Lecture
The archaic formation encompasses a single mode of production — the primitive-communal one. The archaic formation is characterized by the incompleteness of the process by which a number of social relations among people arose, by the undifferentiated (syncretic) nature of some of them, and by the preservation of a significant (and sometimes determining) dependence of the development of human society not on social but on natural factors.
Only gradually, over the course of this formation, are the preconditions created for properly economic relations to acquire their character as the determining factor of social development. For this reason, this formation may also be called pre-economic. Thus, the archaic formation is the historical epoch of the formation of human society as such, and it is marked by the incompleteness of this formation, or by the non-manifestation of many laws of social development that are characteristic of more mature stages.
Reconstructing the origin of human society is an extremely complex task. To this day there is no sufficiently convincing theoretical concept explaining the causes and mechanism of the qualitative leap from the animal state of humanity's ancestral forms to man as a social being possessing the capacity for labor, speech, and consciousness. In any case, however, it is not scientific to attempt to avoid this complexity by drawing a direct and immediate link between the complex conditioned reflexes of animals and human thought, the tool-using activity of animals and human labor, or the distant sound signals of animals and human speech. In other words, explaining the origin of man through the gradual development and increasing complexity of prerequisites for human traits already present in the animal world is untenable, since it evades the question of the qualitative boundary between man and animal — the very boundary whose crossing is what actually needs to be explained. The question of the natural preconditions for the transition from animal to man is also insufficiently studied. One such precondition was the transition to upright walking, which created the possibility for the development of the manipulative functions of the human hand. However, other questions related to the features of the way of life and behavior of humanity's ancestral forms that created the conditions for this qualitative leap remain a subject of debate, owing to insufficient evidence for the various hypotheses. Understanding the economic structure of primitive society also presents considerable difficulties, and this is connected not only with the historical remoteness of that society from us. Primitive society stood at the dawn of the formation of humanity's social existence, and the relations of production characteristic of it had not yet become fully differentiated from other social relations, forming with them an indivisible (syncretic) unity. The relations of production themselves were also completely undifferentiated, and some of them had not yet taken shape at all (for example, relations of property). Another feature of the primitive mode of production was the high degree of dependence of humans and the social structures then forming on the natural environment. Because of these circumstances, the process of production and the relations of production were under the significant and hard-to-distinguish influence of various non-economic social factors and motives of human activity, as well as under the influence of the natural conditions in which primitive man lived. In any case, it was these natural conditions that, to a decisive extent, determined the character of the productive specialization of the local social communities (primitive communities) into which people united, and, in large measure, the prospects for obtaining sufficient means of subsistence and for the very survival of people.
The principal social communities of the primitive era were the community, the clan, and the tribe.
CLAN — a union of blood relatives descended along a single line (kinship was initially reckoned along the maternal line, and later along the paternal line). COMMUNITY — a naturally arising collective of hunters and gatherers, later of agricultural producers. The primitive clan community was characterized by common origin (kinship) and by the shared occupation of an economic territory. A community could coincide with a clan or be the product of its territorial fragmentation. TRIBE — a union of several clans. The original cell of a tribe was a union of two clans, whose members were bound by mutual marriage ties, and later by a common cult and common organs of self-government. Such a union is also called a phratry. In short, the very word "community" attests to the close bond of the people united within it. It was not a consciously formed union. People who shared a common origin (blood kinship) stayed together and jointly appropriated the economic resources of a given territory.
A community could coincide with a clan, or it could result from the clan splitting into several communities owing to the difficulty of a large group exploiting an economic territory (for example, if the territory near a community's settlement could no longer meet its needs, part of the clan might break away and form an independent community in another territory). In a later period, when blood ties had somewhat lost their original significance, a community might form from people belonging to several different clans. The tribe was a less close-knit but larger social community of primitive people than the community or clan. The tribe was usually characterized by considerable territorial dispersion. Although the leading motive for people's joint existence in the community, clan, and tribe was ensuring the joint production of the means of subsistence, the principle underlying their union was not economic but kinship-based. Personal bonds among people within a community were weaker than the bond that united them into the community as such. The institution of the family had not yet taken shape at the stage of the clan community. Marriage was initially a rather unstable social institution and played, in any case, a lesser role than blood ties. The closest blood relatives (brothers, sisters) were for a long time considered closer than spouses, and even than children and parents. This state of social relations corresponded to the reckoning of kinship along the maternal line. The clan, accordingly, was originally organized as a maternal clan.
Since the level of production of the means of subsistence in primitive society was extremely low, and moreover was quite unstable, an individual person could not have survived at all without uniting with others. In Soviet "Marxism-Leninism" the notion became widespread that the union of people in the primitive community rested on the collective nature of their labor. However, present-day scientific data indicate that the labor of primitive man was mostly individual or carried out in small groups, and only in some cases took the form of collectively organized labor (battue hunting, collective fishing, clearing plots for agriculture). A far more serious economic basis for people's union into a primitive community lay in the fact that an individual could not guarantee producing the volume of the means of life necessary for his survival. Only the combined product of the entire community's production could, to some degree, provide such a guarantee. The vagaries of individual procurement of the means of subsistence were smoothed out in the community's aggregate product. Moreover, pooling the individual yields obtained through hunting and gathering made it possible to create the reserves needed for survival in unfavorable seasons. As for land (territory) — the chief means of production in the primitive era, being at once a space for gathering, hunting and fishing grounds, plots for agriculture, pastures, and deposits of potter's clay and workable stone — no relations of property whatsoever arose regarding it among the members of the community. Such relations concerned only the outside world — other, neighboring communities, clans, and tribes. The community regarded the territory it inhabited as a natural appendage of itself, as an extension of its own natural collective body. Inter-communal conflicts over the delimitation of the territories they occupied were the only kind of purely economic conflict in that period. Even so, this conflict can be classed as belonging to the sphere of social contradictions only with a certain degree of qualification. Objectively it was such a conflict, but for quite a long time it was not subjectively recognized as such. People outside one's own clan were not even acknowledged as beings of the same kind as oneself. Killing a kinsman was regarded as the gravest crime and occurred extremely rarely. Killing a stranger, on the contrary, was under certain conditions even considered praiseworthy. Only gradually did at least occasional economic contacts arise between neighboring communities, and a certain interweaving of blood ties began to occur. Corresponding to this was the emergence of the custom of exogamy (that is, the prohibition of marriage relations within a given clan)¹, as opposed to the previously existing endogamy (that is, marriage relations within the blood-related collective)². As a result, members of the community passed from one clan to another (the husband moved from his own clan to the clan of his wife — an uxorilocal³ family settlement, or, later, conversely, the wife moved to the clan of her husband — a virilocal⁴ family settlement, or the wife and husband lived apart, each within their own clan community — a dislocal family settlement, as a transitional form between the two just mentioned), which created a basis for the development of personal contacts between different clans. On this basis a cultural-linguistic community of neighboring clans took shape. In this way the preconditions were created for clans to draw together, first into phratries⁵ (unions of a small number of clans, originally two, linked by marriage exchanges, periodic military alliances, and so on), and then for their union into tribes (unions of clans and phratries on the basis of cultural-linguistic community). Primitive people gradually began to recognize as fellow human beings not only members of their own clan but also fellow tribesmen (although for a long time this recognition remained far from complete). People outside the tribe, however, were still not regarded as beings of the same kind (which corresponded to the existence of the custom of endogamy, but now within the tribe — the union of intermarrying exogamous clans). It should be noted that linguistic community existed historically considerably earlier than tribal community, which allows us not to discard the hypothesis according to which clans and communities sharing similar dialects arose as a result of the divergence of once-unified archaic communities.
1 The precise reasons for the emergence of this custom have not been established by science. The most likely explanation is considered to be the growth of prohibitions on sexual contact within the community (clan) in order to avoid intra-communal conflicts on this basis. Another explanation (which may complement the first) is the selection, as more successful, of those communities that practiced exogamy and thereby avoided the genetic defects associated with closely related marriages. 3 Original endogamy did not exist as a defined custom but was a spontaneously arising situation characteristic of the primitive horde of humanity's ancestral forms. During the period of the disintegration of the primitive order, among some peoples (usually small in number) a temporary revival of endogamy within communities occurred as a means of securing property rights and keeping accumulated property within the clan. 5 From the Latin uxor — wife. 4 From the Latin vir — husband. 5 Such is the common interpretation. However, there is evidence allowing one to assert that the phratry existed even before the formal establishment of clan organization as such.
The cause of such divergence could have been (among other, as yet not fully clear, factors) simple population growth, the fragmentation of the original community, and the settlement of groups that had broken away from it in the vicinity, on unoccupied territories (given the low population density then existing and the vast expanse of free land). The character of intra-communal relations, although it included a substantial element of equality with respect to the product produced within the community, did not signify complete social equality within the community. The elements of inequality that did exist were based mainly on natural factors — on sex and age differences, which determined the unequal opportunities of community members to take part in procuring the means of subsistence and defending their territory from other communities. Within sex-and-age groups themselves, however, complete equality prevailed in socioeconomic terms. This equality also determined the character of the community's social organization. The whole adult population of the community — both men and women — took part in deciding communal affairs. The organization of community life was built on the principles of self-government. In the leadership of the community, formal leadership coincided with informal leadership. Chiefs were elected and could be removed at any moment (the expression "to break off the horns" then had a literal meaning — to strip a chief of the symbols of his power). Besides the chiefs, power in the community belonged to the elders, who were put forward on a meritocratic principle (on the basis of personal merit and life experience). A special position in the community was occupied by the priest (magician, sorcerer, shaman...). His authority was fairly high, but at the same time was strongly dependent on the community's successes or failures, which were attributed, correspondingly, to the priest's successful or unsuccessful communication with otherworldly forces. Relations of property in the primitive community were still at the stage of emergence. With regard to the principal means of production — the territory with its natural resources — no relations of property existed at all. Since the land was regarded as a natural extension of the community itself, the beginnings of property relations arose only where claims to territory clashed between different communities, and the need arose to delimit territory. As for tools and the product produced, common (group) ownership of the community's members prevailed here. One must be warned, however, against projecting modern notions of common ownership onto the primitive community. Neither the tools of labor nor the product produced generally formed, within the community, a single fund at the disposal of the chiefs or elders or the community assembly. It is likewise mistaken to derive common ownership in the primitive community from the collective character of labor (although such an approach was widely accepted among most Soviet-era social scientists). The structure of relations of common ownership in the primitive community was unfamiliar to modern understanding. Although collective labor processes were fairly characteristic of the community (for example, battue hunting), most activity in gathering, hunting, fishing, and the making of tools rested on individual or small-group labor. Correspondingly, tools were in individual use (with a few exceptions — for example, large boats for sea fishing), and the products of hunting, fishing, and gathering most often did not form a common fund. However, with regard to tools, there was a custom of freely borrowing temporarily unused tools from any member of the community. There also existed a custom of mutual assistance in making complex, labor-intensive items (for example, dwellings or large boats). Products of labor, being individual catches, were subsequently redistributed among members of the community. The customs governing such redistribution were based on transferring the relative surpluses that temporarily arose among the more fortunate
hunters or gatherers to those members of the community who were experiencing a relative shortfall. In this process, distribution was based on the principle of equal provision (rather than primitive egalitarianism). This meant taking into account sex-and-age differences in food needs, as well as prioritizing those sex-and-age groups on whom the procurement of the means of subsistence, and thereby the community's survival, depended. Later, customs formed whereby successful providers had the right to a fixed share of their catch, while others were entitled only to the surplus above that, which ensured an interest in the productivity of hunting and gathering. Part of the relative (temporary, incidental) surpluses replenished communal stores. The mechanism for redistributing surpluses might consist of the direct handing over of products to those in need (which later took the vestigial form of direct gift exchange). There might also exist a custom of temporarily forming a common fund, which was then divided up (most often in the case of a scarce overall catch). Thus, relations of egalitarian, equal-provision redistribution of the product operated within the community. This egalitarianism rested on the fact that individual procurement of the means of subsistence necessary for survival was not guaranteed. The community's survival as a whole therefore required smoothing out individual differences in the level of the means of subsistence obtained, as well as the formation of communal reserves to smooth out seasonal fluctuations in yield. But even this mechanism did not provide sufficient guarantees — cases of entire clans dying out from starvation were not uncommon. Without egalitarianism, however, the survival of the community would have been altogether doubtful. Over time, the needs of the clan community's survival pushed it toward enlargement. Contacts with neighboring communities strengthened, and blood ties were established between them (in connection with the formation of the custom of exogamy, which also helped avoid the negative consequences of closely related marriages within a single clan). Larger social communities formed, encompassing several clans. As a result, the community gradually lost its narrowly clan-based character in practice (although formally it remained unshaken), since through marriages its membership was replenished with members of neighboring clans. This subsequently led, as noted, to the formation of tribal organization, consisting of several groups of neighboring clans located in several settlements or camps. The transition from an isolated clan to tribes created better preconditions for a deeper division of labor and for the transition to what is called productive economy (stock-breeding and agriculture). This transition required diverting part of community members' working time away from the direct procurement of the means of subsistence. For stock-breeding, and agriculture even more so, do not yield an immediate useful effect. The transition to stock-breeding and agriculture therefore presupposes the accumulation of insurance reserves, allowing food consumption to be maintained beyond the seasons of harvest or slaughter. In larger communities — tribes — it was considerably easier to ensure both the diversion of part of the time from hunting and gathering and the accumulation of insurance reserves on a scale that reduced risks to a minimum.
Together with the development of a productive economy comes the development of the individual character of labor, and the production of surplus product arises. These changes serve as preconditions for the emergence of private property and the family. The production of surplus product — that is, product going beyond what is necessary for current consumption — makes it possible to increase the degree to which both communal and individual existence are guaranteed. The systematic production of surplus product, and the creation of reserves on this basis, renders constant egalitarian redistribution of the means of subsistence unnecessary. However, under pre-industrial production the level of development of the productive forces still cannot fully guarantee the production of a sufficient volume of products for both current consumption and insurance reserves, so that various chance or extraordinary circumstances may require the use of a redistribution mechanism for the survival of community members. Therefore, both the community itself and the customs of mutual assistance within it (which continues to exist, now within the tribal organization) are preserved for several more historical epochs in particularly difficult cases — crop failure, livestock loss, fire, house-building, and so on — and in some places even down to the present day (if only in the form of vestiges).
SURPLUS PRODUCT — product going beyond what is necessary. For a long time the production of surplus product was combined with the preservation of the custom of gift exchange in the form of wasteful consumption. Families that produced significant surpluses squandered at least part of them among their neighbors in the community — for example, in the form of mass feasts, during festivals, and so on. Members of the communal elite could do the same, using for this purpose the communal reserves at their disposal. This served to strengthen their prestige within the community. Thus the common fund became a means of strengthening personal prestige, although not yet an object of private appropriation (since it was distributed among all members of the community). This custom survived in vestigial form even in class society (for example, the distribution of "bread and circuses" in ancient Rome). Individual or small-group production of surplus product leads to the formation of a new, stable social community within which the appropriation and accumulation of the product produced takes place. This is the family — a community based on marriage, on the blood tie of the closest relatives (primarily parents and children), and on their joint economic activity. The family becomes the primary economic cell of society. Previously, marriage — a socially fixed union of persons of the opposite sex — did not lead to the creation of a stable, reproducible social community of economic significance. The prevailing form of pair marriage could lead to the formation of a fairly stable union. However, there existed real possibilities of dissolving such a union, considerable pre-marital and marital sexual freedom (the customs of supplementary husbands, "hunting girls," and the like), and the union itself did not create a permanent, particularly stable bond between parents and children, nor did it create grounds for the appropriation of any significant property. Kinship in this case was reckoned only along the maternal line, which seemed both natural and the only reliable basis. MARRIAGE — a socially fixed union of persons of the opposite sex.
Once children emerged from infancy, their further upbringing became to a considerable extent a communal function. Blood ties with the children of a sister or brother were considered no less significant (and, with respect to the father, even more significant) than blood ties with one's own children. Once children reached adulthood and entered marriage (and, correspondingly, moved into the clan of the husband or wife), their belonging to the clan as a whole acquired significantly greater importance than their ties with their parents. The production of surplus product and the possibility of its individual accumulation created an interest in establishing a more solid form of marital union.
Monogamous marriage arises, and then, on its basis, the patriarchal family (literally, one based on the authority of the father). Monogamous marriage presupposed the exclusive right of spouses to possess each other, which made it possible to use kinship reckoning along the paternal line. The accumulation of surplus product by the married couple created the economic basis for children's dependence on their parents, while the continuity of the process of accumulation was ensured by the emergence of the institution of inheritance. Initially, the patriarchal family, based on monogamous marriage, did not take the form of a nuclear family, but formed as what is called the "extended family" — a married couple with children, including adult children with the married couples they themselves had formed and their own children. Such families reached the size of several dozen people, not infrequently exceeding a hundred. A married couple's separation into an independent family occurred fairly late, since the rate of accumulation of the economic resources necessary for this (to establish an independent household with a sufficient number of working hands, with its own house, plot of land, livestock, tools, and so on) was rather slow, and without this the independent economic activity of the married couple could not succeed. The transition to the patriarchal family occurred simultaneously with the development of patriarchy (the patriarchal community), as opposed to the approximate equality of the sexes that had previously existed (contemporary paleoethnographic research generally rejects the notion of matriarchy as an obligatory stage preceding patriarchy¹). The patriarchal community appears as a form of the disintegration of the clan community and the transition to the neighborhood community, formed from a group of extended families. But why did the transition to monogamous
marriage lead to male dominance and to the formation specifically of the patriarchal form of the family? The matter here lies not so much in monogamy as such, but in the fact that its emergence coincided with a change in the conditions of economic activity. First, herding and agricultural functions were predominantly male, on the basis of the sex-and-age division of labor. If, for example, horticulture and hoe-based agriculture could be practiced by women too (and most often it was), then irrigation work or slash-and-burn agriculture required the application of heavy physical labor by men. Plow agriculture was linked to the use of draft animals, which, like stock-breeding itself, was a male function. Nomadic or transhumant stock-breeding involved considerable distance from settlements or camps and was a dangerous occupation, often requiring the armed defense of herds from predators or raiders. In a number of regions of the world, the leading role in agriculture (mainly where it was confined to work on small plots near the home) long belonged to women, and it is precisely in these regions that clan organization, or serious vestiges of it, along with vestiges of matriarchy, have survived to this day. The dominance of men in stock-breeding and agriculture, correspondingly, placed the disposal of the products of these branches into their hands.
The transition to a predominantly family-based character of production, appropriation, and distribution of the means of subsistence placed economic power over family members into the hands of the man. Second, the monogamous character of marriage, which made it possible to reckon kinship along the paternal line, also secured inheritance along the paternal line. Whereas initially certain elements of equality in the inheritance rights of sons and daughters, as well as of brothers, sisters, and nephews, were preserved, the consolidation of the patriarchal form of the family led to the transfer of the main part of inherited property from father to son, which further reinforced the patriarchal character of the family.
1 Matriarchy arises historically simultaneously with patriarchy. Matriarchal communities arise mainly where hoe-based agriculture, resting on female labor, is practiced, and where woman thus retains a dominant economic position within the community.
Corresponding to the transition to the patriarchal family and the patriarchal community is the transition from the clan community to the neighborhood community. The tribal organization of society, uniting several clans, led to a situation in which by no means all the people in a single settlement could be linked by blood kinship. Moreover, the development of the private (family) character of labor and of the appropriation of the product produced led to the formation of elements of private property both in the products and tools of labor and in the principal means of production — land — initially in the form of family allotments being carved out of communal land and used privately. Simultaneously with the emergence of private property, the institution of common (communal) property also takes shape. The whole territory used by the community, with the possible exception of family allotments, is regarded as the common property of the community's members. And even over family allotments the community's supreme sovereignty is preserved (whether there existed in antiquity a custom of regularly redistributing family allotments is a disputed question). An allotment could be received only by someone recognized as a full member of the community. Houses and household plots, farm buildings, livestock, implements, and, most importantly, the product produced (with certain deductions dictated by custom) are, however, already regarded as objects not of communal but of family ownership. In such a community, blood kinship already has considerably less economic significance (although substantial vestiges of customs of mutual assistance, especially among kin, are preserved for a long time). Patriarchal families are now less kinsmen than neighbors. Communal self-government is preserved, but gradually men almost entirely push women out of participation in communal affairs, leaving them only certain functions connected with specifically female ritual practice (performing the initiation rites of girls, participation in wedding ceremonies, and the like). This period of struggle between men and women for communal hegemony is historically connected with the formation of secret male and female societies, which served as instruments of this struggle. If one likes, one can see here the beginnings of political relations. Simultaneously with these processes, the human individual becomes distinguished from the undifferentiated mass of community members, and the unconditional power of communal tradition over human individuality is overcome. This overcoming has both a positive character (the development of individual enterprise and personal distinctiveness) and a negative one (the non-recognition of the rights of the wife and children as individuals within the patriarchal family, the further struggle to establish relations of domination and subordination). The systematic production of surplus product entails two further important consequences — exploitation and predatory wars. The transition to the systematic production of surplus product makes it possible to carry out exploitation. EXPLOITATION — the compulsion of one person by another to labor in order to appropriate the surplus product he produces, leaving him only the necessary means of subsistence. Such compulsion was applied to people without rights — captives seized in clashes with foreign communities (tribes), or outcasts (persons expelled from their community, or who had lost their community). Previously, such people, strictly speaking, simply were not recognized as human beings. They were therefore either killed or admitted as members of the community (more precisely, as members of a specific clan), which conferred upon them the status of a blood relative, that is, of a human being. Now, however, such people were turned into partial members of patriarchal families — into slaves (hence the term "patriarchal slavery"). PATRIARCHAL SLAVERY — the transformation of people (captives or outcasts) into partial members of patriarchal families — into slaves.
Slaves in the patriarchal family were assigned tasks that diverted the masters from
productive labor — for example, running the household, carrying loads (especially in areas where there were no
domesticated draft animals — for example, in Central America), earthworks
in construction or irrigation. Thus, the function of slaves in that period
was auxiliary. They ensured
an increase in the productivity of the full-rights family members' labor within the family economy.
Together with the growth of productivity
comes a deepening of the division of labor.
First, stock-breeding and agriculture separate (in the process, predominantly pastoral and predominantly agricultural tribes may form). Then
the separation of craft from agriculture
takes place. This too is not complete.
However, some craft specialties (blacksmith, potter) become professional — those engaged in them no longer
spend on agricultural work time sufficient to
fully provide themselves with food
products.
With the development of the division of labor comes a further growth in labor productivity, and the exchange of the products
of specialized production develops. The accumulation of wealth grows not only quantitatively but also acquires an ever more varied material expression. Thus
it becomes possible to acquire the most varied kinds of wealth not only
through labor, but also through seizure. Sporadic clashes between neighboring tribes or
communities over the delimitation of territory or
blood feuds turn into systematic predatory raids and wars.
The waging of predatory wars raises
the authority of male warriors. However, in regions where vestiges of the clan order and of the dislocal and uxorilocal family long persisted (that is, respectively, where
spouses lived apart in their own communities, and where the husband moved to live in his wife's community), and where matriarchal communities arose — for example, in West Equatorial Africa, still in the nineteenth century — female military contingents were
not uncommon. Hordes of fanatically fierce maidens not infrequently put to flight bands of battle-hardened,
grim male warriors. Echoes
of facts of this kind found reflection in Antiquity in the myths of the Amazons.
Together with the growing significance of wars and of military
organization, the authority of the military chief also grows. Previously this was a temporary,
elective office, filled only for the
duration of direct military clashes. With the growth both of the constant danger of predatory raids and of the desire
to carry out such raids themselves, this office becomes permanent. For example, in
Homer's "Iliad," the function of temporary elected military leader of the army of the allied
Achaean tribes before Troy is performed by
Agamemnon, while in his own tribe he is already
a permanent military chief.
The authority of the military chief begins to
surpass the authority of all other
representatives of the clan-tribal organization. Alongside the military chief there forms
a group of professional warriors — a retinue, ensuring constant readiness for defense against attacks and for carrying out raids.
The scale of the tribe makes performing all (not only military) functions of tribal self-government a permanent matter. There occurs a specialization of elected
officials in the performance of these
functions, and then the transmission of the corresponding skills, and with them, of claims to
occupy the office itself, by inheritance.
However, this inheritance still requires the sanction of the people's assembly. There still remains
a real possibility of removing officials who have provoked clear discontent
among the tribe.
A clan-tribal elite
(nobility) forms, and a division arises between noble (represented in the tribal elite) and common clans. The functions of the general assembly of the tribe — or rather, now, only of the men-warriors — are thereby significantly narrowed.
Such an order is regarded as pre-state and has received in historical
scholarship the name of chiefdom. One
variety of chiefdom is the order
of military democracy, in which a significant role in tribe-wide affairs (including a decisive role — in the election of a chief) is played by the general assembly of the men-warriors. This is not yet a state — that is, not yet a public power separated from the people. In those matters requiring the participation of the tribe, the chiefdom knows no way of compelling the people to do anything against their consent. The drive to strengthen one's military forces in the face of predatory raids by neighbors (or in order to carry out successful predatory raids on neighbors) leads to the formation of large tribal unions (for example, the union of the Sabines and Latins, with the participation of certain Etruscan clans, which gave rise to the city-state of Rome; the union of the seven Dakota tribes in North America, which offered the most stubborn resistance to European colonists). Such unions are at first unstable and easily fall apart (for example, the union of the Achaean tribes for the expedition against Troy; the unions of the western Slavs, or the tribal union of the Prussians, that stood against German expansion). During the period of chiefdom (military democracy), the character of settlements changes.
Villages are surrounded by defensive works, or are fortified from the outset, and alongside them fortified towns arise — sites where military chiefs and their retinues were stationed and centers of religious cult, then places where the rest of the clan-tribal nobility concentrated, and after them craftsmen, merchants, and farmers, seeking the protection of the town's fortifications and, at the same time, access to a market. Initially, specialized craft (apart from blacksmithing and pottery, which had specialized earlier) develops mainly to serve the urban nobility. Equal patrons are the military chiefs with their retinues, who gradually acquire despotic royal power, and the priests. Maintaining retinues, building and fortifying towns, maintaining temples and priests, performing religious rites, and waging wars all require considerable resources.
These are obtained through more or less regular in-kind levies on ordinary community members, usually on the basis of surviving vestiges of the customs of communal mutual assistance. But the size of such levies is usually not large enough. Therefore, as a rule, additional collective levies, called tribute, are exacted from those communities, clans, and tribes that joined the tribal union recently, or were annexed by force. The type of society outlined above is called early-class society. It is characterized by a fairly high degree of social homogeneity. Property differentiation already leads, in early-class society, to the appearance of rich and poor, but stable distinctions in the system of social relations have not yet arisen between them. Only, on the one hand, the disenfranchised slaves, and, on the other, the clan-tribal elite, which secures for itself a monopoly on public functions, stand out clearly. Specialized social-professional groups appear — the priesthood, the retainers. However, these social strata make up a minority of the population, as against the predominant mass of free, full-rights community members. During this period the extended family gradually disintegrates and a transition takes place to the nuclear family, comprising only the married couple with children (possibly also some of the couple's parents, usually on the husband's side).
CLAN — a union of blood relatives descended along a single line (kinship was initially reckoned along the maternal line, later along the paternal line).
COMMUNITY — a naturally arising collective of hunters and gatherers, later of agricultural producers.
The primitive clan community was characterized by common origin (kinship) and by the shared occupation of an economic territory. A community could coincide with a clan or be the product of its territorial fragmentation.
TRIBE — a union of several clans. The original cell of a tribe was a union of two clans, whose members were bound by mutual marriage ties, and later by a common cult and common organs of self-government. Such a union is also called a phratry.
SURPLUS PRODUCT — product going beyond what is necessary for current consumption.
MARRIAGE — a socially fixed union of persons of the opposite sex.
EXPLOITATION — the compulsion of one person by another to labor in order to appropriate the surplus product he produces, leaving him only the necessary means of subsistence.
PATRIARCHAL SLAVERY — the transformation of people (captives or outcasts) into partial members of patriarchal families — into slaves.
Comments