Primitive Communism, Barbarism, and the Origins of Class Society

[Brosa Luxemburg]

http://libcom.org/history/primitive-communism-barbarism-origins-class-society-lionel-sims

Thought this was very interesting, and was wondering what others thought of this.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

bump

[Jimmie Higgins]

I thought it was an interesting read and the criticisms of Engels - some I've read elsewhere - were convincing in regards to some muddiness regarding the role of production in pre-history. I was less convinced of the matriarchy argument though - I thought the part about how a sexual division of labor regarding hunting probably didn't have the effect of "removing women from production" was strong, but trying to sketch out how this society might have functioned so specifically was hard to swallow without any sort of reference to the sort of archeological findings or data led to this argument. I think there was probably a lot of diversity and variation among groups and among regions for the thousands and thousands of years of primitive communism and so speculation on rituals or how these kinds of developments may have played out was a bit of a streach for me.