--- Title: Labor Description: Conscious and deliberate activity by which the species transforms its environment. Author: School of Marxism URL: https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Labor --- > Conscious and deliberate activity by which the species transforms its environment. ### Labor and the human species Ever since the philosophers of Antiquity, the social nature of our species had been discussed in essentialist and metaphysical terms. But in 1859 science took a giant leap with the publication of "The Origin of Species". The theory of evolution provided for the first time a material basis for the famous "what are we and where do we come from", pawed over by all the idealisms and religions up to the present day. For the young revolutionary workers' movement, that advance was an especially valuable scientific conquest that reinforced and propelled its own vision of the species and its future. It had nothing to do, of course, with the crude and unscientific "social Darwinism" later developed by the British bourgeoisie, which twisted the Darwinian metaphor to justify the concentration of capital and the pauperization of the great masses of workers. The reading Engels makes at that time is [materialist](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Historical%20materialism) and [dialectical](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Dialectics). Materialist because the form of adaptation of the ancestors of our species, the transformation of the environment through the use of tools -that is, labor- has no other origin or driving force than the pure material needs of survival; and its consequences will be material too: the particular and characteristic development of the human brain. Dialectical because that development will take place in a complex relationship with the environment, manifesting itself as the interaction and mutual feeding between language, thought, the capacity of perception and the very capacity to transform Nature: labor. > [Labor] is the basic and fundamental condition of all human life. And it is so to such an extent that, in a sense, we must say that labor created man himself. (...) First labor, then and along with it articulate speech, were the two main stimuli under whose influence the brain of the ape gradually changed into the human brain (...) And as the brain developed, so did its most immediate instruments: the sense organs. (...) > > The development of the brain and of the senses serving it, the growing clarity of consciousness, the ever greater capacity for abstraction and reasoning, reacted in turn on labor and speech, stimulating their development more and more; and when man finally separates from the ape, this development by no means ceases (...) advancing as a whole by great strides, considerably driven forward and at the same time guided in a more definite direction by a new element that arises with the appearance of fully-fledged man: society. > > Frederick Engels. ["The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man"](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1870s/1876trab.htm), 1876 That relationship, that social "metabolism" between the species and nature mediated by labor, had already been pointed out in "Capital": > Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process in which man mediates, regulates and controls his metabolism with nature. Man confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms and legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form useful for his own life. By acting through this movement on external nature and transforming it, he at the same time transforms his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within it and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power. > > Karl Marx. [Capital](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/capital/karl-marx-el-capital-tomo-i-editorial-progreso.pdf), 1867 ### The historical and social forms and meanings of labor Our species, "in the social production of its existence", enters into social relations "independent of its will", relations of production "which correspond to a definite stage of development of its material productive forces". These relations, which "constitute the economic structure of society", give meaning to labor and frame it within the class structure of each mode of production. That is why the social meaning of labor has varied historically from one mode of production to another. Slave labor under slavery, serf labor under feudalism and wage labor under capitalism represent an evolution of the forms of exploitation and extraction of the wealth created by the working class, running parallel to the [progress](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Progress) of the [productive forces](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Productive%20forces). In the next revolution now possible for humanity, [socialism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Socialism), the transitional phase towards [communism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Communism), labor will be progressively freed not only from the exaction and the compulsory character it has had in all class societies, but from the very division between manual and intellectual labor. With this, the boundary between free time and productive time tends to disappear, and with it the [alienation](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Alienation) characteristic of all systems of exploitation. > The enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labor will have disappeared, and with it also the antithesis between intellectual and manual labor; labor will no longer be merely a means of life but will itself have become the prime necessity of life, (and) with the all-round development of individuals their productive capacities will also have grown, and all the springs of collective wealth will flow in abundance. > > Karl Marx. [Critique of the Gotha Program](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1870s/gotha/index.htm), 1875