Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. 
And it really is the source—next to nature, which supplies it with 
the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely 
more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human 
existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to 
say that labour created man himself. 

Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not 
yet definitely determinable, of that period of the earth’s history 
known to geologists as the Tertiary period, most likely towards the 
end of it, a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes 
lived somewhere in the tropical zone—probably on a great 
continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.?” 
Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors 
of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards 
and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees.* 

First, owing to their way of living which meant that the hands 
had different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes 
began to lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a 
more and more erect posture. This was the decisive step in the 
transition from ape to man. 

All extant anthropoid apes can stand erect and move about on 
their feet alone, but only in case of urgent need and in a very 
clumsy way. Their natural gait is in a half-erect posture and 
includes the use of the hands. The majority rest the knuckles of 
the fist on the ground and, with legs drawn up, swing the body 

through their long arms, much as a cripple moves on crutches. In 
general, all the transition stages from walking on all fours to 
walking on two legs are still to be observed among the apes today. 
The latter gait, however, has never become more than a makeshift 
for any of them. 

It stands to reason that if erect gait among our hairy ancestors 
became first the rule and then, in time, a necessity, other diverse 
functions must, in the meantime, have devolved upon the hands. 
Already among the apes there is some difference in the way the 
hands and the feet are employed. In climbing, as mentioned 
above, the hands and feet have different uses. The hands are used 
mainly for gathering and holding food in the same way as the fore 
paws of the lower mammals are used. Many apes use their hands 
to build themselves nests in the trees or even to construct roofs 
between the branches to protect themselves against the weather, as 
the chimpanzee, for example, does. With their hands they grasp 
sticks to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard their 
enemies with fruits and stones. In captivity they use their hands 
for a number of simple operations copied from human beings. It 
is in this that one sees the great gulf between the undeveloped 
hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that 
has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of 
labour. The number and general arrangement of the bones and 
muscles are the same in both hands, but the hand of the lowest 
savage can perform hundreds of operations that no simian hand 
can imitate—no simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest 
stone knife. 

The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned 
to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of 
transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. 
The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more 
animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration 
can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional 
beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by 
human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison 
with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. 
But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and 
could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater 
flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from genera- 
tion to generation. 

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the 
product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new 
operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, 

over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special 
development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited 
finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given 
the human hand the high degree of perfection required to 
conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a 
Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini. 

But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an 
integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, 
benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways. 

In the first place, the body benefited from the law of correlation 
of growth, as Darwin called it. This law states that the specialised 
forms of separate parts of an organic being are always bound up 
with certain forms of other parts that apparently have no 
connection with them.* Thus all animals that have red blood cells 
without cell nuclei, and in which the head is attached to the first 
vertebra by means of a double articulatiof: (condyles), also without 
exception possess lacteal glands for suckling their young. Similarly, 
cloven hoofs in mammals are regularly associated with the 
possession of a multiple stomach for rumination. Changes in 
certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the 
body, although we cannot explain the connection. Perfectly white 
cats with blue eyes are always, or almost always, deaf. The 
gradually increasing perfection of the human hand, and the 
commensurate adaptation of the feet for erect gait, have 
undoubtedly, by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts 
of the organism. However, this action has not as yet been 
sufficiently investigated for us to be able to do more here than to 
state the fact in general terms. 

Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of 
the development of the hand on the rest of the organism. It has 
already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is 
obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social 
of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors. Mastery 
over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, 
and widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was 
continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in 
natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour 
necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together 
by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by 
making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. 

In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had 
something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the 
undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed 
by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, 
and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one 
articulate sound after another. 

Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the 
origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only 
correct one. The little that even the most highly-developed animals 
need to communicate to each other does not require articulate 
speech. In its natural state, no animal feels handicapped by its 
inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite 
different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, 
by association with man, have developed such a good ear for 
articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language 
within their range of concept. Moreover they have acquired the 
capacity for feelings such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., 
which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had 
much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the 
conviction that in many cases they now feel their inability to speak 
as a defect, although, unfortunately, it is one that can no longer be 
remedied because their vocal organs are too specialised in a 
definite direction. However, where vocal organs exist, within 
certain limits even this inability disappears. The buccal organs of 
birds are as different from those of man as they can be, yet birds 
are the only animals that can learn to speak; and it is the bird with 
the most hideous voice, the parrot, that speaks best of all. Let no 
one object that the parrot does not understand what it says. It is 
true that for the sheer pleasure of talking and associating with 
human beings, the parrot will chatter for hours at a stretch, 
continually repeating its whole vocabulary. But within the limits of 
its range of concepts it can also learn to understand what it is 
saying. Teach a parrot swear words in such a way that it gets an 
idea of their meaning (one of the great amusements of sailors 
returning from the tropics); tease it and you will soon discover 
that it knows how to use its swear words just as correctly as a 
Berlin costermonger. The same is true of begging for titbits. 

First labour, after it and then with it speech—these were the 
two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain 
of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its 
similarity is far larger and more perfect. Hand in hand with the 
development of the brain went the development of its most 
immediate instruments—the senses. Just as the gradual develop- 

ment of speech is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding 
refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the 
brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of all the senses. 
The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye 
discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the 
eagle. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it 
does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man 
are definite signs denoting different things. And the sense of 
touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, 
has been developed only side by side with the development of the 
human hand itself, through the medium of labour. 

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the 
brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of 
consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both 
labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further develop- 
ment. This development did not reach its conclusion when man 
finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made 
further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among 
different peoples and at different times, and here and there even 
being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further 
development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, 
and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new 
element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged 
man, namely, socvety. 

Hundreds of thousands of years—of no greater significance in 
the history of the earth than one second in the life of 
man *—certainly elapsed before human society arose out of a 
troupe of tree-climbing monkeys. Yet it did finally appear. And 
what do we find once more as the characteristic difference 
between the troupe of monkeys and human society? Labour. The 
ape herd was satisfied to browse over the feeding area determined 
for it by geographical conditions or the resistance of neighbouring 
herds; it undertook migrations and struggles to win new feeding 
grounds, but it was incapable of extracting from them more than 
they offered in their natural state, except that it unconsciously 
fertilised the soil with its own excrement. As soon as all possible 

* A leading authority in this respect, Sir William Thomson, has calculated that 
little more than a hundred million years could have elapsed since the time when the 
earth had cooled sufficiently for plants and animals to be able to live on it. 

In: Nature, Vol. XIV, No. 359, September 14, 1876, pp. 427-31.— Ed. 

feeding grounds were occupied, there could be no further 
increase in the ape population; the number of animals could at 
best remain stationary. But all animals waste a great deal of food, 
and, in addition, destroy in the germ the next generation of the 
food supply. Unlike the hunter, the wolf does not spare the doe 
which would provide it with the young the next year; the goats in 
Greece, that eat away the young bushes before they grow to 
maturity, have eaten bare all the mountains of the country. This 
“predatory economy” of animals plays an important part in the 
gradual transformation of species by forcing them to adapt 
themselves to other than the usual food, thanks to which their 
blood acquires a different chemical composition and the whole 
physical constitution gradually alters, while species that have 
remained unadapted die out. There is no doubt that this 
predatory economy contributed powerfully to the transition of our 
ancestors from ape to man. In a race of apes that far surpassed all 
others in intelligence and adaptability, this predatory economy 
must have led to a continual increase in the number of plants used 
for food and the consumption of more and more edible parts of 
food plants. In short, food became more and more varied, as did 
also the substances entering the body with it, substances that were 
the chemical premises for the transition to man. But all that was 
not yet labour in the proper sense of the word. Labour begins 
with the making of tools. And what are the most ancient tools that 
we find—the most ancient judging by the heirlooms of prehistoric 
man that have been discovered, and by the mode of life of the 
earliest historical peoples and of the rawest of contemporary 
savages? They are hunting and fishing implements, the former at 
the same time serving aS weapons. But hunting and fishing 
presuppose the transition from an exclusively vegetable diet to the 
concomitant use of meat, and this is another important step in the 
process of transition from ape to man. A meat diet contained in an 
almost ready state the most essential ingredients required by the 
organism for its metabolism. By shortening the time required for 
digestion, it also shortened the other vegetative bodily processes 
that correspond to those of plant life, and thus gained further 
time, material and desire for the active manifestation of animal life 
proper. And the farther man in the making moved from the 
vegetable kingdom the higher he rose above the animal. Just as 
becoming accustomed to a vegetable diet side by side with meat 
converted wild cats and dogs into the servants of man, so also 
adaptation to a meat diet, side by side with a vegetable diet, 
greatly contributed towards giving bodily strength and indepen- 

dence to man in the making. The meat diet, however, had its 
greatest effect on the brain, which now received a far richer flow 
of the materials necessary for its nourishment and development, 
and which, therefore, could develop more rapidly and perfectly 
from generation to generation. With all due respect to the 
vegetarians man did not come into existence without a meat diet, 
and if the latter, among all peoples known to us, has led to 
cannibalism at some time or other (the forefathers of the 
Berliners, the Weletabians or Wilzians, used to eat their parents as 
late as the tenth century),””' that is of no consequence to us today. 

The meat diet led to two new advances of decisive importance — 
the harnessing of fire and the domestication of animals. The first 
still further shortened the digestive process, as it provided the 
mouth with food already, as it were, half-digested; the second 
made meat more copious by opening up a new, more regular 
source of supply in addition to hunting, and moreover provided, 
in milk and its products, a new article of food at least as valuable 
as meat in its composition. Thus both these advances were, in 
themselves, new means for the emancipation of man. It would 
lead us too far afield to dwell here in detail on their indirect 
effects notwithstanding the great importance they have had for 
the development of man and society. 

Just as man learned to consume everything edible, he also 
learned to live in any climate. He spread over the whole of the 
habitable world, being the only animal fully able to do so of its 
own accord. The other animals that have become accustomed to 
all climates—domestic animals and vermin—did not become so 
independently, but only in the wake of man. And the transition 
from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to 
colder regions, where the year was divided into summer and 
winter, created new requirements—shelter and clothing as protec- 
tion against cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new 
forms of activity, which further and further separated man from 
the animal. 

By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and 
brain, not only in each individual but also in society, men became 
capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and 
were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. 
The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect 
and more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle 
raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and 
navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally 
appeared. Tribes developed into nations and _ states. Law and 

politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human 
things in the human mind—religion. In the face of all these 
images, which appeared in the first place to be products of the 
mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more modest 
productions of the working hand retreated into the background, 
the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a 
very early stage in the development of society (for example, 
already in the primitive family), to have the labour that had been 
planned carried out by other hands than its own. All merit for the 
swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the 
development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to 
explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their 
needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); 
and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world 
outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, 
has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree 
that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian 
school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, 
because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the 
part that has been played therein by labour. 

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environ- 
ment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same 
extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn 
react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing 
takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every 
other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and 
interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented 
from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. We have seen 
how goats have prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece; 
on the island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first 
arrivals have succeeded in exterminating its old vegetation almost 
completely, and so have prepared the ground for the spreading of 
plants brought by later sailors and colonists. But animals exert a 
lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as 
the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further 
removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on 
nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action 
directed towards definite preconceived ends. The animal destroys 
the vegetation of a locality without realising what it is doing. Man 
destroys it in order to sow field crops on the soil thus released, or 
to plant trees or vines which he knows will yield many times the 
amount planted. He transfers useful plants and domestic animals 
from one country to another and thus changes the flora and fauna 

of whole continents. More than this. Through artificial breeding 
both plants and animals are so changed by the hand of man that 
they become unrecognisable. The wild plants from which our 
grain varieties originated are still being sought in vain. There is 
still some dispute about the wild animals from which our very 
different breeds of dogs or our equally numerous breeds of horses 
are descended.*” 

It goes without saying that it would not occur to us to dispute 
the ability of animals to act in a planned, premeditated fashion. 
On the contrary, a planned mode of action exists in embryo 
wherever protoplasm, living albumen, exists and reacts, that is, 
carries out definite, even if extremely simple, movements as a 
result of definite external stimuli. Such reaction takes place even 
where there is yet no cell at all, far less a nerve cell. There is 
something of the planned action in the way insect-eating plants 
capture their prey, although they do it quite unconsciously. In 
animals the capacity for conscious, planned action is proportional 
to the development of the nervous system, and among mammals it 
attains a fairly high level. While fox-hunting in England one can 
daily observe how unerringly the fox makes use of its excellent 
knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers, and how 
well it knows and turns to account all favourable features of the 
ground that cause the scent to be lost. Among our domestic 
animals, more highly developed thanks to association with man, 
one can constantly observe acts of cunning on exactly the same 
level as those of children. For, just as the development history of 
the human embryo in the mother’s womb is only an abbreviated 
repetition of the history, extending over millions of years, of the 
bodily development of our animal ancestors, starting from the 
worm, so the mental development of the human child is only a still 
more abbreviated repetition of the intellectual development of these 
same ancestors, at least of the later ones. But all the planned action of 
all animals has never succeeded in impressing the stamp of their will 
upon the earth. That was left for man. 

In short, 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.* 

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of 
our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature 

* Ennoblement. (Marginal note.] 

takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place 
brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third 
places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too 
often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, 
Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain 
cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the 
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were 
laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. 
When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the 
southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, 
they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots 
of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that 
they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for 
the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to 
pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy 
seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware 
that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time 
spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by 
no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, 
like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, 
blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that 
all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage 
over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply 
them correctly.* 

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better 
understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more 
immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference 
with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the 
mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present 
century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence 
to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least 
our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses 
the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with 
nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and 
unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and 
nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical 
antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in 
Christianity. 

It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a 
little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our 

actions in the field of production, but it has been still more 
difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these 
actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of 
scrofula. But what is scrofula compared to the effects which the 
reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the living 
conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or compared 
to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which 
consigned to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or 
almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas 
of two million more? When the Arabs learned to distil spirits, it 
never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one 
of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the 
then still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards 
Columbus discovered this America, he did not know that by doing 
so he was giving a new lease of life to slavery, which in Europe 
had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the 
Negro slave trade. The men who in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam-engine had no 
idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than 
any other was to revolutionise social relations throughout the 
world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands 
of a minority and dispossessing the huge majority, this instrument 
was destined at first to give social and political domination to the 
bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between 
bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow 
of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms.— But 
in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience and by 
collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually 
learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social 
effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an 
opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well. 

This regulation, however, requires something more than mere 
knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto 
existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in 
our whole contemporary social order. 

All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at 
achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of 
labour. The further consequences, which appear only later and 
become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, 
were totally neglected. The original common ownership of land 
corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of 
human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to 
what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other 

hand, a certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude 
for correcting the possible bad results of this primeval type of 
economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, common 
ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, 
led to the division of the population into different classes and 
thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes. Thus 
the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of 
production, since production was no longer restricted to providing 
the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has 
been put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of 
production prevailing today in Western Europe. The individual 
capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to 
concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of 
their actions. Indeed, even this useful. effect—inasmuch as it is a 
question of the usefulness of the article that is produced or 
exchanged—retreats far into the background, and the sole 
incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling. 

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, 
in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the 
fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This 
fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the 
theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in 
production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, 
only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into 
account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells 
a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted 
profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what 
afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The 
same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What 
cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on 
the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient 
fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee 
trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards 
washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving 
behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the 
present mode of production is predominantly concerned only 
about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is 
expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this 
end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in 

character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed 
into the very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten 
years’ industrial cycle—even Germany has had a little preliminary 
experience of it in the “crash”*”; that private ownership based on 
one’s own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation 
of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more 
concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that [...]?