The primitive communal system and the primitive economy

The primitive communal system, also the communal-clan system — historically the first in the series of socio-economic formations distinguished in the Marxist philosophy of history.

Primitive society is characterized by a minimal (but steadily rising over time) level of development of the productive forces, to which correspond the relations of production of so-called primitive communism and a classless society .

In modern theory of state and law, the primitive communal system is regarded as a form of non-state organization of society; a stage through which all the peoples of the world have passed .

The primitive epoch is the earliest and longest stretch of human history, extending "from the emergence of man out of the animal world to the rise of class society" . Depending on local conditions, the primitive communal system is succeeded by one of the class formations — the Asiatic mode of production, the slave-owning, feudal and similar systems, up to the socialist one. Some researchers also distinguish early class society.

For the founders of historical scholarship from Hellas and Ancient Rome, the primitive system appeared as an object of direct observation of neighbouring peoples "from the height" of a more developed civilization. The sources of this epoch are scanty and one-sided. They reflect the interest of ancient authors above all in those aspects of the life of neighbouring peoples (traditions, beliefs, customs, behavioural stereotypes, etc.) that are most important for assessing their potential as trading partners, allies and/or potential adversaries. The primitive periphery of medieval Europe is described by contemporaries somewhat more extensively, but here too one cannot discount the fact that both in the West and in Asia and the Far East these tribes had over the preceding centuries been in contact with more developed neighbours and thus experienced their influence.

The primitive way of life came into the philosophers' field of vision long before the thinkers of the modern era began to give this object the form of a category — an element of systematic, scientific knowledge. One of the earliest examples here is Hesiod's poem "Works and Days" with its well-known five-part historiographical scheme: the golden age → the age of silver → the age of bronze → the age of heroes → the age of iron. As in the Marxist "five-part scheme" (from primitive communism to the communism of the future), a cyclical movement, a return to the starting point, can be discerned in Hesiod. The difference is that in Hesiod the spiral is descending (with the potential possibility of returning to the "golden age" through purification from the sins of the past), whereas in Marxism it is ascending, in which the former quality of equality and distribution according to needs is attained at a qualitatively and quantitatively higher level of development of the productive forces.

Democritus wrote of gathering ("feeding on the natural fodder of the earth and the chance fruits of trees") and of a "coarse and bestial life"; from Dicaearchus to Varro and Titus Lucretius Carus the hypothesis passes of the development of economic forms from hunting and gathering through pastoralism to agriculture. Lucretius, moreover, sets out a sequence close to the modern archaeological periodization (the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages): "at first people used tools of wood and stone, then discovered copper and only after that — iron". Unfolding this chain of examples, Yu. I. Semyonov expresses a sceptical attitude towards it: "all these were remarkable conjectures" .

The Age of Great Geographical Discoveries gave Europeans a chance to study, in the literal sense, the untouched material of the New World. It is at this stage, properly speaking, that modern ethnography is born (B. de Sahagún), although the first missionaries delved into the daily life of the native peoples with the aim of transforming it, not of studying it for academic scholarship. After the 18th century, aspects of the social organization of primitive societies, of family and marriage, begin to attract ever more attention among the objects of ethnographic observation.

Finally, in the 19th century scientific schools are formed (evolutionists and diffusionists) Lewis Morgan and other ethnographers of the 19th century reconstructed prehistoric life from observations of Indians, Papuans, pygmies and other native peoples; discussions unfold about matriarchy and patriarchy. For these objective reasons, ethnographic material also predominates in "The Origin of the Family…". However, the main contribution of this work of Engels to Marxism consisted not in the presentation of ethnographic conceptions, but in laying down a method of studying the mode of production in the unity of the factors of the productive forces and the relations of production. In this light, the designation "clan-based", occasionally encountered in pre-war literature, only partially reveals the essential features of this system.

In accordance with the methodology of historical materialism, each socio-economic formation is characterized by a definite level of development of the two basic components of the very concept of a formation — the productive forces and the specific features of the relations of production.

Within the category "productive forces", Marxism distinguishes the means of production and people as the bearers of labour experience and skills. Man is thus regarded as the principal element of the productive forces of any society, of any formation; from a philosophical point of view man appears simultaneously both as the aim of social production and as its result.

A unique feature of the primitive communal system among the other formations is that "at the entrance" to this formation man himself arises (cf. "labour made man out of the ape"), and his subsequent genesis as a biological being is closely interlinked with successes in improving the mode of interaction with the surrounding world, that is, with the invention and refinement of new means of production and technologies for applying them.

The critical moment in determining the point of reference for the primitive communal system (as also for non-Marxist systems of periodization of human history) is the determination of the criteria and, accordingly, the dating of the event of the appearance of "Homo sapiens". Although the discovery and first descriptions of Neanderthals (1856—1858) and Cro-Magnons (1868) took place during the lifetime of Marx and Engels, as of the third quarter of the 19th century the materials on anthropogenesis were still insufficient to correct, perhaps, the conceptions of the chronology of the initial stages of the formation of man.

In any case, long before the exit from the primitive communal system, between 39 and 60-70 thousand years ago, the population of the Earth was for the most part already represented by neoanthropes — people of the modern type. Their successive activity in sustaining populations and reproducing them acquires over time socially organized forms and takes shape as the general history of the development of humanity's productive forces.

The low, primitive level of the material and technical base of the primitive formation is an objective but far from complete characterization of its productive forces. But excessive emphasis on self-evident comparisons with subsequent formations inadvertently belittles the level attained by the end of the primitive epoch. If one identifies its material and technical base only, in the literal sense of the word, with "Stone Age technologies", then it becomes incomprehensible how people, "having barely emerged from caves", find themselves in settlements reaching several thousand inhabitants. Rhetorical perplexity at such an apparent break in history was in his time expressed by the foremost orientalist B. A. Turaev, who noted that already in the I Dynasty of the Early Kingdom Egypt appears "already at a mature age, with a developed bureaucracy, with an art and religion already formed, with a language that had gone through several phases of development" .

Sickle. Sumer, Neolithic, fired clay

Indeed, archaeological excavations have shown that several thousand years before the beginning of the written period of history, humanity accomplished a number of technological leaps. Among the latter are named the Neolithic revolution and then the so-called "urban revolution", based on the mastery of new technologies and accompanied by a sharp increase in the range of material goods obtained as a result of conscious labour activity. At the same time, owing to the insignificant surplus product, the corresponding producing communities were not yet class-based, and consequently cannot be assigned either to the slave-owning or to the "Asiatic" type.

To resolve this formal contradiction, Soviet historians of the second half of the 20th century introduced into circulation, as a palliative, the concept of early class societies. At this, its concluding stage, the formation loses the quality of "primitiveness" (above all in technologies), while at the same time the qualities of "communality" grow and strengthen as a form of collectivist organization of social reproduction and administration. At this stage the basic traditions and stereotypes of the commune are laid down, which then appear in subsequent formations in the form of a dominant or secondary structure.

In the history of humankind, the primitive communal system is the epoch in which relations of production emerged and took shape; by these Marxism means «the totality of material economic relations between people in the process of social production and the movement of the social product from production to consumption» .

In evolving from a subject of the primitive herd into an individual — a member of a clan-and-tribe community — the human being places instincts laid down by nature on a conscious footing, transforming them into stereotypes for organising the labour of obtaining the means of subsistence and of distributing, preserving and storing them. The multitude of analogues of a corresponding division of functions among representatives of the animal kingdom within their structured groups (pack, herd, pride, etc.) serves as an additional argument in favour of the evolutionary hypothesis of human origins.

In the animal kingdom, by no means all life-support and reproductive functions require collective performance. Among higher mammals there is an evident division of a number of functions along sexual lines; in particular, in connection with the need to bear and nurse offspring. The physiological division of labour by sex and age took place even before man emerged from the animal kingdom. In the primitive epoch it broadened and deepened, embracing newly arising objects to which labour could be applied.

Long before the next major divisions of labour occurred — the separation of agriculture and stock-raising, and the emergence of craft (the latter already representing a productive form of the division of labour) — the corresponding types of activity were developing in more or less significant volumes within the primary communities. Purely pastoral or purely agricultural tribes did not exist, or else they died out: biologically, the human being was formed as an exclusively omnivorous creature (polyphage) , requiring food of both plant and animal origin.

A particular type of production-and-technological relation — the division between managerial and executive labour, which in due course entails the formation of an administrative superstructure — also has prototypes in the animal kingdom, and not only in the example of pack leaders. The function of training new generations in specific types of productive labour presupposes the management not only of the trainees' actions, but also of their distribution among types of activity, for example according to the child's sex.

Recent research (from the late 1990s onward) has shown that a more correct analogue for designating the associations of humanity's closest ancestors is not the herd but the swarm, with its attendant phenomena of swarm intellect and so on. In any case, in the genesis of property as the leading element in the system of relations of production, the historically first form of property under the primitive communal system was collective, communal property.

As the productive forces develop, the forms of organising life-support processes change. At the same time there occurs a spontaneous optimisation of the size of the primary economic communities, of their settlement patterns, migrations, and so on. At the stage of the appropriating economy, the former herd instinct of defending territory grows into a conscious attitude towards objects of collective property as «one's own». The condition under which it is at all permissible to speak of property relations is the presence of at least two economically separate subjects. Such are the tribes that regularly wage war with one another over living space. Their clashes entrench collectivist rather than egoistic, private stereotypes in the mentality. Contemporary research shows that private-property motives are on the whole alien to small, egalitarian communities of hunter-gatherers .

The life-support of those with limited or complete incapacity for work may be effected through various arrangements for the distribution and redistribution of collectively or individually obtained goods. With regard to primitive communities, the hypothesis advanced here is that

«A wholly natural form of self-defence here proved to be the collective's full ownership of all the food obtained by its members, irrespective of whether it had been obtained jointly or singly. Such a form of the collective's full ownership of food could be expressed only in the distribution of food among all members on the principles of egalitarian distribution».

— Yu. I. Semyonov [10]

In everyday usage, egalitarian distribution may be associated with a situation in which, owing to an insufficient quantity of the aggregate good, a person receives less than his actual need — for example, because of an unfavourable conjunction of external (most often natural) factors against which primitive people were insufficiently protected. But the under-satisfaction of needs cannot be systematic; otherwise such a population dies out. The polemical hyperbole «equality in poverty»[11], which claims to characterise such distribution in a classless order, is also unacceptable owing to the absence within it of the notion of «wealth» that is paired with «poverty».

In fact, egalitarian distribution in this formation had the features of «satisfaction according to needs». The necessary additional source for this was goods obtained (as with many mammals) in excess of the norm of current consumption, «in reserve». The refinement of technologies for storing perishable products expanded the list of goods obtained additionally to replenish the seasonal reserve, as well as the absolute volumes of these reserves. The thesis that links, in primitive distribution, the qualities of being both egalitarian and simultaneously according to needs entered the encyclopaedia article cited above[10], and was repeated and developed in a contemporary monograph:

"…on the principles of egalitarian distribution. The latter by no means presupposed the distribution of the product among all members of the collective in equal shares (although this too could occur) The essence of egalitarian distribution lay in the fact that each member of the collective received a share of the obtained product by virtue of his belonging to that collective. As for the size of the share received, it depended both on the total volume of products obtained and on the needs of the particular individual

— Semyonov Yu. I. Traditional normative culture…[12].

The thesis that the presence of a surplus product is a necessary precondition for the exchange of products between the economically separate collective economies of different communities is not exclusively Marxist. It is shared by other conceptions in the philosophy of history of the 19th–20th centuries, which operated with speculative logical constructions on a very meagre base of material and other evidence from archaeology and ethnography.

Arrowhead. Obsidian

Only towards the end of the 20th century did it begin to emerge that certain goods specific to the primitive epoch were being found in excavations at a considerable distance from the place where they were obtained. An example is obsidian, a mineral of volcanic origin with unique cutting properties. Its use secured a sharp increase in productivity and quality in the manufacture of both means of production and clothing. Pieces of obsidian could cover considerable distances, sometimes of several hundred kilometres, only thanks to a chain of successive exchanges between neighbouring tribes[13].

These finds do not undermine the formulation of the original thesis. By the definition of the necessary product as the volume minimally required to maintain physical existence and natural reproduction, the product entering into exchange cannot be anything other than surplus. Schemes of «hunger exports» arise only at later stages in the development of the world economy[14]. To remove the apparent contradiction that arises under an extreme interpretation of the thesis about the «low level of development of the productive forces», and to avoid a collision with the definition of «surplus product» (this category adjoins closely the concept of surplus value, which is absent under the primitive communal system), Soviet Marxist historians expanded the categorial apparatus by putting into circulation the concepts of the life-sustaining product and the superfluous product.

«Life-sustaining is the product absolutely necessary to maintain such an existence of the members of the collective that their organisms do not undergo irreversible pathological changes» [15]. The bulk of the life-sustaining product consisted of food.

Superfluous is the entire social product exceeding this level. «It was superfluous by no means in the sense that it could not be consumed by the members of the collective, but only in the sense that when it was absent, their normal existence was possible without it» .

In the «five-member» scheme for periodising the stages of social evolution, socio-economic formations are often named in abbreviated form after the dominant type of relations of production[16]: instead of «feudal order» one says «feudalism», the term «capitalist mode of production» is simplified to «capitalism», and so on. There is, however, no complete identity here, as can be seen in the example of the categories «communism» and «primitive communism», situated at the opposite ends of the formational axis.

The debatable points in the internal periodisation of the prehistoric epoch, and the adjoining problematics of the Asiatic mode of production, make it didactically preferable to abandon the full identification of the primitive communal system with primitive communism. The latter is unquestionably an essential, leading, but not the sole and not an exhaustive characteristic of the primitive communal system.

The term «primitive communism» as a translation of English primitive communism was in scholarly circulation in Russia at the end of the 19th century[17].

The divergence between Russian and foreign-language designations of categories, and sometimes of entire branches of knowledge, partly reflects the particularities of the Russian historical school, whose roots go back to the 19th and even the 18th century. For example, Russian has both the concept «древний» (ancient) and the narrower «античный» (classical), to which one and the same English word ‘ancient’ corresponds. Furthermore, ethnography — a branch of the study of peoples that bears directly on primitive problematics — has in Russia a two-century tradition of developing its subject matter and methods, whereas in the West «anthropology» and «ethnology» developed separately and along their own methodological lines[18][19].

The translation of E. B. Tylor's classic work, English «Primitive culture», 1871}, published in 1873 in St Petersburg under the title «Первобытная культура»[20], set a precedent for rendering the polysemous English ‘primitive’ by the felicitous two-part construction «первобытный». «Перво-» conveys the quality of being chronologically first (cf. первопроходец, pathfinder), a consequence of which may be the incomplete development of the forms of being. For its part, «бытие», «быт» (being, way of life) emphasise the philosophical, socio-historical context rather than, say, the term's belonging to the natural sciences.

But alongside «primitive» → «первобытный» there is also the semi-calque «primitive» → «примитивный». This creates a formal precondition for equating «первобытный» with «примитивный», which as applied to the formation as a whole is not always correct, especially at the concluding (communal) stage, when social forms that are far from primitive are already taking shape.

The commune in the primitive epoch is a universal social institution serving as the bearer of the entire totality of social functions. The primitive commune determines the whole system of relations of the formation: it is simultaneously a productive, a family-and-domestic, and a cultic collective[21].

The dissolution of the commune does not mean its complete disappearance. In the course of its evolution into the class epoch, the commune's functional load is dispersed among new, separate institutions of administration, power and cult; superstructural forms are transformed. Pausanias's account of the death of King Codrus (around the 11th century) reflected the transformation of the autocratic power of the tribal chief («kings», basileis) into the collegiate rule of a group of elders-archons (eponym, basileus, polemarch, etc.) who divided the administration of the commune by spheres of authority (military affairs, cults, economy)[22]. With the emergence of classes, the general assemblies of full members of the commune (the agora and the like) lose power. Despite privatisation and the partition of the land fund among commune members, a certain part of it long remains in communal ownership (cf. ager publicus). Rudiments of the communal order survive to our own day in the names of small administrative-territorial units; here one must recall above all the rural and, later, urban communes, which among other things are also etymologically connected with the primary concept of «communism». Thus in retrospect the concepts «communist», «communal» and «social» converge upon one and the same primitive-communal, primitive-communist epoch.

«Any attempt to structure history, to divide it into a series of periods, always leads to crude simplifications», noted the German philosopher K. T. Jaspers, «yet these simplifications can serve as arrows pointing to essential moments»[23]. Some contemporary philosophers of history point to the futility of resolving the contradiction between the formational and civilisational approaches along «either-or» lines. Opposing to this approach the principle of «both-and», they call for finding «such a conjunction of the formational and civilisational paradigms as can be fruitfully applied to the task of large-scale division of the historical process, which will make the very vision of history more multidimensional»[24].

Because the primitive communal system is located at the starting segment of the axis of historical time, there are no fundamental discrepancies between the two approaches to the division of history. On the contrary, different variants for choosing the zero point of reference often unite the adherents of opposing currents of thought.

The primary source that prompted K. Marx to undertake an in-depth study of materials on primitive antiquity was the book «Ancient Society» by the American ethnographer Lewis Morgan (published in 1877). During 1880–1881 Marx compiled an annotated synopsis of it. Its posthumous publication, with his own additions, was carried out in 1884 by F. Engels under the title «The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State».

But priority in creating this variant of the tripartite scale (English scale) of human history («savagery», «barbarism» and «civilisation»), known to many from «The Origin of the Family», belongs neither to Engels nor even to Morgan. The latter's conception goes back to the works of Adam Smith's teacher, the Scottish philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson (1766); Hegel and Saint-Simon, mentioned in this connection by V. P. Ilyushechkin[25], already belong to the next generation of philosophers.

Comparing Ferguson's scale with the formational one, it is easy to see that two of the three segments fall within the primitive communal system, while «civilisation» covers all the subsequent formations in a single lump

Marx and Engels did not manage to give the scale of formations its final form, in which it would be applicable to all local variants of the general civilisational process. The further development of this section of historical materialism in the 20th century was carried out by Marxists of various countries, and above all by social scientists of the USSR. This work proceeded in parallel with the translation into Russian and the introduction into scholarly circulation of the archives of Marx and Engels, and part of the categorial apparatus did not always receive timely and adequate reflection in scholarly works in the languages of researchers of other countries.

Being the fullest primary source on the study of primitive society in Marxist theory, «The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State» nevertheless, for objective reasons, does not cover the entire range of questions required for deploying a formational analysis of this epoch. Engels himself, in setting out Morgan's scheme, acknowledged its conventionality, and in the Soviet period part of the material of this book was recognised as largely outdated[26], although this work continued to be included in the list of primary sources for the course in historical materialism. Guided by it as a methodological basis, the pre-war generation of Soviet scholars (P. P. Efimenko, M. O. Kosven, A. M. Zolotaryov, S. P. Tolstov) already introduced into scholarly circulation «substantial material proving the universality of the communal-clan system and refuting attempts to substitute for it various kinds of ‘totemic societies' or ‘family-kinship groups'» .

While agreeing that the initial stage of the system was the primitive human herd, scholars proposed different variants for the second and third stages, corresponding to the flourishing of clan society and the dissolution of the commune. Thus M. O. Kosven distinguishes, within the stage of the clan system, matriarchy, patriarchy and military democracy; A. I. Pershits — the periods of the early clan, early agricultural clan, and neighbourhood-extended-family commune[27]. For his part, Yu. I. Semyonov later correlated with the epoch of the primitive herd the formation of the human being and of human society, and the subsequent history of the clan system as the development of an already formed society. Emphasising that the dividing line between these periods is deeper than the boundaries between other formations, the scholar insisted that clan society be considered the first socio-economic formation .

In 1989 Yu. V. Pavlenko published the following scheme, reflecting, in his view, the correlation of formational categories and subcategories: