Sharing, Freedom, and Egalitarian Living: Some Communal History (Part One)

from Commune Life

Living collectively and sharing most things has a long, long history.  Scholars are still debating how prehistoric and other tribes lived.

Friedrich Engles (Marx’s collaborator) wrote about what he called “primitive communism”, much of it based on the observations of Lewis Henry Morgan, who studied the Haudensaunee (also known as the Five–and then Six–Nations or the Iroquois).  Some of what Morgan reported has been disputed.

Two anarchist academics (an anthropologist and an archeologist–David Graeber and David Wengrow) in their book, The Dawn of Everything, claim that “primitive communism” and “egalitarian societies” are myths and that the societies that have occurred throughout ancient history and non-Western society are both more complex and more creative than those labels would suggest.

The Davids claimed that “... the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments…” and “Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step toward inequality.  In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies.”

On the other hand, they don’t like the term “egalitarian societies” stating that “no one seems to agree on what the term [equality] actually refers to.”  They go on to look at liberty and the various form of freedom (to move or relocate where you want, to ignore or disobey orders, and to actually change society), but they do point out that “Mutual aid–what many contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’--was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.”

What interests me is the notion of sharing and the question of private property.  Some writers have pointed out that there was a difference for some tribal folks between personal property and private property and some things (such as land) could not be owned.  Further, how did hierarchies emerge?  The Davids point out that “Carole Crumley [an anthropologist now at the Swedish Biodiversity Center] has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world.”

Whether egalitarianism existed in early societies or not, it is something that humans have fought to have for thousands of years.  I will write more on this in Part Two of this survey of history, looking at egalitarian living in the Middle Ages.