> if I understand Heidegger's meaning here, and in the following two
> sentences, I agree with H.
> Culture, tradition, custom - "what is most uncanny and mighiest" -
> is there at the human origin defining it. The original humanity is
> communism. Our name should be _homo communis_ . Marx and Engels , by
> the time Engels writes _The Origin_, understand that the "primitive"/
> original human society is "primitive" communism, without private
> property.
According to Marx, human historical development is “a long and painful process” that substitutes rational self-determination (fully "free individuality") for instinctive determination. What constitutes the “human essence” is the “potential” for this development.; this "potential" becomes “actual” at the end of this process.
In the primal commune, “individuality,” in this sense, has not yet begun to develop; its development into the “true individuality,” the fully “free individuality,” that constitutes human “species-being” requires entry into “class” society, an entry that “initiates a long and painful process of development."
Marx explicitly claims this in Capital.
“Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.
“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.” <http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm>
“Co-operation, such as we find it at the dawn of human development, among races who live by the chase, [20] or, say, in the agriculture of Indian communities, is based, on the one hand, on ownership in common of the means of production, and on the other hand, on the fact, that in those cases, each individual has no more torn himself off from the navel-string of his tribe or community, than each bee has freed itself from connexion with the hive. Such co-operation is distinguished from capitalistic co-operation by both of the above characteristics. The sporadic application of co-operation on a large scale in ancient times, in the middle ages, and in modern colonies, reposes on relations of dominion and servitude, principally on slavery. The capitalistic form, on the contrary, pre-supposes from first to last, the free wage-labourer, who sells his labour-power to capital. Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition to peasant agriculture and to the carrying on of independent handicrafts whether in guilds or not. [21] From the standpoint of these, capitalistic co- operation does not manifest itself as a particular historical form of co-operation, but co-operation itself appears to be a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist process of production.”
“20. Linguet is improbably right, when in his “Théorie des Lois Civiles,” he declares hunting to be the first form of co-operation, and man-hunting (war) one of the earliest forms of hunting.
“21. Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the carrying on of independent handicrafts, which together form the basis of the feudal mode of production, and after the dissolution of that system, continue side by side with the capitalist mode, also form the economic foundation of the classical communities at their best, after the primitive form of ownership of land in common had disappeared, and before slavery had seized on production in earnest.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm>
This repeats the claim Marx makes about this primitive communal form Marx in his Ethnological Notebooks that “in this early condition of society, individuality of persons was lost in the gens.” (Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, p. 150)
Far from being abandoned in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, these claims by Marx about the relation of the primitive communal form to “individuality” are explicitly endorsed. Notice the treatment at the end of "the lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth," "the vilest means -- theft, violence, fraud, treason," as "passions" in the sense of Hegel, a sense explicated and endorsed in the passage I recently quoted from "Ludwig Feuerbach" contrasting Feuerbach with Hegel on the role of "evil" in human historical development.
“And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to accept them into the confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they were driven from their territory. And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians.
“We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The Zulus a few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago -- both of them tribes in which gentile institutions have not yet died out -- did what no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without firearms, under a hail of bullets from the breech-loaders of the English infantry - acknowledged the best in the world at fighting in close order -- they advanced right up to the bayonets and more than once threw the lines into disorder and even broke them, in spite of the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact that they have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English that a Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a horse. His smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord, says an English painter.
“That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society.
“That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. [5] The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth -- inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means -- theft, violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.
“[5] ‘Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unified him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of domination and subjection.’ -- (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 51, New York.) Ed.” <http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm
>
“Private property” is “necessary” to the development of “free individuality,” i.e. to the development of the “universally developed individuals” who actualize “communism” as fully “free individuality.”
"The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm>
“Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm>
In Marx’s 1881 letters to Vera, it’s the imagined role of “private property” in the Russian peasant commune that’s made an essential part of the basis FOR the speculation that relations in the commune were consistent with those required for the development of an “individuality” with the developed “degree of universality” required to “appropriate” the “productive forces” developed within capitalism outside Russia and use them to build the penultimate social form (a speculation that turns out to have been based on a badly mistaken idea of the consistency of peasant commune relations, including of the role played in them by private property, with the development of required "individuality").
He claims that, the Russian peasant commune, "the private house, the cultivation of arable land in parcels and the private appropriation of its fruits permit a development of individuality which is incompatible with conditions in more primitive communities." (Marx, “First Draft of the Letter to Vera Zasulich, March 1981”) <http://www.marxfaq.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm>
Ted