This is labor and the evolution of human consciousness.

So now that we understand the evolution of all biological life as a dialectical and

materialist process, which in and of itself is a truly startling realization and a profound

insight in the nature of reality, it's time to turn to the evolution of our species in

particular.

Homo sapiens stand out in nature as a unique species, and it's worth exploring not only

how we got here biologically, but how we made the jump from clever apes in a state of nature

to an intelligent techno species capable of building a planetary civilization.

Here we run into another essential and largely underappreciated claim of

Marxist theory. Labor didn't just build society. Labor made us human. Labor is not simply the

source of wealth, as the economist would have it. It is, or some of them, it is the very foundation of our species. In his chapter titled,

The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, Angles argues that labor was the decisive

force that transformed a species of clever apes into human beings. And to be clear, he means this

literally, not metaphorically or symbolically,

but biologically, materially, historically, labor-created humanity. This transformation

began deep in prehistory, hundreds of thousands of years ago when a particularly

intelligent species of anthropoid apes, likely now extinct,

began spending more and more time moving upright.

This too, like everything in dialectics, was not a single aha evolutionary moment, but a process,

a process that unfolded gradually over thousands upon thousands of years and generations.

The liberations of the hands from local motion, liberating the hands from being tied to the

propelling of our ancestors forward, like most four-legged mammals, was a decisive development.

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