THE ROLE of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell.

You know that the material for the history of primitive culture was furnished by archaeological data and by the reflections of ancient religious cults, while the elucidation and study of these survivals have been carried on under the influence of Christian philosophical dogma, to which even atheist historians have been no strangers. This influence may be clearly traced in Spencer’s theory of super-organic evolution, and not in his works alone, but also in those of Frazer and many others. But no historian of primitive and ancient culture has used the material of folklore, the unwritten compositions of the people, the testimony of mythology, which, taken as a whole, is a reflection in broad artistic generalizations of the phenomena of nature, of the struggle with nature and of social life.

It is very hard to conceive of a two-legged animal, who spent all his strength in the struggle for existence, thinking in abstraction from the processes of labour, from questions of clan and tribe. It is difficult to conceive an Immanuel Kant, barefoot and clothed in an animal’s skin, cogitating on the “thing-in-itself.” Abstract thought was indulged in by man at a later period, by that solitary man of whom Aristotle in his Politics said: “Man outside society is either a god, or a beast.” Being a beast, he sometimes compelled recognition as a god, but as a beast, he served as the material for the creation of numerous myths about beast-like men, just as the first men who learned to ride on horseback furnished the basis for the centaur myth.

The historians of primitive culture have completely waived the clear evidence of materialist thought, to which the processes of labour and the sum total of phenomena in the social life of ancient man inevitably gave rise. These evidences have come down to us in the shape of fables and myths in which we hear the echo of work done in the taming of animals, in the discovery of healing herbs, in the invention of implements of labour. Even in remote antiquity men dreamed of being able to fly in the air, as can be seen from the legend about Phaethon, about Daedalus and his son Icarus, and also from the fable of the “magic carpet.” Men dreamed of speedier movement over the earth – hence the fable of the “seven-league boots.” They learned to ride the horse. The desire to navigate rivers faster than the current led to the invention of the oar and the sall. The striving to kill enemy and beast from a distance prompted the invention of the sling, of the bow and arrow. Men conceived the possibility of spinning and weaving a vast amount of fabric in one night, of building overnight a good dwelling, even a “castle,” that is, a dwelling fortified against the enemy. They created the spinning wheel, one of the most ancient instruments of labour; they created the primitive hand loom, and also the legend of Vassllisa the Wise. It would be possible to produce many more proofs to show that all these ancient tales and myths contained a purpose, to show how far-sighted were the fanciful, hypothetical, but already technological thoughts of primitive man, which could rise to such hypotheses of our own day as that of using the force of the earth’s revolution around its own axis, or of breaking up the polar ice. All the myths and legends of ancient times find their consummation, as it were, in the Tantalus myth. Tantalus stands up to his neck in water, he is racked by thirst, but unable to allay it – there you have ancient man amid the phenomena of the outer world, which he has not yet learned to know.

This is from his, Soviet Literature, 1934. Find it here - http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1934/soviet-literature.htm . Read it all if you get the time, it is so good...)