Primitive communism

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Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership.^[1] A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America.^[2] In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.^[3]

The idea has been criticised by anthropologists as too ethnocentrically European a model to be applied to other societies, whilst also romanticising non European societies. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other "primitive societies" and provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property.