Here are some quotes to add to Chris's
"the reproduction of presupposed social relations - more or less naturally arisen or historic as well, but become traditional - of the individual to his commune, together with a specific objective existence predetermined for the individual, of his relations both to the conditions of labour and to his co-workers, fellow tribesmen, etc - are the foundations of development, which is therefore from teh outset restricted ... The individuals may appear great. But thre can be no conception here of a free and full development either of the individual or of the society, since such development stands in contradiction to the original relation." Marx Grundrisse p487 Penguin 1973
'[Primitive communism was an] 'abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor unrefined man who has no needs and who has not even reached the stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it.' Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsp 346 Penguin 1975
'Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organisations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisation and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that those idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.'
British Rule in India p 306. Marx changed his assessment of the positive role of British Imperialism, but not of the restrictive character of traditional communities.
'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 material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is refelcted in the ancient worship of Nature...'
Capital, p84
And then there is this from Engels:
'There is no country in Europe that does not possess, in some remote corner, one or more ruins of peoples, left over from an earlier population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became the repository of historical development. These remnants of a nation, mercilessly crushd, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this national refuse, is always the fanatical representative of the counter- revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de- nationalised, as its whole existence is in itself a protest against a great historical rvolution.
In Scotland, for example, the Gaels, supporters of the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745.
In France, the Bretons, supporters of the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800.
In Spain the Basques, supporters of Don Carlos.
In Austria the pan-Slav South Slavs...'
Revolutions of 1848, quoted in Engels and the Non-Historic Peoples, Roman Rosdolsky, Critique Books 1987