Lecture
The biological prerequisite for social relations was the pack, in which every individual felt protected and received help from others. The factor that drove the transformation of the pack into a society was labor activity, that is, activity carried out by people in the joint making and use of tools.
Changes in living conditions and the worsening of the climate led to a reduction in the possibilities for satisfying primary needs. The ancestors of humans were forced either to die out or to qualitatively change their behavior and adapt to the new conditions in order to survive.
Primitive man found a way out through joint labor actions. Instinctive communication gradually gave way to communication based on "productive" activity. Joint activity and the mutual exchange of the products of that activity contributed to the transformation of the pack into a society.
The emergence of labor activity influenced the development of social relations (of a historical character), which, in turn, contributed to the improvement of labor activity. The development of the higher form of the human psyche — consciousness, characterized by the identification of objective stable properties of practical activity and the transformation of the surrounding environment — is connected with the increasing complexity of labor processes.
Gradually the tools that people make become more complex, and specialization occurs, with fixed operations becoming attached to them. It is precisely because of this that qualitative differences arise between the environment of humans and that of animals, which do not live in a world of permanent things.
The tools created by people serve as material carriers of the operations, actions, and activity of previous generations. Through tools, one generation passes on its experience to another in the form of operations, actions, and activity. As tools become more complex, their manufacture comes to involve the division of operations among many members of society simultaneously. Activity gradually becomes conscious and deliberate, since its ultimate goal — the satisfaction of the need for food — becomes increasingly remote, and only a person with developed logical thinking can understand this.
Thus, in changing nature, a person changes above all himself.
Under the influence of labor, a new function of the hand becomes fixed: it develops simultaneously both as a tool for grasping and as an organ of cognition of objective reality through active examination (touch), which provides knowledge of the essential properties of objects of the material world. That is, the hand is not only an organ of labor, but also its product.
As a consequence of the specialization of the hand as an organ of labor, its representation formed in the brain, which led to an increase in brain mass and changes in brain structure. Upright walking developed. These changes contributed to the rapid satisfaction of human needs and the emergence of new, material, specifically human needs.
Thus, labor determined the development of human society, the formation of human needs, and the development of human consciousness, which no longer merely reflects but also transforms the world. This, in turn, shaped the need for communication and speech. Language and consciousness are inseparable. Language expands the boundaries of consciousness. Thus, verbal communication, like labor, is an important factor in the development of consciousness and self-awareness of people.
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