Communism

The Vision of Primitive Communism

Communism features neither in Aristotle's famous typology of governmental forms (monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional government) nor in his list of respective governmental perversions(tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy). It is not until around 1840that the word finally appears in print. Like its slightly older cousin socialism, communism announced itself from the start as an antidote to the toxins coursing through the veins of early capitalist society: its pauperism, crime, landlessness, war, despotism, injustice, and moral corruption. The instability endemic to the new bourgeois mode of production, and the legacies of Enlightenment reason and the French Revolution, exposed these ancient poisons as not only intolerable but unnecessary. They could be abolished. A new humane and self-legislating social order was possible. And it belonged to humanity by right.

At the center of existing society, and the source of its ills, according to the communists, was the exploitation of one person by another. It was class society, with its pampered rich and its destitute working masses, which had to be overcome. If the source of the power of the bourgeoisie was private property, the manipulation of the state to enforce their alleged property rights, and the reduction of each laborer's working life to an item to be sold to the highest bidder, then the communist antivenin, as it were, must eventually entail the abolition of money, the withering away of the state, and the holding of all productive property in common.

The mid-19th century also saw the emergence of modern anthropology, and it was in the work of some [Page 535]of the fathers of the new discipline that Marxist communists in particular looked for evidence that communism might be possible. This evidence was of two sorts. In anthropological accounts of the variety of human societies, they found confirmation that capitalism was not in fact the natural order of things. And in descriptions of the earliest forms of human society, they found confirmation that humanity had once organized itself into associations that could fairly be given the name “primitive communism.”

The cumulative picture arising from the researches of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887) and Lewis Henry Morgan(1818–1881), in particular, was one in which the early human societies were egalitarian, property was shared, classes were nonexistent, and sexual relations were unrestricted. Basing his arguments principally on investigations into the Iroquois, Morgan emphasized the matrilineal character of Iroquois kinship, seeing it as evidence for an original and universal matriarchal order. He also proposed an evolutionary schema that attempted to account for humankind's departure from its egalitarian beginnings and its ascent to civilization (a journey he did not wholeheartedly applaud).

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