Origin of family - Engels

The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the light of the researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats) [ Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family; the idea was accepted by most pre-historians and anthropologists throughout the late nineteenth century.
Also interested in what leads to social change, he was a contemporary of the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were influenced by reading his work on social structure and material culture, the influence of technology on progress. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by such diverse scholars as Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Morgan served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1879.
Morgan was a Republican member of the New York State Assembly (Monroe Co., 2nd D.) in 1861, and of the New York State Senate in 1868 and 1869.] is a historical materialist treatise written by Friedrich Engels and published in 1884. It is partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society. The book is one of the first major works within the family economics.
Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in just two months – beginning toward the end of March 1884 and completing it by the end of May. It focuses on early human history, following the disintegration of the primitive community and the emergence of a class society based on private property. Engels looks into the origin and essence of the state, and concludes it is bound to wither away leaving a classless society.
This work systematically set out to provide a social explanation for the emergence of women’s oppression with the development of the social institutions of the patriarchal family and private property at a particular historic period.
Tit-bits of Engels study;
1. Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour,
2. For Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx 40 years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at.
3. According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
4. Meanwhile, more and more facts soon came to light, which did not fit into his neat scheme. McLennan knew only three forms of marriage — polygamy, polyandry and monogamy. But once attention had been directed to this point, more and more proofs were discovered of the fact that among undeveloped peoples forms of marriage existed in which a group of men possessed a group of women in common; and Lubbock (in his The Origin of Civilisation. 1870) acknowledged this group marriage (“communal marriage”) to be a historical fact.
5. 1. The Consanguine Family — the first stage of the family. Here the marriage groups are ranged according to generations: all the grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all mutual husbands and wives, the same being the case with their children, the fathers and mothers, whose children will again form a third circle of common mates, their children — the great-grandchildren of the first — in turn, forming a fourth circle.
     2. The Punaluan Family. If the first advance in organisation was the exclusion of parents and children from mutual sexual relations, the second was the exclusion of brothers and sisters. In view of the greater similarity in the ages of the participants, this step forward was infinitely more important, but also more difficult, than the first. It was accomplished gradually, commencing most probably with the exclusion of natural brothers and sisters (that is, on the maternal side) from sexual relations, at first in isolated cases, then gradually becoming the rule (in Hawaii exceptions to this rule still existed in the present century), and ending with the prohibition of marriage.
   3. The Pairing Family. A certain pairing for longer or shorter periods took place already under group marriage, or even earlier. Among he was her principal husband, among the others. This situation contributed in no small degree to the confusion among the missionaries, who see in group marriage, now promiscuous community of wives, now wanton adultery. Such habitual pairing, however, necessarily became more and more established as the gens developed and as the numbers of classes of “brothers” and “sisters” between which marriage was now impossible increased. The impetus given by the gens to prevent marriage between blood relatives drove things still further. Thus we find that among the Iroquois and most other Indian tribes in the lower stage of barbarism, marriage is prohibited between all relatives recognised by their system, and these are of several hundred kinds.
Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his children. But this was impossible as long as descent according to mother right prevailed. This had, therefore, to be overthrown, and it was overthrown; and it was not so difficult to do this as it appears to us now. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind — need not have disturbed one single living member of a gens. All the members could remain what they were previously. The simple decision sufficed that in future the descendants of the male members should remain in the gens, but that those of the females were to be excluded from the gens and transferred to that of their father.
4. The Monogamian Family. As already indicated, this arises out of the pairing family in the transition period from the middle to the upper stage of barbarism, its final victory being one of the signs of the beginning of civilisation. It is based on the supremacy of the man; its express aim is the begetting of children of undisputed paternity, this paternity being required in order that these children may in due time inherit their father’s wealth as his natural heirs. The monogamian family differs from pairing marriage in the far greater rigidity of the marriage tie, which can now no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. Now, as a rule, only the man can dissolve it and cast off his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity remains his even now, sanctioned, as least, by custom (the Code Napoléon expressly concedes this right to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the conjugal home19), and is exercised more and more with the growing development of society.
While, as Marx observes, the position of the goddesses in mythology represents an earlier period, when women still occupied a freer and more respected place, in the Heroic Age we already find women degraded owing to the predominance of the man and the competition of female slaves. One may read in the Odyssey how Telemachus cuts his mother short and enjoins silence upon her.
The old conjugal system, now reduced to narrower limits by the gradual disappearance of the punaluan groups, still environed the advancing family, which it was to follow to the verge of civilisation … It finally disappeared in the new form of hetaerism, which still follows mankind in civilisation as a dark shadow upon the family.

MORGAN is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man; so long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force.

Of the three main epochs – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – he is concerned, of course, only with the first two and the transition to the third. He divides both savagery and barbarism into lower, middle, and upper stages according to the progress made in the production of food; for, he says:

Upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human supremacy on the earth depended. Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food.... It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence.

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 19. -Ed.]

The development of the family takes a parallel course, but here the periods have not such striking marks of differentiation.

Origin of Family

A society in primitive age was of two kinds. 1. Primitive age , and  2. Age of Barbarism.

In the primitive age people lived on entirely dependent on nature having no weapon to protect themselves or to procure food for them. In barbarous age men began to live in a permanent  shelter, began animal husbandry, cultivating lands. Though they had weapons made up of stone which they could make in the shape according to their need. But in  the case of relation between a man and a woman at this stage, a difference of opinion exists. According to Engels the relation between a man and a woman differs from that in the case prevailed as in animals. In animals we find all types of relations in the case of mammals. Actually, there are no definite or a single system. They had one to one relation, many to many relation, one to many and many to one relation regarding their sexual behaviour.
A community and an individual have its own contribution. When individual family life developed community life disappeared. On the other hand, when many to many sexual life developed, a community relationship developed automatically.
Primitive family life was community marriage. In such a family each man had relation with each woman and there was nothing to envy upon. Sexual relationship was open and was simple. But there was a generation gap. Each man behaved as husband to each woman within the same generation which was true for the next generation also. Thus a clan was developed. Marriage between the male and the female within the clan was not allowed.
As communal marriage was in vogue, it became difficult to determine the father of a new baby in a community. Therefore, the child was known after its mother and the clan was determined by his mother.
In the primitive stage the property of a community was meant only household goods, shelters, weapons to procure food and other productive forces. In the higher form of barbarous stage, property included animal husbandry which gradually became individual property. Thus a community became richer than the other and some became servants to others. After some time these slaves became the property of an individual as the animals.
As the clan was determined by the female, the male after marriage come to the family of the female. But as the property became huge, the influence of the male increased and the bindings of the matriarchal family gradually became loosened.      
 

Marx on Religioon

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society William H. Swatos, Jr. Editor

Table of Contents | Cover Page | Editors | Contributors | Introduction | Web Version

MARX, KARL

(1818-1883) Social economist, born in Trier, Germany. Marx's father was a lawyer who, because his Jewish religion caused him to be deprived of social and occupational mobility, decided to convert himself and his children to Protestantism. (His wife converted much later after her mother's death.) After university studies at Bonn and Berlin, with a doctorate from Jena in 1841, Marx assumed the editorship of the Reinische Zeitung , a newspaper opposed to the ruling political system. Because of his socialist perspective, Marx had to flee Germany. For a while he lived in Paris, where in 1848 he and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto and participated in the 1848-1849 revolution. After its defeat, Marx again had to flee and settled in London, where he began his studies in political economy that led to the publication of Capital . He lived in London until his death. Theory of Religion Marx's theory of religion (Marx and Engels 1975:38 f) must be viewed as an aspect of his general theory of society. Like many others in his era, Marx too was critical of religion. Unlike them, however, Marx did not seek to criticize the logic of religion as a set of beliefs. Rather, he proposed that religion reflects society, therefore any criticism of religion must ipso facto be a criticism of society itself. "Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics ." Religion for Marx is a human product. "Man makes religion, religion doesn't make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again." In short, what Marx proposes is that religion does not reflect man's true consciousness. Religion, as Marx sees it, is a false consciousness; religion is the product of men, the product of those in power—those who control the productive process. Religion comes to divert people's attention from their miseries, which are the consequences of exploitation. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion. This passage clearly illustrates Marx's view that religion is not the creation of the bourgeoisie but the resulting conditions of the historical systems of exploitation. Given that religion has existed long before capitalism, its clear that, even from Marx's view, this is not the product of capitalism. It is the natural consequence of distress, which includes both transvaluation and ressentiment . Both Marx and Engels renounced the anarchists such as the Blanquists and Dühring who sought to use coercive methods against religion. For Marx and Engels, religion cannot be eliminated until the social and political conditions that foster it are eliminated. A concomitant factor is the development of religion as a compensatory mechanism. This is achieved through the process of transvaluation (Nietzsche 1927 [1887]). This is the process by which those of the lower class when faced with their powerless conditions redefine them and attribute a positive value to those conditions (see Mannheim 1936: 45 f). This, for instance, is best exemplified in the Christian teachings of meekness, turning the other cheek, and the desirability of poverty. But are not people aware of their interests? Are not people aware that religion serves the interests of the ruling classes? The answer is obviously—No. It is no because people are socialized into believing that what they know is the truth. Marx proposes that religion internalizes in people a set of beliefs that are contrary to their interest but are in the interest of the ruling class. In short, it teaches obedience to authority as a condition for achieving future happiness through salvation. Both Halévy (1971 [1906]) and Thompson (1966), for instance, suggest that the rise of Methodism in England was a primary force that dissipated political fermentation that, in their opinion, otherwise would have led to revolution. In fact, Marx was even skeptical of Christian socialism's ability to serve the interests of the proletariat. He comments that just "as the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. . . . Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priests consecrate the heartburn of the aristocrats" (Marx and Engels 1968 [1848]: 55). In the Communist Manifesto , Marx suggests that religion, like morality and philosophy, must be eliminated if we are to achieve a new political and economic existence. "Communism," he and Engels write, "abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on new basis" (1968:52). The reason for this is the historical evidence that regardless of previous changes in the productive systems, religion has always supported the maintenance of the legitimacy of the exploiter and exploited. Thus, to create a truly free society, religion as a tie to the past must be eliminated. Religion as the Social Superstructure To Marx, religion is one facet of that whole that he called the superstructure and that is based on and affected by the infrastructure . Differences in religion occur with changes in the infrastructure. Thus Marx and Engels proposed that earlier (precapitalist) religious beliefs arose from primitive man's helplessness in his struggle against nature, while in the class society it is rooted in his struggle against man. In man's quest and struggle against his exploiters, the working masses experience a different form of helplessness—and this experience is what changed religion and introduced the belief in a better life in a hereafter, the alleged reward for his earthly suffering. Moreover, Engels suggests in "Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity" (in Marx and Engels 1975) that Christianity, with its concept of salvation, reflects the outlook of utterly despairing people, of slaves who lost their battles with their masters, of indigent people and Greeks and other nationalities who lost wealth and status. Religion as a Dominant Ideology In The German Ideology , Marx (Marx and Engels 1976 [c. 1845]: 67) writes, The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. . . . The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self evident that they do this in its whole range , hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the idea of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. One apparatus of the transmission of ideas is the church through religion. Religion adds legitimacy to ideas (by making them sacred) that enhance the ruling class's economic position and their hegemony. (This view has been challenged in Abercombie et al. 1980.) The influence religion exerts on the lower classes is only possible to the extent that they constitute a class by itself (eine Klasse en Sich) , namely, a class that has not developed a class consciousness. However, when a class develops consciousness, becomes aware of its own interests and become a class for itself (eine Klasse für Sich) , then the consciousness it develops reflects its own interests. Marx and Judaism Marx's opposition to Christianity was extremely mild compared with hostility to Judaism. While on the one hand his hostility toward Jews may reflect a general anti-Semitism that pervaded Germany, and in fact made the mid-twentieth-century Holocaust possible, on the other hand it also reflects his hostility to his mother and her family, the Phillips, who were wealthy Dutch manufacturers. His hostile view of Jews and Judaism is expressed in 1843 under the title "On the Jewish Question" (Marx 1977 [1843]). This essay is Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer's study on the emancipation of Jews in Germany. In the first part of the essay, Marx seeks to solve the problem of the duality of egoistic individualism that can be expressed in the "civil society" and the political individual as a member of the state. In the second section, Marx turns to the question of Jewish emancipation. Here he advocates the need to emancipate the Christian world, which made the civil world possible, from Judaism. The real Jew, in contrast to the abstract Jew, is a selfish huckster whose god is Mammon. This hostile attitude was not due to his lack of knowledge of Jewish history. Feuer (1969: 36 f.) writes of Marx, "He knew the history of the Spanish and German Jews and their decisions to resist economic determination and to sacrifice their goods for their religious loyalties." Marx's hatred of Jews in general and Dutch Jews in particular is so intense, so dogmatic, that it led him, according to Feuer, to the verge of a conspiracy theory of history that cannot be but a "reaction-formation," an ego-defense mechanism of an insecure person. In spite of a number of problems with his ideology and personality, Marx's theory of society and of religion, while in many ways controversial, has nonetheless provided great insight into the functioning of society. While one may not accept his political views, his social theory based on the interaction between the social infrastructure and superstructure has been and continues to be an important departing point for the sociological approach to the study of society and religion. —Eugen Schoenfeld

Origin of Religion

Religion originated in the age of "Totem" when the primitive person went out for hunting . They thought that the animals are more powerful than human beings they began praying help from them. Each "totem" had its own animal for praying. They portrait their image on their weapons. Sometimes they also embalmed their image on the walls of the caves where they live.
When humans first became religious remains unknown, but there is credible evidence of religious behavior from the Middle Paleolithic era (300–500 thousand years ago) and possibly earlier.

Paleolithic burials

The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead. Most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their own species. Ritual burial thus represents a significant change in human behavior. Ritual burials represent an awareness of life and death and a possible belief in the afterlife. Philip Lieberman states "burials with grave goods clearly signify religious practices and concern for the dead that transcends daily life."
The earliest evidence for treatment of the dead comes from Atapuerca in Spain. At this location the bones of 30 individuals believed to be Homo heidelbergensis have been found in a pit. Neanderthals are also contenders for the first hominids to intentionally bury the dead. They may have placed corpses into shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones. The presence of these grave goods may indicate an emotional connection with the deceased and possibly a belief in the afterlife. Neanderthal burial sites include Shanidar in Iraq and Krapina in Croatia and Kebara Cave in Israel.
The earliest known burial of modern humans is from a cave in Israel located at Qafzeh. Human remains have been dated to 100,000 years ago. Human skeletons were found stained with red ochre. A variety of grave goods were found at the burial site. The mandible of a wild boar was found placed in the arms of one of the skeletons. Philip Lieberman states:

"Burial rituals incorporating grave goods may have been invented by the anatomically modern hominids who emigrated from Africa to the Middle East roughly 100,000 years ago".

Matt Rossano suggests that the period in between 80,000–60,000 years after humans retreated from the Levant to Africa was a crucial period in the evolution of religion.

The first form of Religion was to worship "Animals".
At first the aged persons were engaged in worship. Some among the aged became expert in rituals. they were called Priests. The priests demanded price for worshiping.

Origin of Language

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals.

Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.
 
When and how the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that its evolution must have been a long process.

Our ancestors were probably speaking a million years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar than we are accustomed to.
  Origins of language

The origins of human language will perhaps remain for ever obscure. By contrast the origin of individual languages has been the subject of very precise study over the past two centuries.

There are about 5000 languages spoken in the world today (a third of them in Africa), but scholars group them together into relatively few families - probably less than twenty. Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions. The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago.

At first the human beings used o communicate with its fellows just as the animals did by sounds and body languages. But as the development of weapons proceeded languages began to develop. First of all some words were created . A word was used to mean more than one object. Such as the same word was used to mean "water" and "cloud", same word was used to mean the "quantity" and " number". But along with the progress of the productive forces, the languages began to develop in its present form. Probably it took million of years to develop languages in the present form its primitive stages. Actually it took a proper shape during the age of agriculture and animal husbandry.  

Trade in Primitive Society and class division

When the people of Primitive Society became confined to a particular place due to inclement weather they began agriculture and animal husbandry. At that time they also tried to collect wool for their protection. The people who used to get animal husbandry, would have want of cereals. Thus they needed exchange of their product with others who were used to agriculture as their occupation and a trade system developed in the primitive society. The people in the desert area started trade with other community. But such exchange of products among them was not individual affair but restricted within the two or more communities. One community exchanged products with that of the  other community. But even in such a restriction,  some families became rich among the tribes of the other families. Thus exploitation began within the families of a community.
In primitive society division of labour and class division started.
In the family of shepherds, it became patriarchal, because in this occupation some physical strength was needed where as in agricultural society, it was matriarchal. In matriarchal society number of family members became gradually increasing than that of the patriarchal society.   Due to the increase of products in a community a surplus of their products began to grow and a storage for surplus food became necessary  In the shepherd families weapons made up of metals required. At first the weapons are made up of copper because copper was available on the surface of earth. In due course they made it hard by mixing it with tin, lead etc.
In the case of agricultural society lands available were distributed among its members were not even. Some lands were more fertile than the other. Thus differences of the wealth began to grow not only in two societies but also in two families. Thus some families became slaves for want of food. Class societies began to develop in primitive stages. The differences and exploitation between two societies and families developed. Gradually class societies and class families developed in primitive society.

From primitive communism to class society

Compared with a lion, a gorilla, or even a horse, the human animal is weak, slow and defenseless. And yet homo sapiens has become the dominant species of the planet. Our species developed none of the specialized attributes that have fitted other creatures so well for their environments. Physiologically, we have hardly evolved at all since we became a distinct species. Whereas other species have evolved to fit their environments and the available food supplies, human beings have remained unspecialised, but very adaptable. Instead of their bodies altering to suit their environments, they have altered their environments to suit themselves.
Human beings spread across the surface of the planet, occupying tropical rain forests, deserts, temperate regions, and even polar ice. They lived on virtually every type of food possible, from seal fat to tropical fruits and desert insects. And from this variety of life-pattems there arose wide differences in knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, feelings and behaviour. Almost every conceivable kind of belief has been adopted by some humans at some time somewhere. Although we are one species, from the jungle of New Guinea to the streets of New York, the inhabitants of different places may think and act in quite dissimilar ways
And yet a baby, carried across the world from New Guinea to New York and brought up there, could become a complete New Yorker, with the accent, the food preferences, the personal habits, the love of baseball, and the average tendency towards obesity, heart disease, divorce and crime. The basic animal is the same, but all behaviour patterns and ideas are shaped by the society in which the child is brought up.
But if societies mould individuals, different types of society are themselves shaped by a number of external factors, as well as by the activities of individuals and classes within them. The basic needs of the human animal are, like those of any other mammal, food, drink, warmth and sex. But these needs have not always been easily met .For most of human existence, the lives of the great majority have been dominated by scarcity. The methods of making a living from the land and sea have therefore been the major influences on the sorts of lives people have led, the types of society that have been formed, and the attitudes and behaviour of those societies
We do not know exactly how long ago human beings evolved from other species. Modern man, according to many anthropologists, emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and gradually spread out from there to replace all earlier species in the rest of the world (Snooks, 1996:50). For most of that time people lived communally, through hunting and gathering. For many thousands of years there was no private property, no money, no working for wages, no stock exchange and no class divisions. People lived with and for one another. It was a system of primitive communism.
The comic cartoon idea of the cave man with his club displaying aggression towards everyone is a fiction. Such an individual would not have lasted a week in the world of prehistory. Human beings have survived and prospered because they are adaptable and they have co-operated with one another. Long before there were private property societies with their class divisions and exploitation, small hunter-gatherer communities relied for their existence on all members playing their part. This co-operation lasted for many tens of thousands of years. The remnants of it can still be seen in surviving primitive communities such as of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the pygmies of the Congo rain forests, Australian aborigines and South American Indians.
The earliest human societies -as self-sufficient producer groups -would have been composed of relatively small numbers whose members survived in nature as nomadic bands capturing and killing wild animals and gathering wild plants, fruits and insects. The particular character of these material conditions of production demanded a certain division of labour between hunters, gatherers and those engaged in making the tools used in these activities. They also demanded free access to nature, the main means of production
Thus, in accordance with the material conditions of production in which hunter-gatherer societies operated, they were societies which did not know private ownership of the means of production. There was no private ownership of what was produced. What was produced -whether by hunting or gathering -was not the private property of the hunter or the hunting party or of the gatherer(s) but was to be shared out among all the members of the group on an equitable basis. Hunting, gathering and tool-making were all regarded as essential activities entitling those who performed them to be maintained by the whole group.
It used to be thought that living by hunting and gathering was a bad way to live. But recent evidence suggests that they lived in surprisingly abundant environments that provided all of the basic calories, nutrients and proteins they needed, and they worked relatively few hours to enjoy those things. This left them plenty of free time for visiting relatives, playing games, or just relaxing (Sanderson, 1995:21).
Anthropologists who live among the hunter-gatherers who survive today describe the ways in -which they are generally free from material pressures. According to Sahlins:
It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic impulses; they simply never made an institution of them… We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them as free. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society (1972:14)
Settled agriculture
The practice of settled agriculture represented a major change in the material conditions of production. It meant an end to nomadism and the establishment of settled communities. It also meant an increase in the amount of food available, so permitting an increase in the size of human communities. But it also involved a different division of labour which paved the way, as it developed, for the emergence of minority control over access to the means of production.
The first settled agricultural communities would have been established by societies which had previously practised hunting and gathering and so had a communistic economic structure. This was characterised by the absence of private ownership of the means of production and by the sharing of products according to need. After the adoption of agriculture, these communistic economic arrangements survived for a while, but tended to break down in the long run as they no longer corresponded to the material conditions of production.
The social arrangement for meeting the material requirements of early agriculture is most likely to have been the allocation to family units of plots of land to cultivate. This was not yet the establishment of private ownership, but it meant the end of free access to the means of production that had obtained in hunter-gatherer societies. It ruled out any member of society simply helping themselves to the products of any plot of land. Normally they would only have free access to the products of the plot cultivated by the family unit to which they belonged.
Nevertheless, such a limitation is not incompatible with the continuation of some communistic practices. The actual cultivators could still be regarded by the community as performing a function on its behalf and be required by social custom to contribute any surplus product to a common store on which any member in need could draw. This could happen, for instance, as a result of their crops having failed or been destroyed by a storm. Such social arrangements have been discovered in societies at this stage of development which have survived into modern times.
The existence of a common store becomes another aspect of the society's material conditions of production and requires a social arrangement for managing this store -collecting and distributing the surpluses. The usual arrangement seems to have been to confer this responsibility on a particular family. Arguments can go on as to whether being given this responsibility was conferred on a family whose head had already acquired this status for other reasons -perhaps military or religious. But the fact remains that this role of collecting and redistributing surpluses had to be filled if all the members of the community were able to meet their basic needs as of right.
The Emergence of Class Society
It is easy to imagine how over time the co-ordinating role in distribution could become a source of privileged consumption for the chief and his family. The duty to contribute any surplus products to the common storehouse could become a duty to contribute this to the chief, and the chief and his family could come to consume an excessive amount of the stores at the expense of distributing them to those in need.
The tendency for what was originally a necessary technical function to evolve into a social privilege would have been even more pronounced when the co-ordinating role concerned production rather than simply distribution. It was the case when large-scale irrigation works had to be managed so that agriculture could be practised. For instance, this happened with agriculture in the Nile, Euphrates and other river valleys. It was the main material condition of production which gave rise to an economic structure in which the cultivators were exploited by a class of priests who collectively controlled the key means of production which the irrigation works represented.
The emergence of control over means of production by a section of society, or social class, was a radical departure in human social arrangements. Production was no longer controlled by society as a whole. Such societies ceased to be communities with a common interest and became divided, with one class, on the basis of its control over access to and use of the material forces of production, exploiting the productive work of the other class and allocating itself a privileged consumption.
The emergence of class and property meant that some humans acquired the power to exclude others from access to the material forces of production, including nature, except on their terms. In these circumstances, humans ceased to be a united community seeking to satisfy the needs of all its members. Instead they became members of a class-divided society in which there is internal conflict over how the material forces of production and distribution should be used: to satisfy the needs of all or to accumulate wealth for the few.
Throughout history this conflict has nearly always been settled in favour of the class that has controlled the means of production. There are two main reasons for this. First, the power of this class was based on a real functional role within the division of labour, at least originally. Secondly, this class controlled armed bodies to enforce its will, thus enabling it to hold on to power, at least for a while, even after its original function in organising production had disappeared and been taken over by some other group as a result of technological change
The discovery and utilisation of metals, and the development of more and more complex tools and machines have usually gone hand in hand with progress in methods of making a living, increasing the amount of wealth produced per capita many times over. But the benefits of these improvements have not been shared by all members of society. After the rise of settled townships on an agricultural base in Mesopotamia, trade between localities developed. For the first time the products of hands and brains took on an alien life as commodities to be bartered, and then bought and sold with the abstract commodity of money. Property, realised at the boundary between tribes, began to impinge within them. The first property society came to be developed when people were bought and sold as slaves.
Slavery
Slavery differs fundamentally from wage labour. With the wage system the labour power of the worker becomes one of the main commodities in the marketplace. With slavery the workers themselves become commodities, they have no rights and are legally the property of the person who controls them. Slaves were fundamental to the economy of ancient Greece and Rome during their classical periods -the fifth to third centuries BC for Greece and the first century BC to the second century AD for Rome (Applebaum, 1992:170).
Anyone might have become a slave through capture in war, piracy, or breaking the law. They could be bought or sold through the slave trade on the open market. Slaves in theory had no rights. They were property and might be disposed of as their masters wished. In practice, slaves did have some protection under the law -the owner could not maltreat slaves or put them to death with impunity.
Access to political power was unthinkable for slaves. The only form of action they could take was running away when a favourable opportunity arose. However, it cannot be assumed that all slaves occupied a low status in Greek and Roman society, although undoubtedly most of them did. Slaves worked on farms, in workshops and in mines, mostly under harsh conditions. But there were slaves employed as managers and administrators, especially during the Roman Empire. Slaves were also employed as professionals, teachers, doctors, and household servants. Some slaves who were engaged in commerce even engaged their own slaves.
Between 1500 and 1870 plantations in the southern USA, the Caribbean and Brazil contained 10 million slaves (Wallace, 1990:71). Although it is mainly an institution of the past, slavery or slave-like practices are still common around the world (Levinson and Christensen, 1996:291). The three main forms are child labour, debt bondage and forced labour. Around 100 million children world-wide are forced to work long hours in unhealthy conditions and are paid little or nothing for their labour. In India alone an estimated 6.5 million people have pledged their labour against debts. Often the debt bondage (illegal since 1976) remains so for life.
Feudalism
In the feudal system absolute ownership of the land is vested in the feudal lord but, unlike the slave owner, his title to the worker (serf) is not absolute. The lord owns him merely by title to a share of his labour. In return he is obligated to grant the worker use of some land, some ownership of tools and some of the products of his own labour. Slavery thus gave way to serfdom. In both cases the majority was exploited by the minority. The slave owned none of the products of his labour but was fed and clothed by his owner. The serf had enough to keep himself and his family alive, but the rest was appropriated by the lord, a non-producer (Venable, 1945:100).
Feudalism evolved as a hierarchical system of personal relationships in which land and military power—and of course the labour of the serfs—were the principal commodities exchanged. (Singman 1999:4). The system was strengthened and expanded in Britain with the eleventh-century Norman Conquest. In feudal times the king nominally owned all the land. He granted lands to his tenants-in-chief, the aristocracy, and they in return had to give military service to him and pay customary dues which comprised a percentage of their wealth. Not only did the feudal aristocracy and the church own most of the land, but they controlled the men and women who lived and worked on it. The landlords had their own courts, they levied taxes and exacted services from their serfs and, in times of war, they ordered their subjects to fight their battles.
The power of the feudal lord depended on the amount of land he owned and the number of peasants he could control. Peasants had feudal obligations to their landlord. They either had to work on his land for a certain length of time each week or else they had to give him a portion of their produce in return for living on his land. Either way, the landlord received his wealth without having to work.
Every family had access to a piece of land for cultivation and to the commons for pasturing their animals. Their rights were recognised by all. The behaviour which regulated society was not backed by sanctions -law, police or army -but by custom which was a condition of existence: expulsion from the community could mean death from hunger or exposure (Smith, 1994:58).
Capitalist social relations emerged with the expropriation of common land by the aristocracy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The lands were enclosed to be used for sheep farming rather than arable cultivation. One reason for this was that the new Flemish woollen industry made sheep more profitable tenants than peasants. Enclosure destroyed the lives of thousands of peasant families, turning them into propertyless vagabonds. In dealing with the primitive accumulation of capital, Marx wrote:
The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as voluntary criminals and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed (1954, vol. 1 :686).

Deprived of their land, their homes, their traditional surroundings and the protection of the law, the expropriated peasantry were left to sell the one thing they possessed -their ability to work. The introduction of wage labour was the starting point of capitalism..
     

Family and Marriage in Primitive Society

The development of mode of production corresponds to the development human Society from its primitive stages. there were three stages of development of the mode of production of the primitive society.
1. At first the people of the primitive society took the weapons as they received in the nature, such as , a stick, a stone etc.
2. In the next stage they began to make the weapons sharpen with the help of another stone , and lastly
3. After the discovery fire and metal they began to construct metal weapons replacing the weapons made up of stones.
The society too began to grow from its stage commune to the stage of small groups called as "totem" consisting of five to six members.  
A totem is a being, object, or symbol representing an animal or plant that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe, reminding them of their ancestry (or mythic past). In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a totem. Normally this belief is accompanied by a totemic myth.
Although the term is of Ojibwe origin in North America, totemistic beliefs are not limited to Native Americans and Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Similar totem-like beliefs have been historically present in societies throughout much of the world, including Africa, Arabia, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the Arctic polar region.

In modern times, some single individuals, not otherwise involved in the practice of a tribal religion, have chosen to adopt a personal spirit animal helper, which has special meaning to them, and may refer to this as a totem. This non-traditional usage of the term is prevalent in the New Age movement and the mythopoetic men's movement.
Five or six totems formed a tribe. In eighteenth century these totems societies were visible in North America. Each totem had its own name and logo of the name of a beast which they engraved on their weapons and the place of their habitation. During their going out for hunting they selected their leaders.the senior citizens were engaged in sharpening the weapons and made the young trained in hunting. The senior citizens of each tribe formed a council. But they did not have any rights on the area of hunting or on weapons. Though they received the lion share of the hunts.
The marriage in such a society of totems was under control. The marriage between the two were free and open subject to divorce if needed. A male could marry any number of females and vice verso, a female could marry any number of males. Ofcourse, the marriage should take place in two different totems.
When the people became confined to a particular place due to inclement weather they began fishing in a pond or a river and thus a categorical change of the products and the productive forces took place. The primitive men became fishermen instead of hunters. They began thinking in a particular place and construct their own houses for dwelling. They began agricultural work and maintain livestock. Thus they began to keep domestic animals and used to make stores for preserving their materials etc.
After getting their habitation fixed to a particular place, they got their family bondage more firm.
The male member after their marriage used to live in the family of the female. The society was matriarchal.
Agriculture was first adopted by the females. The the leader of a society was elected from the male members which could not take place without the consent of the females.
Even at the middle of the nineteenth century Morgan, a famous anthropologists, observed the a matriarchal society in America among the Yorkers at the middle of the nineteenth century.
Thus they started business between two neighboring tribes.But in such a society production and distribution was equal and the property belonged to the community.              

Marxian Study of Primitive Society

Hunter-gatherer society/Primitive Communism
WE ARE taught to think that class society has always existed - that class exploitation is a natural and unavoidable part of human society. But this is not true. The earliest human societies were classless societies based on co-operation and consensus, without the systematic exploitation or oppression of any one group by another.
This type of society, which is usually called hunter-gatherer society, was not a brief change from the 'normal' exploitation and oppression we see in class society. It was the only way human society was organised for over 100,000 years, until class society began developing around 10,000 years ago. Even today there are a few areas around the world where hunter-gatherer societies still exist, though this may not be the case for much longer (all of them are under pressure to become absorbed into the capitalist world economy).
Why were hunter-gatherer societies run so differently to society today? The answer lies in the way in which the production of the necessities of life were organised.
They depended on finding enough food to survive through a combination of hunting and scavenging wild animals and gathering wild plants. They were at the mercy of their environment and had no way of storing more than small amounts of food long-term, particularly as they usually had to travel long distances to find food.
Everyone was involved in producing the necessities of life (food, shelter etc) because otherwise the group would starve. There was no room for an elite to develop who could exploit the labour of others.
There were often differences in the work people did. For example in many hunter-gatherer societies women appear to have done more childcare while men tended to do more hunting, although this basic division of labour was very flexible and did not exist everywhere.
However, where they did happen these differences were due to practical reasons and not given value-judgments about the status of particular types of work, or the people doing them (as they are today). It was only when class society arose that childcare and other work more associated with women became devalued and the systematic oppression of women began. (For more information about the oppression of women and the role of the family under class society, see the section Why are women oppressed? in the Socialist Women’s pack – available separately).
Hunter-gatherer societies tended to operate in small groups (the size of groups depended on the availability of resources) which were linked to a number of other small groups in the same area. Studies of hunter-gatherer societies carried out in the last century show that in many cases they had developed a complex system of sharing resources within and between the groups as a kind of insurance against famine or conflict.
In hunter-gatherer society, if one group does well it is in their own long-term interests to share the fruits of their success with other groups. If they have a surplus of food they cannot eat or store they give some to other groups, understanding that if another group is successful the original group will be able to share their surplus. This not only helps the groups through the times when food is scarce, it also reduces conflict between them. When everyone is dependent on each other, it is in everyone's interests to avoid conflict.
Marx and Engels described hunter-gatherer society as 'primitive communism', because the way in which the necessities of life are produced and distributed in hunter-gatherer society - its 'mode of production' - in turn produces a democratic and co-operative method of decision-making. The quote below describes how this worked among G/wi-speaking bushmen in the central Kalahari reserve of Botswana in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
‘Consensus is reached by a process of examination of the various proffered courses of action and rejection of all but one of them. It is a process of attrition of alternatives other than the one to which there remains no significant opposition. That one, then, is the one which is adopted. The fact that it is the band [group] as a whole which decides . . . is both necessary and sufficient to legitimise what is decided and to make the decision binding on all who are concerned with, and affected by, it.’
Political process in G/wi bands by George Silberbauer
(from Politics and history in band societies, edited by Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee, published by Cambridge University Press, 1982).
We are often told that the selfishness, brutality and war we see in the world today are part of human nature; that humans are not designed to co-operate and live as equals. But the existence of 'primitive communist' societies all over the world for such a long period of time proves that this is not the case.
Human nature has almost endless possibilities. Life under hunter-gatherer society was certainly not perfect: there was bound to be hardship and disagreements between individuals. But the way society was organised under hunter-gatherer society helped to bring out the most positive and co-operative aspects of human nature. At the same time, more negative things such as greed and selfishness were pushed into the background. A socialist society, like hunter-gatherer society, would be able to bring out the best in human nature.
The Neolithic revolution . . .
AROUND 10,000 years ago two discoveries began to revolutionise the way human society was organised: the cultivation of plants (agriculture) and the domestication of animals.
These two achievements, known as the Neolithic revolution, enabled humans to gain a degree of control over their environment for the first time ever. The productivity of labour increased enormously: instead of travelling to where they could find adequate food at different times of the year, humans could grow or keep their own supplies of food and were no longer completely dependent on natural conditions.
This led to the establishment of more permanent settlements, where reserves of food could be stored and where crops and animals could be cared for and protected against raids. The amount of food available increased dramatically, while there was also a rapid growth in the size of the population in Neolithic society.
For the first time ever, human society was able to produce a permanent surplus (the amount of food and goods produced over and above what they needed to survive). This allowed a section of society to be released from the day-to-day work of producing the necessities of life without endangering the survival of the group.
This meant that a section of society were able to concentrate much more on specific specialist tasks, which ranged from conducting rituals believed to help bring food and fortune to the group to tool-making and the development of new techniques such as the smelting of metal and firing of pottery. This led to new and more productive ways of using human labour, for example by the use of metal tools in agriculture.
As the productivity of labour increased and some societies became more complex, a layer of administrators also emerged. For example the first known writing system in the world was developed by the Sumerians in the years leading up to 3,000 BC.
The development of Sumerian society, which arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers not far from modern-day Baghdad, was based on irrigation: human-made systems of channels to take rainwater and river water to fields of crops. This massively increased the yield of crops. But to organise the work of digging irrigation channels to support a large and growing population, and also to make sure that the water was distributed efficiently, Sumerian society needed administrators.
Early Sumerian writing took the form of symbols, scratched into clay tablets to record simple transactions (e.g. so many sheep, or so much grain). But over several hundred years, as the tasks of the administrators grew and became more complex, these early symbols were developed into a real system of writing agreed and understood by all Sumerian administrators (the ability to write and read was a closely-guarded privilege).
. . . & the rise of class society
THE ‘SPECIALISTS’ and administrators who were freed from the work of producing the necessities of life played an enormously progressive role in helping develop the productive forces. However, over a long period of time many of these 'specialists' and their descendants became entrenched in their positions through the accumulation of wealth, status and tradition.
In many areas they began to become a ruling elite, a new class with different interests to others in society. They attempted to make rules in order to protect their privileged position. The most successful of these new elites established special bodies of servants/warriors that they paid to enforce their rules within the group, as well as protecting the group from attacks from outside.
This did not happen without resistance. In some groups it appears that an emerging ruling class was blocked from consolidating their grip on power and collective organisation was re-established. However, such groups tended to be weaker than those with a ruling class, where the productive forces had been developed further. Therefore unless they were geographically isolated from other more developed societies, the collectively-run hunter-gatherer groups generally became absorbed into them anyway, often by defeat in war and enslavement.
The development of human society is based on the development of the productive forces.
THE DEVELOPMENT of tools/machinery or techniques that increase the productivity of human labour, such as the horse-drawn plough, irrigation or the invention of factory production, increases:

the size of the population a society can support;
.

Social Structure of Primitive Human Society

The first socioeconomic formation in human history. The foundations for the doctrine of the primitive communal system as a special socioeconomic formation were laid by K. Marx and F. Engels and were subsequently developed by V. I. Lenin. Most Soviet scientists and scholars believe that the primitive communal system existed from the appearance of the first human beings to the emergence of class society. From the standpoint of archaeology, this period basically coincides with the Stone Age. In the primitive communal system the relationship to the means of production was the same for all members of society. Consequently, the mode of obtaining a share of the social product was the same for all. For this reason, the term “primitive communism” is applied to this system, which is distinguished from succeeding stages of socioeconomic development by the absence of private property, classes, and the state.
There are various viewpoints concerning the origins of the primitive communal system. In the earliest period of history, human beings and society developed. People lived in a formative society that many Soviet scholars call the primitive human herd. If the archanthropoi (for example, Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Atlanthropus, and Heidelberg man) are considered to be the first human beings, the origin of the primitive human herd dates from about 1,000,000 B.C. If pre-Zinjanthropus, or Homo habilis (capable human), is considered to be the first human being, then the primitive herd dates from at least 2,000,000 B.C., and perhaps earlier. According to the most widely held point of view, the epoch of the primitive human herd coincides with the Lower Paleolithic period. Approximately 40,000 to 35,000 years ago, during the transition from the Lower Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, the transformation of the paleoanthropoi into human beings of the modern type (neoanthropoi) was completed. The development of man (anthropogenesis) could not have been completed without the formation of society (sociogenesis). Consequently, there are grounds for believing that the primitive human herd was transformed into a genuine, shaped human society on the threshold of the Upper Paleolithic.
Most scholars refer to the primitive human herd as the first stage of the primitive communal system. Others believe that the concept of socioeconomic formations is applicable only to the levels of evolution of a shaped society. Accordingly, they treat the primitive communal system as the initial stage of development of a shaped society, a stage preceding the emergence of classes and the state. In archaeological terms, this stage coincides with the Upper Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, and perhaps the beginning of the Aeneolithic period.
Throughout the period of primitive communism there was no written language. The history of the primitive communal system has been reconstructed primarily through the data of paleoanthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. There are anthropological and archaeological materials dating from this epoch, but although they provide an adequate idea of the physical appearance and material culture of primitive humans, they tell little about social relations. On the basis of data collected by cultural anthropologists, it is possible to make judgments about all aspects of primitive communal society as a whole. However, cultural anthropology is confined to knowledge of primitive communal systems in the form they acquired among peoples who remained at the stage of preclass society through modern times—that is, epochs six millennia after the appearance of the first class societies. Therefore, contemporary ideas of the primitive communal system include both firmly established propositions and quite a few disputed ones.
Soviet researchers are united on a major point—the belief that the primitive communal system was collectivist. But they differ over many more concrete questions. There are two main lines of thought: the “clan” theory and the “commune” theory. According to the clan theory, on the threshold of the Upper Paleolithic the primitive human herd, in which promiscuity prevailed, was transformed into a matrilineal clan, which was in fact the first instance of a shaped society. By virtue of exogamy, the clan could not exist without ties to other clans. Consequently, the emergence of the clan coincided with the appearance of a system consisting of two intermarrying clans—dual organization. Marriage originated with the clan—initially, group marriage (dual organization) and, in addition, dislocal marriage. As a result of dislocal marriage, the matrilineal clan coincided completely with the community: the clan was the community; the community was the clan.
Some adherents of the matrilineal clan theory do not accept the thesis of dislocal group marriage but favor the thesis of matrilocal marriage. From their point of view, the matrilineal clan and the community do not completely coincide from the very beginning. Each community was made up of people from several clans, but each had as its foundation a single clan. In this sense, each was a clan community. Adherents of the proposition that group marriage was dislocal believe that the clan community structure emerged later, after the appearance of pairing marriage and the family. In many instances, the clan remained matrilineal until the epoch characterized by the accumulation of riches and the transition to the private possession of wealth by individual families. These developments usually resulted in the emergence of the patrilineal clan. Taking this as their point of departure, some researchers distinguish matriarchy and patriarchy as the main stages in the evolution of the primitive communal system. However, cultural anthropology has found evidence that under certain concrete conditions (for example, among the Australian aborigines), the matrilineal clan gave way to the patrilineal clan long before the beginning of the formation of private property. In other cases, the matrilineal clan persisted until the emergence of classes and the state (for example, among the Minangkabau of Sumatra, the Nasi of Yünnan Province in the People’s Republic of China, and the Ashanti of West Africa).
As the primitive communal system develops, the clan gradually loses many of its original functions, including its economic ones, and ceases to be the foundation of the community. It may continue to exist for a long time, but primarily as an institution regulating marital relations, ensuring the defense of its members, and supervising the observance of traditions, worship, and rituals. In this capacity the clan is encountered in class society (for example, among the ancient Greeks and the Romans). At a later stage of the primitive communal system the main economic unit was the commune, which usually consisted of representatives of many clans. This circumstance is the basis for the periodization that designates the epoch of the primitive clan commune and the epoch of the primitive territorial commune as the main stages of the primitive communal system.
According to another viewpoint, the “commune” theory, the basic unit of the primitive communal system at all stages of its development was the primitive commune, which always consisted of pairing families. The commune and the family were the defining and universal units of the primitive communal system. The clan never had economic functions. Its main role was the regulation of marriage. Adherents of this viewpoint do not agree on when the primitive commune first developed. Some of them believe that it emerged on the threshold of the Upper Paleolithic period. Others date its origin to an earlier time; in so doing, they often express opposition to the concept of the “primitive human herd.” Supporters of the commune theory also disagree on when the clan emerged.
The disagreements between the supporters of the clan and commune theories should not, however, be overestimated. If extreme viewpoints juxtaposing the clan and the commune are excluded, the majority of researchers generally agree that during the epoch when the primitive communal system flourished, the clan and the commune essentially coincided.
The collectivist character of primitive production, which is recognized by all Marxist researchers, was the result of the extremely low level of development of the productive forces. K. Marx observed: “This primitive type of collective or cooperative production resulted, of course, from the weakness of the isolated individual, and not from the socialization of the means of production” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch, 2nd ed., vol. 19, p. 404).
The weakness of human beings in the struggle against nature was particularly telling in the earliest stages of the primitive communal system. The first humans (archanthropoi) settled in a comparatively small area restricted to regions with a warm climate (Africa, East and South Asia, and Southwestern Europe). The dominant form of human activity was usually hunting, including collective hunting for large animals. Wooden spears and clubs, as well as stones, served as weapons. Gathering, which apparently supplied most of the food, played an important role. It is an indisputable fact that Sinanthropus used fire, although it is probable that they had not yet learned how to make it. With the transition to paleoanthropoi (Neanderthals), hunting became the main source of livelihood. Humans became acclimatized in regions with harsh conditions. Although methods of working stone were perfected, on the whole, there was little progress in making tools during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Lower Paleolithic. From pebbles with one or two crude chips on one end, man progressed to a relatively small number of conventional implements, of which the best known are the side-scraper and the triangular point.
Techniques of working stone changed radically with the transition to the Upper Paleolithic period. A very valuable and varied set of specialized implements appeared (for example, chisels, adzes, knives, and saws). Techniques of working bone and horn developed. For the first time, various composite implements were made (spears, javelins, and harpoons with flint and bone tips). These developments resulted in the increased productivity of the economy, which, however, continued to be appropriative throughout the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods (approximately 25,000–30,000 years). Hunting and gathering, supplemented by fishing, were the principal sources of livelihood. The inhabited area continued to expand: humans settled in Australia, entered northwestern America via the Bering Strait, and gradually populated the entire Western hemisphere.
The Lower Paleolithic period—the epoch of the primitive human herd—was characterized by the formation of social relations in general, and especially primitive collectivism. There were two main stages in the evolution of the developed primitive communal system, which began with the transition to the Upper Paleolithic period. During the first stage the productive forces had reached a level of development at which the product was no greater or only slightly greater than was necessary to guarantee physical existence, or survival. (In other words, the product was life-supporting, and if there was a surplus product, it was small.) Under these conditions, the only possible mode of distribution was the equalizing mode. Essentially, equalizing relations meant that the entire product, regardless of how and by whom it was obtained, was the complete, indivisible property of the group. As a result, by virtue of affiliation with the group, each member had a right to a share of the product. Neither participation in production nor the amount of the individual member’s contribution to the creation of the product was taken into account in distribution, which was basically carried out solely in relation to need. Consequently, members of the group received unequal shares. Adult males, for example, received a greater share of the product than children. The absolute size of the portions depended on the size of the product. This provided sufficient motivation for labor, as long as there was no surplus product or an extremely small one. Only the strenuous activity of all able-bodied members of the group could guarantee that each member would receive the share necessary for survival. Thus, at the earliest stage of the evolution of the primitive communal system, there could only be collective property. What was sometimes called personal property was actually collective property available for personal use.
The emergence of a minimal surplus product presented the possibility for exchange between members of different groups. Gradually, this possibility became a reality. However, the type of exchange that developed in primitive communal society did not involve commodities. In ethnology, it is referred to as the exchange of gifts, or gift exchange, a form prevalent in preclass society. Cultural anthropologists have found evidence that the principal motivation for the gift exchange was the creation of new ties, or the maintenance of previously existing social ties between individuals or groups.
During the first stage of the evolution of the primitive communal system, the groups usually consisted of no more than a few dozen members. Although they were small, they were independent social organisms in many respects, especially in economic matters. There were no special governing bodies or officials. Some individuals enjoyed considerable influence, but it was based exclusively on their personal qualities. The only regulator of behavior was the will of the group (its moral code), which was expressed in public opinion and consolidated in traditions. Equality between men and women was characteristic of this stage.
The total independence of groups in deciding internal affairs did not preclude ties between them. Moreover, exogamy made these ties inevitable. As a rule, several groups living in an area constituted a system of social organisms—a tribe. Usually, the primitive tribe was not an organized unit. In particular, it lacked general governing bodies. Contacts between groups within a tribe were more frequent and more regular than contacts between groups from different tribes. Consequently, all the groups in a single tribe had a common language and culture, and the primitive tribe was also an ethnic community.
In many respects, the intellectual pursuits of the people of this epoch were undifferentiated and syncretic. The differentiation of various forms of social consciousness was just becoming evident. Through practical activities, the people built up a body of knowledge about their environment and about themselves. However, their ideas included much that was erroneous and illusory. The existence of religion in the Upper Paleolithic is indisputable. At this stage, it consisted of magic and totemism, the rudiments of which had apparently emerged by the time of Neanderthal man. It is also probable that animism had developed by the Upper Paleolithic period. Representational art dates from this period. Realistic, multicolored drawings of animals have been found in caves in southern France, northern Spain, and the Southern Urals (the Kapova Cave). Primitive sculptures in bone, horn, stone, and clay have been discovered. Drawings from the Upper Paleolithic provide evidence of primitive dances.
Production developed slowly but steadily. Progress was made in techniques of working stone, bone, and horn. Methods of hunting and fishing were perfected. During the Mesolithic period the use of the bow and arrow began to spread. Apparently, the domestication of the dog dates to this period. These developments created the conditions for the transition from the first phase of the primitive communal system to the second.
In the second phase of the primitive communal system the level of development of the productive forces made possible a comparatively large surplus product, which laid the foundation for and predetermined a fundamental reconstruction of the entire system of socioeconomic relations.
During the epoch of the primitive communal system the overwhelming majority of tools were used by individuals. As the isolation and parceling of labor increased, owing to improvements in the instruments of production and labor processes, an ever-increasing part of the product created by human labor became more or less completely private property. Referring to this period of history, Marx wrote: “The most essential point is the parceling of labor, the source of private appropriation” (ibid., p. 419).
The parceling of labor proceeded at an extremely slow, gradual pace. At this stage, no person, no family, could exist without sharing (systematically) the products of its labor with other people or other families, without constantly offering and receiving aid. Inasmuch as there was no need for a more or less exact correspondence between what a person gave and what he received in return, these relations were a form of equalizing distribution. The labor mode of distribution presupposed equivalent compensation for all the products and services received by a person. In other words, it presupposed the transformation of distributive relations into exchange relations. The type of exchange associated with this stage of the primitive communal system was qualitatively different from commodity exchange, which developed later. Nonetheless, it contributed to the rise of a type of exchange in which the product gradually assumed the character of a commodity. In the initial stages, the exchange of commodities took place only between members of different communities. It was originally based on the different natural resources at the disposal of different communities. The development of exchange promoted the establishment of the labor mode of distribution. The sphere of operation of the labor mode of distribution gradually expanded. At first, it included only the surplus product; later, it included the product necessary for survival. As a result, the proportion of the social product subject to equalizing distribution decreased, and the circle of persons within which the equalizing principle continued to operate contracted.
Among the inevitable consequences of the parceling of labor was the consolidation of personal property, although communal property persisted for a long time. The parceling of labor also led inevitably to the growth of the family’s role as an economic unit and the emergence of a degree of inequality in property among individuals and families. Gradually, the bulk of the surplus product was concentrated in the hands of a few people, creating the conditions for the appearance of rudimentary forms of exploitation. Communities became larger, often including hundreds of people. Structurally, communities became more complex, consisting of several more or less isolated subdivisions, which, in turn, might be subdivided. Ties between communities became stronger. In many cases, more or less stable associations of communities emerged, often developing as leagues of clans. Like the earlier associations of groups, they were usually called tribes. Some of them had several thousand members. At this time, most tribes had a definite internal organization. Apparently, among some primitive peoples this stage was marked by the emergence of specialized clan, community, and governing tribal bodies and special officials, such as elders and chiefs. In some cases, the posts of chief and elders became hereditary.
The transition to the second phase of the primitive communal system took place as early as the epoch of the dominance of the appropriative economy. However, it was possible only among hunters, gatherers, and fishermen who lived under the most favorable conditions. Others remained at the previous stage of development. This is a graphic demonstration of the unevenness of historical development. The transition to the second phase was not ruled out for tribes living by appropriation, but for those whose economy was based on production, it was altogether inevitable. Cultural anthropologists do not know of any people who engaged in land cultivation and in livestock raising and remained in the first phase of the primitive communal system.
Archaeological data provide evidence that in some parts of the Middle East (northern Iraq and Palestine) the transition to land cultivation and livestock raising took place during the Mesolithic period, in the ninth-seventh millennia B.C. By the fifth millennium B.C. a new form of economy had become established in many areas of Southwest Asia (Turkmenia, Iran, Anatolia, and Syria) and in the Balkans, and by the sixth-fifth millennia B.C., in Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, and Central Europe.
The transition to land cultivation and livestock raising was a very important turning point—a genuine revolution—in the development of mankind’s productive forces. Previously, human beings had simply used implements they had created to appropriate food found in ready form in nature. With the transition to land cultivation and livestock raising, human beings, having brought certain natural processes under their control for the first time, began to produce food, thus creating the conditions for a relatively rapid growth of population.
Because it ensured the regular production of a surplus product, the emergence of land cultivation and livestock raising made possible, and subsequently inevitable, the transition from preclass to class society. All the necessary conditions for the beginning of the formation of class society had been created by the end of the second phase of the primitive communal system. The formation of class society was a protracted, complex, contradictory process. The parceling of labor, which had originated in the preceding stage, gradually moved toward completion. The community was slowly transformed into a system of households increasingly isolated from each other. Pairing marriage was transformed into monogamy. Often, this transformation was mediated by the emergence of the large patriarchal family.
Distinct crafts began to take shape, promoting the further development of commodity exchange. Inequality in property, which had emerged as early as the preceding stage, became more deeply entrenched. As they developed, the embryonic forms of appropriation of the surplus product were transformed into a system of relations of exploitation. Slavery and various forms of bondage developed. Increasingly, the free population was stratified into a wealthy, distinguished minority (sometimes called the clan aristocracy) and a mass of ordinary community members. Private property developed gradually. Social antagonisms emerged and grew sharper.
The state began to develop. One of its forms was the military democracy. Wars for plunder became more and more important, greatly accelerating the formation of classes and the state. Social organisms grew to include tens and even hundreds of thousands of people. Increasingly, communities ceased to be independent social units and became parts of larger organisms, which were formative states. To a tremendous degree, these changes contributed to the formation of comparatively large ethnic communities. The unification of tribes gave rise to ethnicity (narodnost’).
The formation of class society affected social consciousness. The unitary moral code of the primitive communal system disappeared, giving way to class morality. Law developed. The stratification of society was reflected in the stratification of the supernatural world in the popular consciousness—in the distinguishing of particularly powerful beings, or gods, among the more or less equally important supernatural beings (demons, totemic ancestors). Polytheism, which developed with the rise of class society, sanctified the exploitation of man by man. Religion was the first form of ideology.
The formation of class society was first completed in two regions of the Old World—Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. The Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations developed in the fourth millennium B.C., during the Aeneolithic period. In the Aegean basin (including western Asia Minor), the Indus Valley, and the Huang Ho Valley early class societies emerged during the Bronze Age, in the third and second millennia B.C. The problem of the socioeconomic structure of the first early class societies is open to discussion. Some Soviet scholars regard them as slave-holding societies; others view them as societies characterized by the Asiatic mode of production. Throughout the world, the emergence of class societies was associated with the period when the use of metals became widespread. The only known exception is the ancient Mayan kingdom in the New World (first millennium A.D.). However, the transition to the use of metal implements could not in itself transform a particular society into a class society. Historians and cultural anthropologists have found that some peoples did not reach the stage of class society, even though they were acquainted with the use of iron implements, as well as copper and bronze ones. If these peoples were exposed constantly and for a long time to the influence of a major system of more advanced social organisms based on class, the formation of class society inevitably acquired a specific character among them. They made the transition to a higher socioeconomic class formation, skipping stages of development through which the rest of humanity had already passed. For example, among the Slavs and the Germanic peoples, the formation of class society was completed with the emergence of the feudal system.
The concept of the primitive communal system as the first socioeconomic stage of development is found only in Marxist science. Among bourgeois scholars, the evolutionist L. H. Morgan came closest to developing the concept in Ancient Society (1877), a work that was highly regarded by the classic authors of Marxism. The results of Morgan’s research were used by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). For a time, Morgan’s ideas were rather widely accepted in ethnology, but in the late 19th century there was a sharp turn against evolutionism in bourgeois scholarship on primitive society. Many schools and currents emerged, including various strains of diffusionism—the British school (G. E. Smith and W. Perry); the German Kulturkreise school (F. Graebner); the Viennese cultural-historical school, an offshoot that developed the ideas of the German school (W. Schmidt); the American “historical” school (F. Boas); and the structural-functional school (B. Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown). All of these schools were characterized by narrow empiricism, an extreme antihistoricism, and repudiation of the lawlike and progressive, or advancing character of society’s development. Bourgeois researchers have tried in various ways to prove that private property and monogamy have always existed. Some have attempted to demonstrate the primordial character of religion. Cultural relativism, another antievolutionary trend, treats each culture as a unique, individual system and defines history as quantitative changes within a single tradition.

The exposure of the bankruptcy of the narrowly empiricist and antihistorical approach to the study of primitive society prompted a search for new approaches, beginning in the 1950’s. Neo-evolutionism became popular in bourgeois ethnology. Typically, the neo-revolutionists retreat from the extremes of theoretical nihilism and antihistoricism. However, a genuinely historical approach is alien to them, as is evident in the theory of multilinear evolution developed by J. H. Steward (USA). The rejection of general laws of development of society underlies Steward’s theory. However, a growing number of Western European and American cultural anthropologists and archaeologists recognize the unity and the advancing, or progressive character of society’s development and are making an effort to discover its laws (L. White, R. Redfield, R. Adams, E. Service, M. Sahlins, and R. Frankenberg, for example). Some of them have made efforts to periodize the history of primitive society. For example, Service and Sahlins have distinguished a number of “levels” of evolution: the level of bands; the level of tribes; the level of prestate associations headed by chiefs (chiefdoms); and the level of “primitive states.” The level of empires or archaic civilizations, which follows the level of primitive states, is not included under “primitive” society. Although the adherents of this line of thought do not transcend a particular form of technological determinism, some of them arrive at conclusions similar to the Marxists’ on a broad range of questions.