>Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 09:34:13 -0400
>From: "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Re: The role of the state
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>
>It seems to me that gatherers and
>hunters had property in the sense
>that they had rules about the
>relationships between people
>and their means of production, but
>these property rules were not
>private property rights. There was
>communal property.
>
>Charles Brown
>
>
The distinction here is between "societas" and "civitas", developed by
Lewis Henry Morgan in his "Ancient Society." Marx's "Notes on
Ethnography" and Engel's "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State" indicate the "dialectical movement" in property
relationships. Humanity starts out in classless societies with communal
property ("societas") where the social relations are based on the
hand-craft level of material production. With the development of
productive forces (and the subsequent unequal distribution of the
material products), the classless society turns into its
opposite--political economic classes are formed. These property
relations are destined to turn into their opposite through the
revolutionary action of the working class, which abolishes political
economic classes (and the states based on the classes)--a return to
"societas", but at a higher level of development of the productive
forces.
The historical role of capitalism ("civitas") is to develop the productive forces, regardless of the human consequences. This is also sketched in the chapter on the "historical tendency of capitalist accumulation" in Volume 1 of Capital.
I think that most anthropologists agree that original human societies were "gatherers" rather than "hunters." Through analysis of dental fossils, it seems that at least 80% of the calories of early man were vegetable substances, gathered by women and children. The hunters were a marginal source of nutritional energy. Of course, this marginal source of concentrated proteins may have been critical for human development, especially with the use of fire to break down the protein for consumption. But, animal products did not come into wide consumption until agriculture and herding began--around 10,000 BC. The years that folowed were the transition from "societas" to "civitas."
Randy Stone
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