Human imitate , too , of course. That's how they learn language and culture. But "monkey see, monkey do" do not have language or culture to imitate.
Conrad Kottak and senior anthropologists term it chimps have society, not culture. They can't imitate humans' culture and language beyond rudiments; proto-language; very pro to, qualitatively less than humans.
All mammals have imitation , not just monkeys .
Also, central to human culture is kinship, naming , organizing the living generation based on closeness or distance of relation from a DEAD ancestors. Chimps do NOT have kinship systems.
Human kinship systems are based on analogy to natural phylogeny. Chimps do not have the ability to think in terms of phylogeny or "tree of life logic. " It's algebra ( see Levi-Strauss' _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_ . Chimps can't think algebraically.
Marx is correct here in distinguishing human labor from the labor of all others species by "imagination ". Must have language and symbolling ability on a scale no other species, including chimps, to have imagination.
"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 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. 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 enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#S1
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