The first mode of production — how humanity lived for tens of thousands of years without private property, classes, or the state
For the vast majority of human history — roughly 200,000 years — our species lived in societies characterised by collective ownership, communal labour, and the absence of class divisions. This earliest mode of production is what Marx and Engels called primitive communism.
This was not a paradise. Life was harsh, productive forces were extremely limited, and existence was precarious. But it was a society without exploitation, without a ruling class, and without a state apparatus to enforce the domination of one group over another. The means of production — tools, hunting grounds, shelters — belonged to the community as a whole.
Understanding primitive communism is essential for historical materialism. It demonstrates that private property, class division, and the state are not eternal features of human nature — they are historical products that arose at a specific stage of development and will be abolished at a higher stage.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)The economic foundation of primitive communism was simple: the productive forces were so undeveloped that individual accumulation was impossible. When a hunting band killed a mammoth, the meat had to be shared — there was no way to preserve or store it for private profit. When a group gathered berries, the harvest was consumed collectively. There was no surplus to appropriate.
Production was carried out collectively because it had to be. A single individual could not hunt large game, defend against predators, or survive the elements alone. Cooperation was not a moral choice — it was a material necessity imposed by the level of productive forces.
The mode of production determines social relations. When the means of production are held in common and there is no surplus, there can be no classes, no exploitation, and no state. The social relations of primitive communism were a direct product of its material conditions.
The basic unit of primitive communist society was the gens (clan) — a group of people related by blood ties, tracing descent through either the maternal or paternal line. Several gens formed a tribe. Leadership was elected, recallable, and carried no material privilege. Chiefs and elders held authority only so long as the community granted it.
Engels studied these social forms extensively in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawing on the ethnographic research of Lewis Henry Morgan among the Iroquois Confederacy. He demonstrated that the patriarchal family, private property, and the state all arose together as products of the dissolution of the primitive communist order.
In many primitive communist societies, descent was traced through the mother (matrilineal kinship). Women held significant social authority. The subordination of women arose only with the emergence of private property, when the male property-owner needed to ensure the paternity of his heirs. Engels called this the world-historic defeat of the female sex.
This analysis is fundamental: the oppression of women is not rooted in biology but in the historical development of class society. It will be abolished not through cultural reform alone, but through the abolition of private property and class divisions.
"The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex."
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)Primitive communism did not collapse because of human greed or original sin. It was dissolved by the development of the productive forces themselves.
The Neolithic Revolution — the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry — produced for the first time a regular surplus of food. This surplus made it possible for some members of society to be freed from direct production. A division of labour emerged: some worked the land, others became craftsmen, priests, or warriors.
With surplus came the possibility of private appropriation. Those who controlled the surplus — the granaries, the herds, the irrigated fields — became the first exploiting class. Those who produced the surplus but did not control it became the first exploited class.
Once society was divided into antagonistic classes, a new institution was needed to maintain order — that is, to maintain the domination of the exploiting class over the exploited. This institution was the state: armed bodies of men, prisons, courts, and laws designed to protect the property of the ruling class.
The state did not arise by social contract, divine appointment, or rational deliberation. It arose out of the irreconcilable antagonism between classes. It is, as Lenin put it, an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.
The transition from primitive communism to class society produced three inseparable phenomena: private property, class division, and the state. These arose together and will be abolished together — through socialist revolution and the building of communism.
Historical materialism identifies the following successive modes of production, each arising from the contradictions within the previous one:
Collective ownership, no classes, no state. Dissolved by the development of agriculture and the emergence of surplus.
The first class society. Slave-owners exploited the labour of slaves directly. Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt.
Lords exploited the labour of serfs bound to the land. The feudal mode dominated medieval Europe and much of Asia.
The bourgeoisie exploits wage labour. Workers are formally free but compelled to sell their labour power to survive.
The working class seizes power, abolishes private ownership of the means of production, and builds a classless, stateless society.
The most common objection to communism is the claim that humans are naturally selfish, greedy, and competitive — that private property and inequality are hard-wired into our species. The existence of primitive communism for over 200,000 years utterly demolishes this argument.
If humans were naturally incapable of cooperation and collective ownership, our species would have gone extinct long before it developed agriculture. The material record shows that cooperation, sharing, and communal living are not only possible but were the dominant form of human social organisation for the vast majority of our existence.
Communism is not a return to primitive conditions. It is the resolution of the contradictions of class society on the basis of the most advanced productive forces. Modern technology — industrial production, computation, automation, artificial intelligence — makes possible a level of material abundance that primitive communism could never achieve.
What communism shares with its primitive predecessor is the principle of collective ownership and the absence of exploitation. What distinguishes it is that it arises not from scarcity but from abundance — not from the inability to produce a surplus, but from the conscious, planned organisation of production for human need.
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