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1 9 Since human transformations of nature are based on understanding and intentions, human labour is not 'behaviour' but action. Human labour is also in several senses distinctively social involving not only an interaction between each individual and outer Nature, but also an interaction between people. In the more obvious sense, this is so because human individuals always produce with and for others besides themselves. However, taken in isolation this statement appears to be only contingently rather than necessarily true, and invites the response — surely it is at least possible, though admittedly extremely rare in practice, for individuals to produce purely for their own consumption?

From Criticism of Thought to Criticism of Society Although the implications of the interpenetration of subject and object might already seem complex, we have still not gone very far; we have yet to show how this interpenetration applies to our own subject-matter. That is, informal versions of conceptions of people and Nature are, like any other system of constitutive meanings, out there in society itself, and likewise the way in which epistemological positions inform the practice of science in society can often be discerned.

I) People as the Subjects or Agents of History I have argued against deterministic conceptions of people and Nature which do not acknowledge the nature of people as subjects or agents in history. Now in our own lives, we are rarely able to recognise ourselves as the conscious intentional producers of our own social relations and material conditions of existence in anything more than very limited ways. In the main, we have to submit to what already exists, despite the fact that on reflection we may realise that these conditions are socially produced.