Although "primitive communism" has never existed as more than a Marxist concept with no fieldwork, that could account for it, its pervasiveness has proven hard to contest. It's very important to note that Engels in his often quoted work "The origin of the family, private property and the state",⏬ - ThreadSky

magivanga.com • 37 days ago

Although "primitive communism" has never existed as more than a Marxist concept with no fieldwork, that could account for it, its pervasiveness has proven hard to contest. It's very important to note that Engels in his often quoted work "The origin of the family, private property and the state",⏬

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pengiep.bsky.social•37 days ago

Check out Peter Kropotkin’s political ideas. His book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread?wprov=sfti1 is a good source but I don’t think there exists a good English translation as it is a very tough slog indeed. You would be better off reading something like the cliff’s notes versions of his work.

magivanga.com•36 days ago

That’s an anarchist classic, isn’t. I know Kropotkin’s ideas. I just don’t understand why you’re recommending it here. Do you find it groundbreaking? It has nothing to do with study of hunter-gatherer societies.

magivanga.com•36 days ago

It’s good to add that Kropotkin despised hunter-gatherers. He called them savages and wrote about them as the lowest beings on earth. Screenshot provided.

pengiep.bsky.social•36 days ago

I don’t see how you get “despised savages” from that. He is says his people in his times can’t live like that and if anything he is criticizing them in the mistaken context and ideas that late 19th century people had about hunter gatherers. Context is everything, both literary and temporal.

magivanga.com•36 days ago

Were they savage?

magivanga.com•36 days ago

I’ll give you one thing. In the context of his works, especially „Mutual Aid”, he recognised virtues of „tribal solidarity”. But he was still ethnocentric, who thought highly of European civilisation and put it above everything else. He specifically uses term „lowest form of development” there.

alisoncook.bsky.social•36 days ago

Dear god

alisoncook.bsky.social•36 days ago

Daily repairing of the machine 👺👺👺

magivanga.com•36 days ago

I find his theory tedious. As much as he’d like to change the economic-social status quo through a revolutionary action, he remains deeply fortified in an in industrial paradigm of his era. He’s also absolutely anti-environmental, so his ideas are not acceptable from a climate-caring pov.

magivanga.com•37 days ago

published originally in 1884, never used the term itself, instead opting for "household communism" or "family communism". The concept was based on a work of an evolutionary anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, who actually did some fieldwork, so credit here is due. He also famously divided the ⏬

magivanga.com•37 days ago

evolution of human societies into three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. It was a real novelty back in the day, that heavily influenced Marx's and Engels's writings. Unfortunately, it survived among purist Marxists with other largely debunked deterministic concepts, who toss them ⏬

magivanga.com•37 days ago

around everywhere you look without giving any deeper thought to their contingency riding on the mindset and social circumstances of the epoch. But let's sidestep this discussion it, and get back to the matter at hand. "Primitive communism" has indeed its defenders. One of them is a Marxist ⏬

magivanga.com•37 days ago

anthropologist, Robert B. Lee, who has written about it in a chapter "Primitive communism and the origins of social inequality", where he decides to use a term "common ownership". The main problem with it is, that a concept of ownership itself is Western, thus not recognised by any ⏬

magivanga.com•37 days ago

hunter-gatherer group known to social anthropologists. The other problem with his approach is that of "political
power", which he recognises as a static, given institution instead of being set in and dependent on a network of socio-material relations. In fact, cosmologies and worlds of ⏬

magivanga.com•37 days ago

hunter-gatherers are full of power. This power is not centralised or immobile though. We might of course say, that it's all a matter of perspective. However, it's much more complicated than that as perspective itself can only exist within certain ontology, so a Western perspective can never fully ⏬

anarchitek.bsky.social•36 days ago

The problem is the iniquity of human beings. Even families event aberrant members. It’s how all the “tribes” evolved, outcasts and malcontents, aggregating in self-perpetuation, becoming “families” who, inevitably” kicked out their deviants and losers, who went on to found other tribes, or die out.

magivanga.com•36 days ago

It's a very interesting issue actually, and rarely studied by social anthropologists. I had to scan the literature actually to find out what the consensus was as I've never researched it myself. Apparently "The Great Law of Peace" contains a penalty for murder, that is indeed an exile.

magivanga.com•36 days ago

But it seems that exile or banishment was a rarity in hunter-gatherer societies, only practised if mediation and other penalties didn't reestablish peace.

anarchitek.bsky.social•36 days ago

Tolerance of aberrational behavior was the first step in the decline of civilization. Charisma played a large role in whether the offender was punished.

Parents were the first offenders, pleading for the lives of children who would be dangers to the tribe’s continued existence. It was a tough call.

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