Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation. The idea has been criticised by anthropologists as too ethnocentrically European a model to be applied to other societies, whilst also romanticising non-European societies. Anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other "primitive societies" and provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property.
Development of the idea
The original idea of primitive communism is rooted in the idea of the noble savage present in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the early anthropological work of Morgan and Ely S. Parker. Engels was the first to write about primitive communism in detail, with the 1884 publication of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels categorised primitive communist societies into two phases: the "wild" (hunter-gatherer) phase that lacked permanent superstructure and had close relationships with the natural world, and the "barbarian" phase which held a superstructure like that of the ancient Germanic populations beyond the borders of the Roman Empire and the Indigenous peoples of North America before colonisation by Europeans, being intra-communally egalitarian and matrilineal within the community. Marx and Engels used the term more broadly than Marxists did later, and applied it not only to hunter-gatherers but also to some communities that engaged in subsistence agriculture. There is also no agreement among later scholars, including Marxists, on the historical extent, or longevity, of primitive communism. Marx and Engels also noted how capitalist accumulation latched itself onto social organizations of primitive communism. For instance, in private correspondence the same year that The Origin of the Family was published, Engels attacked European colonialism, describing the Dutch regime in Java directly organizing agricultural production and profiting from it, "on the basis of the old communistic village communities". He added that cases like the Dutch East Indies, British India and the Russian Empire showed "how today primitive communism furnishes ... the finest and broadest basis of exploitation". Anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, believed that societies that exemplified primitive communism were also examples of anarchist society before industrialisation. An example of this is Kropotkin's anthropological work on anarchism and gift economies, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which uses a study of the San people of southern Africa for its thesis. There was little development in the research of "primitive communism" among Marxist scholars beyond Engels' study until the 20th and 21st centuries when Ernest Mandel, Rosa Luxemburg, Ian Hodder, Marija Gimbutas and others took up and developed upon the original theses. Some non-Marxist scholars of prehistory and early history did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally engaged with and often dismissed. The term primitive communism first appeared in Russian scholarship in the late 19th century, with references to primitive communism existing in ancient Crete. However, it was not researched in any depth until the 20th century, with work such as that of the ethnographer Dmitry Konstantinovich Zelenin, who looked at non-hunter-gatherer societies within the Soviet Union to identify remnants of primitive communism within their societies.
The belief of primitive communism as based on Morgan's work is inaccurate due to Morgan's misunderstandings of Haudenosaunee society and his since-disproven theory of social evolution. Subsequent and more accurate research has focused on hunter-gatherer societies and aspects of such societies in relation to land ownership, communal ownership, and criminality and justice. A newer definition of primitive communism could be summarized as societies that practice economic cooperation among the members of their community, where almost every member of a community has their own contribution to society and land and natural resources are often shared peacefully among the community. From the 20th century onward, sociologists and archaeologists have looked at the application of the term of primitive communism to hunter-gatherer societies of the Paleolithic through to horticultural societies of the Chalcolithic, including Paleo-American societies from the lithic stage through the archaic period. Soviet archaeologists, influenced by Morgan's and Engels' works, interpreted the various Paleolithic cultures that created Venus figures, many of which were found in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, as evidence of the societies being primitive communist and matriarchal in nature. The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich concluded in 1931 the existence of an early communism from the information in Bronisław Malinowski's work. However, Malinowski and the philosopher Erich Fromm did not consider this conclusion to be compelling. Ernest Borneman supported Reich's ideas in his 1975 work Das Patriarchat.
Primitive communist societies
Characteristics
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