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Concept
Pre-Marxist communism
Summary
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement, there were already similar ideas in the past which one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop.
Primitive communism
Karl Marx and other early communist theorists believed that hunter-gatherer societies as were found in the Paleolithic through to horticultural societies as found in the Chalcolithic were essentially egalitarian and he, therefore, termed their ideology to be primitive communism. Since Marx, sociologists and archaeologists have developed the idea of and research on primitive communism. According to Harry W. Laidler, one of the first writers to espouse a belief in the primitive communism of the past was the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca who stated, "How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common...They held all nature in common which gave them secure possession of the public wealth." Because of this he believed that such primitive societies were the richest as there was no poverty. According to Erik van Ree, other Greco-Roman writers that expressed a belief in a prehistoric humanity that had a communist-like societal structure include Diodorus Siculus, Virgil, and Ovid.
Due to the strong evidence of an egalitarian society, lack of hierarchy and lack of economic inequality, historian Murray Bookchin has argued that Çatalhöyük was an early example of anarcho-communism, and so an example of primitive communism in a proto-city.
It has been argued that the Indus Valley civilisation is an example of a primitive communist society, due to its perceived lack of conflict and social hierarchies. Others argue that such an assessment of the Indus Valley civilisation is not correct.
History of communism#Origins of communism and History of socialism#In antiquity
The idea of a classless and stateless society based on communal ownership of property and wealth also stretches far back in Western thought long before The Communist Manifesto.
Official source
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