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;
.
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