primitive communism

[Alex Trotter <uburoi@xxxxxxxxx>]

It seems that an awful lot rides on the question of whether we can speak
of there having been a "primitive communism" among foraging/hunting
peoples. Lisa brings up the case of the Yanomamo with their war,
abduction of women, and so on. If primitive society is like that, one
might think that maybe Hobbes was right about human nature, since war and
aggression and domination are in our blood or our genes or something to
that effect, and therefore we need the state to keep us civilized and
keep us all from killing each other.
        The other great myth is that of the "noble savage," Rousseau's
man in the state of nature, which perhaps influenced Marx. This would
seem to be the real origin of the romanticization of primitive peoples
that Doug H. talks about (the "prelapsarian"). Perhaps neither Hobbes nor
Rousseau got it right, although Rousseau's vision is certainly
more attractive.
        If science can "prove" that there is in fact no precedent in all
of human history (make that prehistory) for a stateless society of freedom
and equality (or "communism" if that's what you would call it) then we're
all wasting our time, aren't we? How could such a condition ever exist
except in purely utopian or ideological terms?
        But from the little I know of anthropology, which is more than
the average layman, it seems that most original cultures were/are far
closer to the ideal of communism, even with their wars and sacrifices, than
anything that has ever been achieved since the advent of civilization.
Theirs are the only societies not divided into Masters and Subjects.

Speaking of the Yanomamo, that is one of the tribes discussed by Pierre
Clastres in his book *The Archeology of Violence* (others including the
Tupi-Guarani), in which he argues that the ritual of war in that society,
in which relatively few people actually die (compare with the custom of
N. American Indian warriors of "counting coup") serves
as a mechanism to *prevent* the crystallization of permanent hierarchy by
assuring the permanence of dispersion and atomization of groups. Clastres
says that primitive societies are ill understood using the cool Reason of
Enlightenment categories and that marxist categories, which would see
such societies as merely fetal or embryonic, are of little use.



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