Marx, Engels and Luxemburg were all keen to return to the egalitarian
relations of primitive communism, at a higher level. But how does the
egalitarianism of early human societies connect up with Marxism’s prime focus on
the rise and decline of capitalism? As capitalism continues to disintegrate,
this article looks at the egalitarian origins of money in ancient Greece for
clues as to how we might transcend the whole money system.
In The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels claims that “the
overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex”. He
goes on to argue that this counter-revolution led to the decline of primitive
communism and the rise of class society. He also predicts that humanity will one
day return to communistic relations. He then ends the book with a quote from the
pioneering anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, which states that this future
society “will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and
fraternity of the ancient gentes.”
Contemporary Marxists sometimes use these arguments to show that sexism and
class divisions are not inherent to human nature. But it is rare for them to
defend Engels’ anthropology and rarer still for them to argue that Engels’ ideas
can help us understand the nature of any future revolution. Yet, although Engels made many errors, anthropological and genetic studies of African hunter-gatherers do now show that early human society may have been both matrilocal and matrilineal. Hunter-gatherer societies are far from perfect but studies also show that hunter-gatherer women have more power than women in agricultural societies and that hunter-gatherer childcare is more collective. Furthermore, unlike other tribal societies, nomadic hunter-gatherers maintain strong egalitarian and communistic principles as regards material wealth. These principles of equality and sharing would have been particularly easy to maintain in prehistoric times when hunters had access to abundant food supplies in the form of mammoths and other mega-fauna. So, perhaps, we should look again at the early Marxists and their hopes of a return to primitive communism, at a higher technological level.
Engels wrote The Origin of the Family at Marx’s ‘bequest’ and he derived many of its ideas from Marx’s intensive research into anthropology. In his later years, Marx seems to have prioritised this research, rather than finishing further volumes of Capital. Unfortunately, he then died before he could connect up this anthropological work with his analysis of capitalism. However, an unsent letter to the Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich, gives us some idea of what he was thinking.
In that letter, Marx writes that “the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of … modern capitalist societies.” He goes on to argue that “the best proof that the development of the Russian ‘rural commune’ is in keeping with the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type - collective production and appropriation.” Well aware of how radical this argument was, Marx reassures any readers that “we must not let ourselves to be alarmed at the word ‘archaic’.”
One of the first Marxist theorists, August Bebel, was certainly not ‘alarmed’ by ideas of returning to the ‘archaic’. In his classic text, Woman under Socialism, Bebel even quotes the 19th century anthropologist, Johann Bachofen, who argued that “the end-point of political development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns again at last. The materialistic, maternal existence opens and closes the cycle of human history.” Bebel also writes that “the line of human development returns at the end of its journey to social structures similar to those of primal society, only at a much higher level of culture.... The whole development forms a spiral heading upwards, whose end point is exactly above the start.”
Rosa Luxemburg was also not ‘alarmed’ by such ideas. In her last book, Einfuhrung in die Nationalokonomie, she argues that “primitive communism, with its corresponding democracy and social equality [was] … the cradle of social development.” She goes on to claim that “the whole of modern civilisation, with its private property, its class domination, its male domination, its compulsory state and compulsory marriage [are] merely a brief passing phase, which, because they first formed from the dissolution of primitive communist society, in future will become higher social forms.… The noble tradition of the ancient past, thus holds out a hand to the revolutionary aspirations of the future, the circle of knowledge closes harmoniously, and the present world of class domination and exploitation … becomes merely a minuscule transient stage in the great cultural advance of humanity.”
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