This Is What You Get: A Million Years Of Communism

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET

A MILLION YEARS OF COMMUNISM

People raised in largely capitalist countries are often brought up believing that communism never works. Supposedly, every attempt at developing such a society has only ever resulted in greater evil. Stalin's gulags, famines caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot's Killing Fields. No peace and harmony ever results from communism, only misery, oppression and death.

But is this really true? I would argue that this only appears to be the case to those who don't look back very far into our past. However, when we cast our gaze back many thousands of years, a different picture emerges.

First, though, let's remind ourselves of what kind of society Marx imagined communism to be. Actually, despite being remembered as a communist, he didn't have all that much to say about it and wrote much more about capitalism. But he did sketch out some ideas in his 'Critique of the Gotha Program'. He imagined that in communism the distinction between mental and physical labour would disappear, that labour would become 'not only a means of life but life's prime want'. Most importantly, he imagined communism to be a highly cooperative way of life, with people no longer organised hierarchically into higher and lower classes, but rather working communally under the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

If we go back 40,000 years, we find societies functioning much more like communism than capitalism. A journey that far back into our past would take us back to a time when our ancestors were still living in bands. Bands are the smallest societies, consisting of five to eighty people, and as all individuals are close relatives by birth or marriage, bands are in effect an extended family.

There is good evidence to suggest that this way of life persisted for millions of years. After all, our closest animal relatives (the Great Apes of Africa) also live in bands, so it's fairly safe to assume that this was how our hominid ancestors lived.

So, what did life as a member of a band look like? It might be more instructive to describe some of the features of modern life that were missing. In bands, we find none of the formal institutions that seem so indispensable today. There were no police and no laws. There was also no formalised social stratification into upper and lower classes, and formalised and hereditary leadership was likewise absent. In terms of work, everyone was more or less equally expected to participate in hunting and gathering for food and other than age and sex there was no discrimination or regular economic specialisation. Perhaps most importantly, the concept of personal private property was entirely alien to the band. The land in which they lived was not partitioned among sub-groups but rather belonged to the entire group.

Having said all that, one should be wary of painting too idyllic a picture of life in a band. There was very little in the way of technology, which meant bands were limited to acquiring food through hunting and gathering. This forced a nomadic existence onto bands, who were compelled to move on when resources in their local area became too scarce.

Another thing worth pointing out is that, while bands usually treated their own members in an egalitarian way, any other band or band member was treated as a deadly rival. So, while in an in-group sense there was no such thing as private property, one could argue that the territorial behaviour of bands did constitute some vague notion of private property.

When bands encountered other bands, this would invariably result in a territorial dispute. It's usually the case that population densities are low in regions occupied by bands and so the defeated group were able to just move away from their enemy. Also, since there as no such thing as economic specialisation, a victorious band had no use whatsoever for slaves. Furthermore, without intensive food production defeated foes were unable to yield much tribute. So, other than maybe taking females for mates, the members of rival bands were of no use and could be expect to be killed if fleeing was not an option.

Some bands would have had the good fortune of occupying an environment that was particularly abundant with resources. So long as the land continued to be productive there would have been no reason to move on and more permanent settlements would have been established. This would have set the stage for the evolution of bands into tribes. Tribes differ from bands mostly in size (they comprise of hundreds rather than dozens of members) and the aforementioned settled residence. But we also find more than one formally recognised kinship group. These are termed clans, and land belonged to particular clans rather than to the whole tribe. However, it was still possible for everyone in a tribe to know everyone else by name.

(Image from wikimedia commons)

But while there were some differences between bands and tribes there were also many similarities. They had the same kind of informal egalitarian style of government, with decision making and information handled in a communal rather than private fashion. Since this was an egalitarian system that recognised no ranked lineage or class, nobody had any status to pass on as inheritance. Moreover, because every member had debt and obligations to every other member, and resources belonged to the clan rather than individuals, it was not possible for anyone to become significantly wealthier than anyone else.

This should not be taken to mean that there was absolute equality among members of bands or tribes, however. Leaders did emerge, distinguishing themselves from the rest of the band or tribe through qualities like personality or strength. Both bands and tribes had big-men, recognised in some ways as the leader. But such leaders would have been barely distinguishable from ordinary tribe members. At best, the big-man could only sway communal decisions and had no independent decision-making authority to wield or knew any diplomatic secrets that could confer individual advantage. Moreover, the big-man's lifestyle was indistinguishable from everyone else's. As Jared Diamond put it, "he lives in the same type of hut, has the same clothes and ornaments, or is as naked, as everyone else".

As in the case of bands, this absence of class distinction is explained by the almost total lack of economic specialisation. There were no full-time crafts specialists and food production was simply not advanced enough to let anyone shrug off responsibility for acquiring edible produce. Even the big-man took part in hunter-gathering.

More importantly, the monetary system used in tribal communities was quite different to ours. We live in redistributive economies in which we pay tribute to some higher authority (that tribute being either 'employment', which is labour performed mostly in order to enrich a minority of strangers, or taxes) and that authority then decides how the collected tribute should be divvied out. But in bands and tribes there were reciprocal exchanges between individuals and families. You can think of this as being like a crude credit-based systems, with people giving gifts with the understanding that the recipient would return the favour at some time in the future. Those that proved unreliable in meeting their obligations had 'bad credit' and were likely shunned in future gift exchanges unless they demonstrated a change in attitudes.

Another aspect of tribal life that made its egalitarian nature possible was that these were still groups small enough for everyone to be related to everyone else either by blood or by marriage and for everyone to know everyone else's name. No formal laws or policing were necessary, because in the advent of any dispute arising there were always many kin prepared to step in and prevent an argument from escalating into violence. Also, given how closely related everyone in a clan was, it was highly unlikely that any individual was going to have more people siding with them in a dispute.

We can see, then, that it's simply incorrect to say communism has never worked, In fact, human societies functioned more or less communist fashion for millions of years. It was only in the last few tens of thousands of years that human societies began to evolve away from egalitarian-style government to the more hierarchical, class-based systems familiar today.

REFERENCES

'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond

'The Zeitgeist Movement Defined'