pre-modernism "Erik Empson" <erikempson at wanadoo.
> not really. marx thought that what distinguished us _as_ humans was that
we
> labored, collectively and cooperatively, in order to live. the essence of
> what it means to be human is work: "What [individuals]...are coincides
with
> their production, both with _what_ they produce and with _how_ they
> produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions
> determining their production." (The German Ideology)
>
Did he? Don't ants and bees etc labour collectively and cooperatively? The difference is humans intervene and adapt 'the material conditions determining their production'. For Marx communism meant expanding the horizons of humanity beyond a particular form of social power that tries to reduce our lives to 'work'.
EE
^^^^^^^^
CB: Below is a well known way in which Marx distinguishes human labor from that of bees and spiders. I think the key difference is that human labor is qualitatively more social in that it connects the living laborer with those of past generations extrasomatically, i.e. not genetically but historically/symbolically. So, behind the "imagination" that Marx refers to is the sociality that language and imagining are.
"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 hum! an. 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 enj! oys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powe is forced to be. "http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#S1