10 Facts About Primitive communism

Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs.

In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.

Original idea of primitive communism is rooted in idea of the noble savage present in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the early anthropology work of Morgan and Ely S Parker.

Anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus, believed that societies that exemplified primitive communism were examples of anarchist society before industrialisation.

The term primitive communism first appeared in Russian scholarship in the late 19th century, with references to primitive communism existing in ancient Crete.

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Belief of primitive communism as based on Morgan's work is flawed due to Morgan's misunderstandings of Haudenosaunee society and his since-proven-wrong theory of social evolution.

Marx and Engels did not argue that Primitive communism brought about equality, as according to them equality was a concept without connection in physical reality.

Arnold Petersen has used the existence of primitive communism to argue against the idea that communism goes against human nature.

Criticism of the idea of primitive communism relates to definitions of property, where anthropologists such as Margaret Mead argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other "primitive societies" but provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property.

Use of the term "Primitive communism" to describe these societies has been questioned when put in comparison with a future post-industrial Primitive communism, particularly in relation to the difference in scale from small communal groups to the size of modern nation-states.