Mode of production prior to the splitting of society into classes, under which Humanity lived for more than half a million years. Although for most of this period human communities fed themselves by hunting, fishing and gathering, primitive communism discovered agriculture, brought about the first sedentarization and gave life to large cities for centuries.
Primitive communism covers a period of more than two hundred thousand years. In the form of a communal organization, Humanity spent most of that time living by hunting and gathering. About 9,000 years ago, the discovery and gradual development of agriculture and animal husbandry put this mode of production into crisis. In some places it would transform and evolve in the form of an agrarian communism based on ownership of the land for a few thousand more years. In others, society would split into classes, generally through conquest.
Primitive communism and the revision of the traditional narrative by contemporary archaeology
The archaeological discoveries of recent decades paint a picture of a world in which primitive communism developed agriculture and animal husbandry without splitting society into classes, produced large cities very different from those of the "Fertile Crescent" -although these too were probably "communist" in origin- and resisted the emergence of exploiting classes until relatively recent dates, even coexisting in time with the first Roman kings and the first Greek slave-owning democracy.
In the account we were taught at school, the discovery of agriculture led almost automatically to sedentarization, urbanization and class division. It did, however, have obvious flaws. The first great productive revolution of our species, the end of half a million years of nomadic life that opened the door to the division into social classes, writing, developed religions, the first states... could not be explained as an improvement in productivity.
Farming required more resources and produced less than remaining nomadic hunters. For decades all kinds of explanatory models were tried, but none of them managed to reach really satisfactory results. It seemed that our ancestors had voluntarily endured hunger and hardship in order to learn to grow grain and raise livestock, even though these practices would take many generations to become more profitable than hunting and gathering.
Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who led the excavation of Göbekli Tepe, for many the most important archaeological discovery to date, was the first to work out a satisfactory theory from the new evidence. Göbekli Tepe, discovered in 1994 and built some 11,500 years ago, some three millennia before the founding of Uruk/Sumer, has become known in the media as "the first temple", but above all it is the first material vestige of sedentarization and agricultural production discovered so far.
Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe had been the center from which cultivation and animal husbandry spread towards what we call "the Fertile Crescent". But the builders of those structures were still nomads and hunters. It would have been the needs of maintaining the sanctuary's own structures that generated the incentives to invest resources in the arduous task of cultivating wild cereals and domesticating some species.
It may have been uneconomical compared with hunting, but hunting required long journeys on a seasonal cycle; if one wanted to remain at Göbekli, more and more time had to be devoted to tending the wild grains that surrounded it. All the more so if, as seems to be the case, the sanctuary regularly took in and housed the crippled and the sick, functioning as a kind of "base" for a group that remained nomadic.
Even so, one piece still had to be fitted: what was the point of maintaining such a costly and at the same time such a precarious structure? What did these sanctuaries provide that was important enough to organize all community life around them? The answer would again come from Göbekli Tepe. The discovery of large fermentation vats shed light on a new element. Meanwhile, parallel excavations in China gave rise to the first theories claiming that agriculture was a by-product of the need to produce alcoholic beverages for the periodic celebrations of those bands of nomadic hunters.
In 2004 the excavations at Jiahu, the oldest Neolithic Chinese village discovered so far, founded some 9,000 years ago, provided a new clue. The archaeologist Patrick McGovern discovered the remains of a drink, a kind of chicha, which must have had about ten degrees of alcohol. What is more interesting is that the making of this primitive "beer" would have been, according to McGovern, the cause of sedentarization. Sanctuaries such as Göbekli Tepe, or settlements such as Jiahu or those that would give rise to Sumer, would have been the product of the need of the communities and nomadic hunting bands to meet again in order to celebrate and redistribute the fruit of their labor.
As at Göbekli Tepe, Jiahu did not originally house the entire tribe. It quite possibly began as a settlement of only a few people who tended "fermentable" crops that allowed the drink to be made in each seasonal cycle. These were drinks whose function was to form part of a sort of festival in which the nomadic community was reunited with its crippled members and with the less productive and self-sacrificing farmers. McGovern points out:
However we characterize these Neolithic drinks and the domestication of these plants, we will find that it is an egalitarian effort, with everyone working together.
In the economy of primitive communism, celebration is the main collective mechanism of social cohesion. By joining redistribution between farmers and hunters through ceremony, the community not divided into classes affirmed its egalitarianism without friction.
The fermentation of wild grains -the most primitive form of beer- begins to play an increasingly important role in these festivals because it naturally becomes everyone's "goal". Every celebration needs something special. In this way something apparently uneconomical, such as sowing and cultivating full time, becomes the object of a first division of labor that does not serve the exploitation of some by others.
There are still examples of this logic characteristic of primitive communism operating in living societies, for example the Enawene-Nawe, whose society combines hunting and farming and is articulated around a central cyclical festival. Each time the joint hunting and fishing parties return, a different house -the one in charge of a garden plot- organizes a community festival in which the results of hunting and cultivation are redistributed, maintaining the social organization. The houses are arranged radially, and the house that must organize the festival changes from radius to radius like the cyclical Amazonian calendar.
This redistributive logic also seems to have been the origin of the first "global" networks. In all probability, a non-commodity exchange more akin to the extensive Polynesian ritual exchange networks, or to those of the Kwakiutl up to the 20th century, than to the later trade of the Phoenicians or the Greeks. Recent research on the DNA of British flora led a team of scientists to conclude that the Neolithic communities of southern Europe shared seeds of cultivated grains with their more backward northern neighbors more than eight thousand years ago, two thousand years before the first known evidence of agriculture in the British Isles.
That is, the "sanctuaries" -originally the center of the hunting itineraries of a tribe's bands- possibly also served for redistribution among tribes, spreading and equalizing advances across different geographical regions. The agrarian revolution created an interconnected world with long-distance exchanges long before the birth of the commodity.
The overall result is a picture of the Neolithic Revolution and of the birth of civilization very different from the one held during the 20th century. The primitive agrarian community did not have a social structure or a productive cycle essentially different from those of the nomadic tribe. The primitive communalism of hunter-gatherers that fascinated the first anthropologists was not immediately followed by the state, private property and the sexual and social division of labor, but by a long phase of agrarian communism that was still partly sustained by hunting, fishing and gathering.
This productive system occupied wide geographical areas, surely more connected to each other than we imagine. And what is more important: the great leap was not the discovery of agriculture itself, but the birth of the agrarian commune out of the ceremonial logic of celebration.
The city under primitive communism
In the 1970s came the first archaeological discoveries of what was later called the Trypillia-Cucuteni culture. In a vast region of present-day Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, dozens of "megasites", Neolithic cities, have been discovered since then. Their heyday was between 4500 and 3000 BCE. The archaeologists' problem is that the number of houses in each of them is overwhelming. In one of the most recently explored megasites, Nebelivka, during...
...more than six years of fieldwork since 2009, researchers have excavated and mapped structures located over more than one square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures called assembly houses.
But the interesting thing is that...
The researchers say there are no signs of a centralized government, a ruling dynasty or disparities of wealth or social class in the ancient settlement. The houses were largely similar in size and design. The excavations yielded few "prestige" goods, such as copper items and shell ornaments. Many examples of painted pottery and clay figurines typical of the Trypillia culture turned up, and more than 6,300 animal bones unearthed at the site suggest that the residents ate a lot of beef and lamb. These clues suggest that daily life was very much alike in the different neighborhoods of Nebelivka.
The population of these megasites of primitive communism had nothing to envy the Mesopotamian cities already formed under class division. The two largest megasites investigated, Talianki and Maidanets, housed 26,000 and 46,000 people respectively at their peak. That said, under an urbanism and priorities as radically different as their social order.
One of the things that has most caught the researchers' attention has been the diversity and sophistication of the diet. The megasites grew wheat, oats, millet, rye and barley -as well as hemp, used for textiles- but they also had areas of vegetable gardens and orchards where remains of cultivated apricots, plums, cherries, grapes, peas and broad beans have been found.
Animal husbandry, essential to allow the productive inclusion of the physically weaker members, was highly developed, and the diet seems to have been rich in protein from domesticated pigs, goats and sheep, but also from hunting and fishing. And of course, fermented drinks were made from the grains -ancient beer- and possibly grape wine.
But besides the egalitarianism of the houses and the dietary diversity, where these cities of primitive communism differed from the Mesopotamian ones was in their low spatial density. While Ur, at the height of its splendor, occupied 89 hectares and had about 60,000 inhabitants, the 3,000 houses of Maidanets occupied about 270 hectares and the 2,700 of Talianki no less than 450 hectares.
The high density of the first class cities compared with those of primitive communism obviously reflects exploitation, but also the centralization of the newly born state power, there to "mediate" between the classes, yes, but above all to maintain the system of exploitation. A concentrated population is easier to control and to regiment with fewer resources.
The urban structure of the cities of primitive communism reflects not only an egalitarian distribution of space and of access to the products of collective labor -as we saw with the diet- but also the different nature of political power in a society without a state.
In Nebelivka, for example, the houses were grouped into 153 neighbourhoods, most of them with between three and seven houses, which in turn formed 14 districts, each with one or more assembly houses. These places for social coordination and decision-making needed, by their very nature, an open area. The community not divided into classes needs space.
Proto-class struggle overcoming primitive communism
Another thing that has caught the attention of the megasite archaeologists is the appearance of burned houses at different periods. In many cases they were not rebuilt. Only the gap with the ruins was left. At first the researchers attributed it to some form of ritual. It was one of those archaeological "mysteries". But actually... not so much.
All over Eastern Europe, at the same time as and after the Cucuteni "megasites", egalitarian cities appeared, of varying size but very similar. They are known by the Latin word "oppida". And there is archaeological evidence that they flourished until 580 BCE and that some still remained a little over 2,000 years ago. As the framework for understanding this type of city of primitive communism has widened, other lines of interpretation have emerged, much more interesting than the ritual "deus ex machina".
Okolište in Bosnia had been founded around 5200 BCE and contained family groups which apparently developed different economic and demographic potentials in the course of their development. The houses of the richest families, who held a growing position of power within the large village, were burned down around 4900 BCE.
After this moment, much changes in Okolište: the size of the village, which was originally very large for Neolithic conditions with approximately 3,500 inhabitants, is reduced to a "standard size for south-eastern Europe" of 100-200 inhabitants. Moreover, the differences between households cease to be recognizable, and the specific central functions of Okolište within the surrounding settlement area are likewise indiscernible. In this sense, in the case of Okolište we can assume that we are dealing with an internal rebellion against growing social differences and growing differences in the management of resources.
In the three examples mentioned, the certainties and uncertainties in handling and reconstructing internal social conflicts become evident. However, the processes in, for example, Heuneburg and Okolište can be compared. In both cases, the development of the growing economic potentials of a group of households within the total population leads to internal social conflicts.
While a concentration of activities and political power in certain households is recognizable in Neolithic Okolište, in Heuneburg there is an entire district -separated from the rest of the settlement- in which craft production and political control are concentrated. In both cases, the social conflicts lead to a more dispersed settlement pattern and to a reduction of social differences within society.
Johannes Müller. "Rebellion and Inequality in Archaeology", 2017
In other words, differences in the demographic development of the different groups or tribes that converged in the city, and the unequal spread of certain activities within the community -put another way, the development of the productive forces under primitive communism- would have provoked conflicts tending towards the emergence of classes. Once that point was reached, agrarian primitive communism could only repress the process -weakening the fabric and the productive capacity of society as a whole- or transform itself into a class society.
The record of burned houses shows us that primitive communism had the capacity to defend itself against its own internal dynamics. But it is quite possible that in some places -such as Eastern Europe- the large concentrations broke up as a result of these internal conflicts. What we do know is that the communities under primitive communism dispersed or were subjugated by barbarian tribes.
This subjugation, tribal at first, becomes class domination as the state develops as an instrument for extracting tribute from the conquered, as we see at the dawn of both the Asiatic mode of production and slavery.