Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and
 Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates,
 and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes
 himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and
 legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate
 Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting
 on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his
 own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in
 obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive
 forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval
 of time separates the state of things in which 174a man brings
 his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in
 which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose
 labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts
 operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many
 an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the
 worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises
 his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end
 of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination
 of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form
 in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his
 own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate
 his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the
 exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole
 operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.
 This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the
 work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore,
 he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers,
 the more close his attention is forced to be.