The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 1 In his essay on the evolutionary process that led to Homo Sapiens , we saw how Friedrich Engels also links language to the chain of causes that, over hundreds of thousands of years, determined the evolution of the brain: upright posture, the hand, and labour . "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 ". Therefore: "First labour, after it and then with...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 1 In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature and in his unfinished essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man , Friedrich Engels outlined the evolutionary process that led from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens . The text stands out for the conceptual power of its materialist method, and from it we draw five fundamental concepts. First, for Engels, the brain is a product of labour . It is in the dialectical relationship of mutual action and reaction with labour – made possible by the articulation of the hand freed by man's upright posture, the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection – that the brain evolved to perform the most complex functions and develop self-awareness. In turn, labour is an expression of the social relations at the basis of specific socio-economic formations across successive modes of produ...