The long awaited Primitive Communism thread…

[Young Master Smeet]

Marx wrote:

In preceding forms of society this economic mystification arose principally with respect to money and interest-bearing capital. In the nature of things it is excluded, in the first place, where production for the use-value, for immediate personal requirements, predominates; and, secondly, where slavery or serfdom form the broad foundation of social production, as in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. Here, the domination of the producers by the conditions of production is concealed by the relations of dominion and servitude, which appear and are evident as the direct motive power of the process of production. In early communal societies in which primitive communism prevailed, and even in the ancient communal towns, it was this communal society itself with its conditions which appeared as the basis of production, and its reproduction appeared as its ultimate purpose. Even in the medieval guild system neither capital nor labour appear untrammelled, but their relations are rather defined by the corporate rules, and by the same associated relations, and corresponding conceptions of professional duty, craftsmanship, etc. Only when the capitalist mode of production — [The manuscript breaks off here — Ed.]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm

Engels wrote:

I would first limit them historically by explicitly restricting them to the economic phase in which alone value has up to now been known, and could only have been known, namely, the forms of society in which commodity exchange, or commodity production, exists; in primitive communism value was unknown. And secondly it seems to me that the concept could also be defined in a narrower sense. But this would lead too far, in the main you are quite right.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_11.htm

Engels wrote:

The mark association, grown out of primitive communism, prevailed in the countryside. Each peasant originally had an equal hide, with equal pieces of land of each quality, and a corresponding, equal share in the rights of the mark.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm

Marx wrote:

The original unity between the worker and the conditions of production <abstracting from slavery, where the labourer himself belongs to the objective conditions of production> has two main forms: the Asiatic communal system (primitive communism) and small-scale agriculture based on the family (and linked  domestic industry) in one form or another.  Both are embryonic forms and both are equally unfitted to develop labour as social labour and the productive power of social labour.  Hence the necessity for the separation, for the rupture, for the antithesis of labour and property (by which property in the conditions of production is to be understood).  The most extreme form of this rupture, and the one in which the productive forces of social labour are also most powerfully developed, is capital.  The original unity can be reestablished only on the material foundation which capital creates and by means of the revolutions which, in the process of this creation, the working class and the whole society undergo.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch24.htm

Engels wrote:

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

I think the last two are most interesting and telling. Anyway, this is by way of starting a dedicated thread to this topic…

[ALB]

This article by the late John Crump that appeared in an international journal our movement brought out in 1969 is of relevance. It provoked a strong response from our US party which wanted to stick closely to Lewis Henry Morgan's account.Primitive communismMost workers are anti-socialist. They react with distrust or disbelief to the idea of a world community where the means of production will be democratically controlled because they are socially owned. So, in order to break the paralysing grip which capitalism has on working-class consciousness, socialists must be able to demonstrate that Socialism is both an efficient and highly practicable alternative to the capitalist method of organising society. We must be able to offer convincing proof from capitalism itself and also from previous social orders that it is quite within man's powers to run a system based on voluntary work and the free distribution of whatever people need and want.In order to do this the world socialist parties have traditionally leaned heavily on the concept of 'primitive communism' as it was expounded in Engels's The Origin of The Family, Private Property and the State and Morgan's Ancient Society. But if their proposals are to be taken seriously by informed workers, socialists must continually be assimilating the new information which science throws up—even if this entails overhauling comfortable and familiar arguments. Socialists cannot afford not to be constantly re-examining their arguments and sharpening their ideas. Hence this reappraisal of 'primitive communism'.In The Origin of the Family Engels outlined a primitive society ("the lower stage of barbarism") where individual ownership was confined to personal items such as tools and weapons.“Each owned the tools he or she made and used: the men, the weapons and the hunting and fishing tackle, the women, the household goods and utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many families. Whatever was produced and used in common was common property: the house, the garden, the long boat.“ (1)The evolution of this universal tribal communism towards systems based on private property was linked with the gradual refinement of primitive economies based on hunting and food gathering into agricultural and pastoral societies which permitted greater wealth accumulation. Parallel to this development went another, suggested Engels: the "world-historic defeat of the female sex" (2). In the earliest societies there had been a state of 'promiscuous intercourse'—"so that every woman belonged equally to every man and, similarly, every man to every woman"(3). The pairing family was only reached via a number of intermediary stages (the 'consanguine family' and 'punaluan family') and subsequently itself evolved from a matrilineal institution into a patrilineal one.“Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his children.The reckoning of descent through the female line and the right of inheritance through the mother were hereby overthrown and male lineage and right of inheritance from the father instituted.” (4)As early as the 1890s some scientific workers cast doubts on a number of these hypotheses (5) but the deficiencies in Morgan's theories only really started to be exposed some time later. Field-workers like Malinowski living among primitive peoples such as the Trobriand Islanders unearthed a great mass of detailed information which could not be fitted into the evolutionary patterns suggested by Morgan and Engels.In particular it was shown that many primitive societies diverged considerably from the property norms to which they were supposed to conform. Even among the North American Indians whom Morgan had studied closely this was the case, although it varied a great deal from tribe to tribe. For example, although the Shoshones owned the land and its resources communally, this principle did not extend to eagles' nests which were owned by individuals (6) On the other hand, among tribes like the Algonquins and others on the East Coast there were individual and family holdings of tracts of hunting and fishing land. (7) The Vedda of Ceylon were another primitive hunting people who held their hunting territory family by family. As Lowie has put it: "A man would not hunt even on his brother's land without permission ; and if game ran into an alien region the owner of the soil was entitled to a portion of its flesh." ( Among certain tribes it was even possible to combine attitudes of individual and common ownership towards the same objects. Thus among Arctic peoples, such as the Chuchki, if a whale drifted ashore the meat was shared out among the whole tribe, but the whalebone belonged exclusively to whoever made the first sighting. (9)Pastoral societiesEven more significant than these random examples was the fact that common ownership of the land was not restricted merely to those hunting tribes who were the most primitive, with individual ownership appearing among peoples at a higher economic level. For although the Plains Indians, the Californian Maidu, and the Thompson River Indians were all hunters and all held the land on a tribal basis, pastoral societies such as those of the Masai, Toda, and Hottentot did exactly the same. Other hunting tribes such as the Algonquins and Vedda whom we have already referred to, as well as the Kariera of Australia and various Queensland groups, were certainly more backward than the Masai and Hottentot—and yet broke up the tribal territory into holdings owned exclusively by individuals or small units (10). Basing themselves on evidence such as this, then, most 20th-century anthropologists have written off "such fantastic evolutionary schemes as those of Morgan, Bachofen, or Engels . . .", (11) even though they go too far in rejecting the whole concept of social evolution.But, if the blanket concept of 'primitive communism' existing always and everywhere at sufficiently low cultural levels has been severely weakened, this is nothing compared to the battering which Engels's theories on the family have taken. It is true that most relatively advanced peoples —such as the classical Romans and Chinese, and the pastoral tribes of eastern and southern Africa—live in patrilinear societies, while many more backward peoples (e.g. the Malayan and Indonesian aborigines, and certain American and Australian tribes) are matrilinear (12). But as soon as we start to look any closer than this, the evolutionary theory falls apart. In Australia, for example, there is no evidence at all that matrilineal peoples like the Dieri have a less highly developed culture than the patrilineal tribes such as the Arunta. On the contrary, in North America the tribes with mother sibs have been found to be at a generally higher level than those showing father sibs (13). A typical case are the Navajo of northern Arizona. When sheep were introduced into the southwest of the United States in the 17th century the Navajo became a relatively prosperous pastoral people. Yet "in spite of their thriving flocks, tended by the men, they have remained obstinately matrilineal"(14). So, if we are to be scientific, we must generally accept the verdict of researchers such as Claude Levi-Strauss:“The facts support no reconstruction tending, for example, to assert the historical priority of matrilineal over patrilineal institutions. All that can be said is that fragments of earlierhistorical stages are bound to exist and are found. While it is possible and even likely that the instability inherent in matrilineal institutions often leads to their transformation into patrilineal or bilateral institutions, it can by no means be concluded that, always and everywhere, matrilineal descent represents the primitive form.” (15)None of this should suggest, however, that the work of Morgan on this subject is completely without value today. In fact, what needs to be stressed is that it is those parts of his theories which are most peripheral to the socialist case which have been disproved. The rock bottom of his and Engels's arguments—that for thousands of years over vast areas large groups of men did live communally on a basis of voluntary work and free distribution—has been repeatedly confirmed by subsequent research. In fact, much of the data produced by modern anthropology reinforces this conclusion even more effectively than was possible in the 19th century. Thus Martin Fried has shown that leadership is superfluous with the sort of democratic organisation found in many primitive societies:“There are many societies in which leadership, the organised application of power to concrete situations, is so diffuse as to approach non-existence. The Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert exemplify this. Even hunting parties, the most crucial form of organisation among the Kung, frequently lack formal leadership. As Lorna Marshall says, ‘Often an informal leadership develops out of skill and judgment and the men fall in with the plans and suggestions of the best hunter or reach agreement among themselves somehow.’ In such a situation the forceful compulsion implicit in power is lacking; in its stead is consensus based on authority in the sense of favourable reputation.” (16)and Solomon Asch has indicated the extent to which social solidarity can assert itself in a society without class conflicts :“[Among the Hopi Indians] all individuals must be treated alike; no one must be superior and no one must be inferior. The person who is praised or who praises himself is automatically subject to resentment and to criticism. . . . Most Hopi men refuse to be foremen. . . . The play behaviour of children is equally instructive in this respect. From the same source I learned that the children, young and old, are never interested in keeping score during a game. They will play basket-ball by the hour without knowing who is winning or losing. They continue simply because they delight in the game itself. . . ." (17)Socialists, then, have no need to cling to chapter and verse of The Origin of the Family or to attempt to defend its schematism. In no way do we weaken our arguments by jettisoning theories concerned with the priority of mother-right and so on. Rather, we can afford to be confident —since capitalism is digging the ground from under its feet when it is forced to sponsor scientific research into fields such as anthropology. The mountain of evidence is growing daily that it is the capitalist system itself (and nothing in 'human nature') whichprevents men from living as brothers. Thanks to capitalism, socialists have all the ammunition they need!J.C.(Socialist Party of Great Britain).REFERENCES(1) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Moscow, n.d. p. 261.(2) Ibid. p. 92.(3) Ibid. p. 48. The evidence now points to such a state being only a myth.(4) Ibid. pp. 90, 91.(5) Structural Anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss. London, 1968. pp. 32, 51.(6) Man in the Primitive World. Hoebel.1958. p. 435.(7) Ibid. pp. 436-7.( Primitive Society. Lowie. London, 1960. p. 204.(9) Ibid. p. 200.(10) Human Society. Kingsley Davis. New York, 1967. p. 458.(11) A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Malinowski. 1944. p. 176.(12) An Introduction to Social Anthropology. Mair. London, 1968. p. 65.(13) Primitive Society, p. 171.(14) Ibid. p. 159.(15) Structural Athropology. p. 7.(16) Anthropology and the Study of Politics by Martin H. Fried in Horizons of Anthropology. Tax. 1965. p. 182.(17) Marxist Economic Theory. Mandel. London, 1968. pp. 31-32.(World Socialism 69) 

[Young Master Smeet]

Going, roughly by the quotes I mined up, it wouild seem that primitive communism = pre-commodity society: so we're not looking at any specific model of organisation, but a retrospective relationship between commodity relations and non-commodity relations.  So, it actually would encompass many different forms of organisation identified by later anthropologists.

[ALB]

Actually, the doctrine that humanity originally lived under communistic conditions is not specifically Marxist. If anything, it came from the Christian doctrine that "God gave the world to men in common". John Locke, the theorist of the English "Glorious" bourgeois revolution of 1688, had to devote a whole chapter  of his Two Treatises on Government (the one "Of Property") to trying to explain away how, if this was the case, private property could be justified. He begins the chapter:

Quote:

Whether we consider natural reason, which tells us that men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink and such other things as Nature affords for their subsistence, or "revelation," which gives us an account of those grants God made of the world to Adam, and to Noah and his sons, it is very clear that God, as King David says (Psalm 115:16), "has given the earth to the children of men," given it to mankind in common. But, this being supposed, it seems to some a very great difficulty how any one should ever come to have a property in anything,

I think that the terms "primitive communism" is sometimes referred to in German as "Urcommunismus" (I don't know if Engels did so) which could also be translated as "original communism", i.e. that communism was the original condition of humanity.Of course, whether or not early humans did live under communistic conditions is a matter for empirical research and reasoning based on it, not a matter of theological doctrine. But it as well to be aware of the ideological baggage that comes with the term "primitive communism".

[ALB]

Just checked and the term Marx uses in that last chapter of Volume III of Capital in the first quote and translated as "primitive communism" is naturwüchsiger Kommunismus which would seem to be better translated  "natural communism" or "nature communism". Any German-speakers out there?

[Ed]

google translate says quasi-natural communism.

[ALB]

I bought another copy of James Connolly's Socialism Made Easy yesterday (as it's not often that you see an "impossibilist" pamphlet for sale on a Trotskyist literature stand). It first appeared in 1909 but some of it had been written earlier. It dates from a period when he was still recognisably an "impossibilist" and before he became a Labourite reformist and Irish nationalist. I've just re-read it and it expresses a view that would have been typical of (Marxian) socialists of the time which we have inherited too:

Quote:

As we are now aware, common ownership of land was at one time the basis of society all over the world. Our fathers not only owned the land in common, but it many ways practised a common ownership of the things produced. In short, tribal communism was at one time the universally existent order. In such a state of society there existed a degree of freedom that no succeeding order has been able to parallel, and that none will be able to, until the individualistic order of today gives way to the Indistrial Commonwealth, the Workers' Republic, of the future.

[alanjjohnstone]

Mention of Connolly drew my attention to thse posts on our Socialist Courier blog.http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/05/celtic-communism-gaelic-commonwealth.htmlhttp://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/05/scottish-common-ownership.htmlhttp://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/04/scottish-commons.htmlhttp://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/05/crofters-wars.htmlhttp://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/04/scots-land.htmlhttp://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/04/robber-barons.html“Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable – the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter – is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors – clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it came to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), Advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History – Scotch Legal Antiquities  

[ALB]

Interesting and relevant news item on the BBC yesterday:

Quote:

Researchers from Abo Academy University in Finland say that violence in early human communities was driven by personal conflicts rather than large-scale battles.They say their findings suggest that war is not an innate part of human nature, but rather a behaviour that we have adopted more recently.

Full story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23340252

[Hud955]

Interesting new study featured in the Scientific American, though the findings are hardly new, as is claimed. They corroborate findings about band hunter gatherers that have been well-established for decades.Unfortunately, extrapolating the findings directly to our pre-property ancestral societies isn't as straightforward as the article suggests. We have no way of knowing if modern band hunter gatherers reflect  the social realities of so-called 'nomadic' hunter gatherers in the palaeolithic past.  Currently though, information from modern band hunter gatherer societies (foragers as they are now often known) is being used to establish hypotheses which can then be tested out against the archaeological  record.   Some of the conclusions that the journo and the authors draw, or to be fair, hint at, are based on a very crude theoretical model than any historical materialist could easily challenge. (They sound highly ideological in any case.  Social anthropology has never been known for its methodological or theoretical rigour.)It's good to have further empirical evidence though. it's also good to see a challenge to people like Pinker in the popular scientific press. (Pinker has already been forced to admit that he had included horticulturalists in his calculations in 'The Better Angels of our Nature.)http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/07/18/new-study-of-foragers-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/

[ALB]

Why look a gift-horse in the mouth?

[Hud955]

Here's the Independent's take on the research.  It's a rather more muddled account than that of the New Scientist, but it gets the same message across.  The paper gives Jared Diamond the right to reply, and typically, he gives a fudged response, quoting the warlike nature of the Dani people of Papua New Guinea.  Many tribal groupings in New Guinea like the Dani and the Tufi are or were warlike (colonisers often managed to suppress inter-tribal conflicts).  But the Dani are 'tribal' people, and despite the Independent article, tribal people were not the subject of this research.   Nor are tribal peoples thought to be representative of our ancestral societies.  Like most 'tribal' societies, and unlike the band hunter gatherers, the Dani have develped social stratification, an elementary form of property and in this case 'barter' arrangements.   Also unlike band hunter gatherers, but like many tribal peoples, the Dani are definitely warlike.Conflicts of the kind that fall under the author's definition of 'war' do exist in band hunter gatherer societies, but they are rare and they are often found (suggestively) among  band  hunter gatherer peoples who live in close proximity to warring tribal societies or chiefdoms (or have had a long history of colonial contact with slave traders).  Band hunter gatherers have no permanent social stratifcation and no systems of social authority, so one reason among many why warlike or raiding activity does not much occur among them is that it is extremely difficult to organise a war party by consensus.  And on the rare occasion that they do set out to meet their 'enemy' the whole enterprise tends to fall apart rapidly with many of the participants returning home before conflict begins. Among several groups studied, 'sore feet' and 'tummy ache' were reportedly the main reasons given for dropping out of these activities. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-natural-for-humans-to-make-war-new-study-of-tribal-societies-reveals-conflict-is-an-alien-concept-8718069.html?origin=internalSearch

[DJP]

According to people such as Marshall Sahlins, in his book Man the Hunter, people in hunter gatherer societies worked a lot less than do people in modern society.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#.22Work_time.22_and_.22leisure_time.22Wondered if anyone one here has come across anything to counter or bolster this claim?May use it in passing in my talk on Saturday.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/robot-stole-my-job-employment-automation-and-profit-norwich-200pm

[Ed]

I've come across it before but no idea where. It's because we have to produce a surplus and they didn't. just to fluff out this very short post here's another take on the researchhttp://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/07/18/new-study-of-foragers-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/Which claims that war is a 'cultural' construct rather than a material by-product of competing for resources. Apparently anyone who thinks different is a malthusian . Anyway it doesn't seem to grasp the fact that these tribes had new lands to move into whereas for agricultural societies that was a lot harder if not impossible in most cases.

[Hud955]

Be careful about this one DJP.  The Man the Hunter conference was seminal in changing the attitudes of anthropologists, and to some extent the public, towards hunter gatherers.  Sahlins's labour calculations showed that the average hunter gatherer band, rather than living a life that was  'nasty, brutish and short'  in fact lived in a state of 'original affluence.'   Members of these bands spend approximately only four hours a day providing for their needs and spend the rest of their time eating, drinking, socialising engaging in collective activities and playing with the kids.  That is, according to Sahlins.The excitement generated by this claim led to a lot more focused research, which showed (as these things often do) that it wasn't quite accurate.  For a start, Sahlins used a relatively small sample of hunter gatherer groups to achieve his results and he focused entirely on their hunting and gathering activities.  He didn't include, for example, the time taken to make weapons or clothes, prepare food, make or strike camp, and so on.  Subsequent research (depending on the source) estimates that band hunter gatherers spend on average,  7-9 hours a day working.  And this is an average.  In reality, much depends on the environment in which hunter gatherers live and on the seasonality of their food supply.  Some are well fed, others often go hungry at certain times of the year. Sahlins has himself also admitted that, to change people's attitudes, he chose to express his theory in highly polemical terms and used the phrase 'original affluence' for its dramatic effect.Nevertheles, there remains a kernal of truth in what he says, and his claim appears to be literally true for some (a few) hunter gatherer bands.  The most important thing to remember here, I think, is that the social and ecological circumstances of modern hunter gatherers differ widely from one another.   The reality of their social existence is always nuanced and you need to be careful about making universalising or unhedged claims. It is hard to research anthropological evidence since the popular books are extremely untrustworthy and the academic literature is often dense and confusing.  Worse, social anthropologists have never been known for the precision of their research and are often swept along by the latest fashionable academic -ism (currently 'postmodernism') .   Much anthroplogical evidence and its interpretation is also highly contested even among anthropologists themselves.  But there are a number of synoptic accounts that I found helpful, particularly the early chapters of Kelly's The Foraging Spectrum which deals with Sahlins's claim in the course of giving a brief history of the subject.Richard B Lee is also an interesting anthropologist and author.  He's a (vulgar) Marxist.  His arguments are crude from a socialist perspective, but at least he's on something of the same wavelength.  He has championed the historical reality of  'primitive communism' in the anthropological world.

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