What exactly is "primitive communism"?

[Trystan]

And did it ever actually exist? I know what John Zerzan talks about sounds communist, but I don't know where he gets this from.

What exactly is primitive communism?

What is the view of modern anthropology?

If it did exist, why doesn't it exist any more?

(Oh, and any book suggestions?)

Thanks.

[Pogue]

It will either refer to tribal soceities who arranged around a communal and hence communist social structure

or

A variation on Anarcho-Primitivism, the ideology which calls for a return to tribal societies to avoid the problems and exploitation associated with capitalism and insutrial society. They're against technology, etc.

[Revy]

Primitive communism refers to Stone Age era early human societies with no division of classes and an equally shared distribution of resources. It's called primitive to distinguish it from conceptions of modern communism. In these societies, food was the number one priority and all able bodied people would have participated, and everything was shared equally.

[Q]

Quoted from MIA (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#communism):

Primitive communism: The most ancient socio-economic formation of human society which existed until the emergence of class society.

Primitive human families were the center of their economic, religious and other activities, while symbiotic with the community as a whole. Primitive communism attained its peak of organizational development in the clan system, where productive relations were based on collective ownership of the means of production, while existing alongside of personal property (weapons, household articles, clothing, etc.).


In the old communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family [after primitive communism], and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production.

A Marxist class conception begins here — class was not yet in existence; this period of time is instead the opposite of what would become class society. When both have run their course, primitive and class society; humanity can build a society that includes aspects of both class society and primitive society, while at the same time superseding them both: this society is called communism.

No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits — and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened — and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today — the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households — yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy — the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free — the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to accept them into the confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they were driven from their territory.


But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests — base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth — inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means — theft, violence, fraud, treason — that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.

While aspects of Communist society can be compared to primitive communism, full Communism will only be achieved after class society has run its full course: through its inception (slave society), creation (feudalist society) and absolute dominance (capitalist society ), through to its gradual downfall (socialist society). At this point the motion of human history will have run the full course of this cycle, having come from primitive communism to the most divided class society.