive rudimentary ideas, or to solve simple problems. Thus, a creature with as primitive a nervous system as the angleworm can learn to thread a maze; chimpanzees can be stimulated to “invent\" and make tools, such as extensions of sticks, that enable them to reach food, or to stack boxes for the same purpose. As a result, some anthropologists and physiologists have concluded that the difference between the human and the nonhuman animal is not a difference in kind but in degree. But when a difference of degree is so enormous as the gap that exists between the learning and conceptual abilities of humans and even the most adaptable of other animals, it may properly be treated, for the purposes of our present discussion, as a difference in kind. And, we may add, whatever learning capacities may be stimulated in animals through ingenious forms of human tutelage, it has not proved possible to stimulate in them an ability to manage symbolic representation, especially in its highest form, articulate speech. Without symbols and speech, conceptual thought must remain rudimentary and, moreover, cannot be freely transmitted throughout the group or to succeeding generations:\n\nCulture without continuity of experience is, of course, impossible. But what sort of continuity of experience is prerequisite to culture? It is not the continuity which comes from the communication of experience by imitation, for we find this among apes. Clearly, it is continuity on the subjective side rather than on the objective, or overt, that is essential. As we have shown, it is the symbol, particularly in word form, which provides this element of continuity in the tool-experience of man. And, finally, it is this factor of continuity in man's tool-experience that has made accumulation and progress, in short, a material culture, possible.8\n\n32 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nLabor and Labor Power\n\n33\n\nwith each other before performing them; he can assign to himself the most multifarious tasks and adapt to many different materials, and it is precisely this capacity of ordering his intentions or dividing his proposals into separate operations which he calls intelligence. He does not merge into the materials of his undertaking, but proceeds from this material to his mental picture, from his mind to his model, and at each moment exchanges what he wants against what he can do, and what he can do against what he achieves.\"3\n\n\\* Fourier thought he recognized in this the cause of \"happiness\" among animals and the “anguish of repugnant labor\" among humans: “Labour, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants. . . . God has provided them with a social [he might have said biological] mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favour as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours!\"4 But to see in the noninstinctual character of human labor the direct cause of the “anguish of repugnant labor,\" one must skip over all the intervening stages of social development which separate the early emergence of human labor out of pre-human forms, from labor in its modern form.\n\n\\* The general increase in brain size is important, but “certain parts of the brain have increased in size much more than others. As functional maps of the cortex of the brain show, the human sensory-motor cortex is not just an enlargement of that of an ape. The areas for the hand, especially the thumb, in man are tremendously enlarged, and this is an integral part of the structural base that makes the skillful use of the hand possible. . . .\n\n“The same is true for other cortical areas. Much of the cortex in a monkey is still engaged in the motor and sensory functions. In man it is the areas adjacent to the primary centers that are most expanded. These areas are concerned with skills, memory foresight and language; that is, with the mental faculties that make human social life possible.6","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}