Engels. The Part Played by Labour in the Transition From Ape to Man.

In his unfinished essay, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” Frederick Engels attempts to demonstrate the role of labor in human evolution. In this way he is trying to create a synthesis of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of humans and the Marxist philosophy with which he is associated. According to Engels, labor is “the prime basic condition for all human existence” and is in fact constitutive of humanity as a species. In order to demonstrate that “labour created man himself,” Engels must go through the human hand.

Engels describes “a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes” that lost “the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more erect posture.” For Engels, this move away from walking on their hands was “the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.” Given that these apes no longer needed their hands for walking, “other diverse functions must, in the meantime, have developed upon the hands.” He describes that apes use their hands to gather and hold food, build nests or roofs, grasp and throw items for self-defense. However, for Engels there is a vast difference in how apes use their hands and how humans use their hands. This difference is due to the fact that the human hand “has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour.”

In Engels’s formulation, “the hand had become free and could henceforth attain even greater dexterity . . . .” He argues that “the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.” This is true for him insofar as the labor that the hands perform has had an effect on the way the hands have evolved over time and “given the hand the high degree of perfection” that it has today.

After his analysis of the hand and labor as ultimate causes of our transition to human beings, he goes on to discuss the different modes of being in the world that this kind of labor brings about: the development of language, technological advances, society, and so on. As humans progress through more and more complex and abstract stages, we begin to emphasize the forces of the mind over the forces of the hand, all the more so because societies figured out early on how “to have the labour that had been planned carried out by other hands then its own.”

Engels argues that the fundamental human relationship with the environment is one of mastery: “the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.” Our planned, premeditated labor of mastering the environment, however, causes rippling effects that are unintended, negative, and as yet unpredictable. He summarizes several man-made environmental disasters and social injustices brought about by this attempt at mastery, and argues that capitalists, in particular, “are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effects of their actions,” allowing these negative consequences to persist and amplify. Engels argues that the next step of human mastery must be the ability to predict and regulate these indirect consequences.

As is to be expected from one of the founders of Marxism, he argues that this regulation “requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution of our existing modes of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.” Furthermore, this revolution in the material order will make it impossible to uphold “the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, [and] soul and body.” Thus, the revolution is a kind of reclamation of the hand, the primacy of which has been established in his evolutionary origin story and then systematically devalued by historical social forces. The shortsightedness of our past and present modes of production are blamed on our assumption of an endless abundance of resources as well as “a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately available”; to broaden this horizon and to advance to the next level of development, for Engels, means to synthesize our mental abilities to master and understand natural laws with the absolute primacy of the labor of the hand.

While intriguing, this excerpt is quite bare-bones, as it is a fragment of an unfinished work; it would probably be most useful read in conjunction with other more complete texts. Neither of us find Engels’ analysis of embodiment itself particularly compelling, but his attempt at synthesizing Darwinism  and Marxism could be interesting in a historical analysis of the ways in which thinkers in other disciplines made use of Darwin for their own ends, or perhaps as a corrective to a type of social Darwinism. It also may be productive to contrast this piece with Heidegger’s account of labor and the hand, or used to draw out the role of the body itself in other Marxist philosophers. 

-John and Rose