BY GEORGE NOVACK  
Any inquiry into the essential nature of humanity is inseparable from the problem of the making of the human race. The socialist humanism of the Marxian school teaches that the essence of humanity is creative practice. This definition flows from its labor theory of human origins and development.

The practice of working for a living, of producing day in and day out the means of subsistence with tools and weapons, introduced the decisive difference between the prehuman and human. Our species has, quite literally, worked its way up to the human from the animal state and from there, step by step, has moved toward civilization.

The new function acquired by the primate set in motion the human capacity for creativity. Humankind thereupon became demarcated from other living beings by the ability to generate new phenomena by conscious, deliberated, premeditated action. From these and through these, humans have kept on producing new things, new needs, and new ways and means of satisfying wants without limit or end.

Our ancestors threw rocks and used slings to bring down small game and to fell enemies; our contemporaries make intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. The modern weapon is the latest in a line of ascent from the most primitive missile.

The intellectual capacities of our species have grown out of such productive—and destructive—social practices. The savage hunter knows the connection existing between the weapon he hurls and the satisfactory result. His skill is based on repeated and regular acts. Similarly, the fashioning of a standardized hand ax by detaching flakes from a large core demonstrates that a connection exists between the repetition of the proper blows and success in achieving the desired product. The type of observations involved over hundreds of thousands of years in such recurrent activities of production have given rise to theories of causal change, a subject so complex that philosophers and scientists are still trying to unravel its intricacies.

Humanity, then, is above all an innovator. It has been aptly described as “the restless creator.” The power of creativity has been the source of many religious, mystical, and idealistic theories about our nature. But there need no longer be anything mysterious about the genesis of this capacity. It has historical sources and material foundations that are being uncovered by the natural and social sciences and have been best clarified by the method of Marxism.

The Marxist interpretation of history explained that material production is the fundamental factor of social life and that the course of its development changes both external nature and the internal human being. In distinction from the animals, humans create the objective conditions that determine their evolution. The evolution of all other living organisms is determined for them by purely natural conditions. This is not the case with our species. The geographical environment, the climate, the fauna and flora, and other natural factors do not basically shape the socio-historical process. This role belongs to the productive forces that humans themselves fashion. While the natural factors enter as an indispensable and integral component of the productive forces, their decisive element is active, conscious, collective laboring humanity.

The first manifestation of humanity’s most fundamental trait took place at the beginning of its career. The most momentous creative act was the fashioning of itself as a distinctive species out of animal raw materials. This unconscious process gave birth to consciousness.

Our progenitors sparked the power of creative initiative by embarking on the function of producing the means of subsistence for themselves and their kin. The collective production of food led to the sharing of the provender. Cooperative labor and the apportionment of its output constituted the basis of the original group life and whatever emerged from its associated activities. The practice of workmanship led to the fabrication of tools. Communal living made possible the generation, then the domestication, of fire. Through such innovations humans came to shape more and more materials into useful objects, thus asserting their power against nature’s and counterposing their will to coercive external circumstances.  
 
 
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