Page 156 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

133 Historical Materialism

produce and 4ow they produce” *—can be understood, according
to the first of the Theses on Feuerbach, in the sense of an epis-
temologically oriented pragmatism, that is, as a critique of a
phenomenalism of any sort, empiricist or rationalist, which under-
stands the knowing subject as a passive, self-contained conscious-
ness. The same statement has materialist connotations as well; it
is directed equally against theoretical and practical idealism, which
assert the primacy of the spirit over nature and that of the idea
over the interest. Or consider the statement: “But the essence
of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual. In
its actuality it is the ensemble of social relationships.” * Here
Marx, schooled in the Hegelian concept of objective spirit, de-
clares war on the methodological individualism of the bourgeois
social sciences and on the practical individualism of English and
French moral philosophy; both set forth the acting subject as an
isolated monad.
In the present context we are naturally interested in the ques-
tion, whether the concept of social labor adequately characterizes
the form of reproduction of human life. Thus we must specify
more exactly what we wish to understand by “human mode of
life.” In the last generation anthropology has gained new knowl-
edge about the Jong (more than four million years) phase during
which the development from primates to humans, that is, the
process of hominization, took place; beginning with a postulated
common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, the evolution
proceeded through homo erectus to homo sapiens. This hominiza-
tion was determined by the cooperation of organic and cultural
mechanisms of development. On the one hand, during this period
of anthropogenesis, there were changes—based on a long series
of mutations—in the size of the brain and in important mor-
phological features. On the other hand, the environments from
which the pressure for selection proceeded were no longer de-
termined solely by natural ecology, but through the active, adap-
tive accomplishments of hunting bands of hominids. Only at the
threshold to homo sapiens did this mixed organic-cultural form of
evolution give way to an exclusively soczal evolution. The natural
mechanism of evolution came to a standstill. No new species
arose. Instead, the exogamy that was the basis for the societization