It’s my understanding Native Americans (“Indians”) did not recognize property rights. Since the abolishment of property rights is one of the key tenants of communism, would it be incorrect to say the Native Americans were communists?
You’re mistaken about your understanding of communism—its goal isn’t to abolish property rights in general, but rather private ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth. The wealth thereby produced can still be privately held.
That said, if you go back far enough in history, all human societies, including the Native Americans, practised a form of communism called “primitive communism”. In such societies all able-bodied people were expected to contribute to production. Private property was restricted to personal effects such as clothing; tools for the production of wealth were held communally.
You understand wrong (and thank you so much for forcing me to link to an FEE article). Often, these rights were bound in family or clan ownership systems rather than individual rights, but that’s not the same as communism.
Communist societies don’t evolve potlatch ceremonies, either. The very structure of them is so un-Left.
Cite?
Entire books have been written on the subject. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was probably the first, though if you want firsthand accounts rather than (informed) armchair theorizing you could read works by any number of big-name anthropologists who studied modern-day primitive societies. Common ownership in primitive communist socities is described in, for example, Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead, Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronisław Malinowski, and Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict.
I meant a cite for this being the case in Native American societies. Something more recent than WWII would be appreciated.
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
Entire books have been written on the subject. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was probably the first, though if you want firsthand accounts rather than (informed) armchair theorizing you could read works by any number of big-name anthropologists who studied modern-day primitive societies. Common ownership in primitive communist socities is described in, for example, Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead, Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronisław Malinowski, and Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict.
[/QUOTE]
Although I should note that just in the last book you list,* Patterns of Culture*, the description of the Kwakiutl is far from communist. Like I said, no potlatch culture is communist.
Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines by Lewis H. Morgan.
Firsthand accounts of primitive communism in American indigenous societies post-WWII are going to be rare to non-existent, since by then most or all of those socities had become influenced by or integrated into Western capitalism.
Not every Native American culture was/is identical. Even omitting the great Mesoamerican civilizations, many groups were more complex than “primitive.” Those classic studies of other cultures are important to the history of anthropology, but not so relevant to the question.
The groups named *Pueblo *Indians by the Spanish, the rich Northwestern cultures & the last of the Mound Builders (mostly wiped out by disease after the initial European contacts) were/are all more than “primitive” hunter-gatherers.
1881 :dubious:
“This state of descents which can be traced back to the Middle Status of savagery, as among the Australians, remained among the American aborigines through the Upper Status of savagery, and into and through the Lower Status of barbarism, with occasional exceptions.” You know, I was not sure I wanted to read much further, but I did - up until he started describing the Maya and Inca as communist. Then I couldn’t read any more for laughter.
They’d been influenced by it for 200 years plus already, before any of your cited authors started studying them.
But let me rephrase - I don’t doubt that you can make a case for particular tribes having a more-or-less “primitive communist” shudder organization - say, the Zuni. What I’m arguing against is the idea that it was the default or overwhelming order.
Let’s say a society works like this: All able-bodied people either hunt and fish (men) or gather roots and berries and work to prepare food (women). They own what they get, but nobody starves, as there are strong social mores which establish that food is shared with people who have none. Individuals own the tools they need to do what they do; various extended family groups engage in the culture’s most elaborate industry, building fish weirs to catch salmon going upstream to spawn, and then that group would own and maintain it.
So, is that society Communist? Is it Socialist?
The Incas weren’t precisely communist, but they definitely had some communist features, and a good number of 20th- and 20th-century communists, socialists, and assorted marxists in the Andes looked to them as a sort of inspiration.
Of course, the Incas were very very far from primitive, so whatever their economic order should be called, it isn’t primitive communism. It was an extremely highly organized and regulated economy.
Pragmatic.
I like Grey’s answer. I don’t understand the need to shoehorn a society into some category that is ill-fitting at best and at worse could serve as a cover to despicable atrocities. “See, they were communistic so they deserve what they got.”
I would like to thank MrDibble for his efforts in fighting ignorance regarding American Indian culture. I also want to thank the OP for using the word “were” in the thread title. I, personally, am no damn commie.
Uh, most people who refer to (say) the Incas as communists are doing so as a term of praise.
Household mode of production with some redistribution?
Cite?
It seems to me that the OP is reversing things. The native Americans (at least, those] of them who were tribal hunter-gatherers) weren’t communists - it was the communists who attempted to replicate the tribal system in massive industrial societies.
It’s important to note that capitalism is a relatively recent invention, a byproduct of abandoning tribal lifestyles in favor of city-dwelling. All of our ancestors were once “communists”.
Depends; is there any surplus, and if so, who owns it? If there’s no surplus, then what you’ve described and what I described upthread as primitive communism are more or less the same. In your scenario, the tools are owned privately rather than communally, but if all the wealth they produce is fairly distributed and immediately consumed, there’s not much practical difference.