These passages were widely discussed when Roman law was revived in twelfth-century Western Europe, where attempts were made to square them with biblical accounts of Eden and with the teachings of Jesus, the practices of the Apostles and the writings of some of the early Church Fathers (such as Saint Basil) who opposed the private ownership of wealth. It came to be enshrined in Roman Law through certain passages of Justinian’s Digest which hold that property divisions are not based on the laws of nature but, like war, government, slavery and all forms of social inequality, arose only later through the ius gentium (law of nations) - essentially, the usages of war. To return to what we still like to call, for no particularly good reason, the ‘Western tradition,’ the idea that property divisions have not always existed recurs often in ancient authors and seems to have been commonly held. It is not at all clear how much their rejection of individualist property regimes or, for that matter, anything else about their social organization really resembles what was common in the Paleolithic or how much they represent a self-conscious rejection of the values of surrounding populations. Even African hunter-gatherers like the !Kung, Hadza or Pygmies, so often treated as living fossils of the Paleolithic, or egalitarian pastoralists like the Nuer or Maasai, live in areas where there have been farmers, states and kingdoms for thousands of years. Are they better seen as refugees from the collapse of those civilizations or as descendants of the rebels who overthrew them? If the latter, might this suggest that their ideas and practices with regard to land, nature, and property (which inspired many early European conceptions of ‘primitive communism’ in the first place) are themselves successful revolutionary ideologies of generations past? It seems likely, but we simply do not know. Many of the notoriously egalitarian societies of Amazonia and North America, for example, lived on lands that, centuries earlier, had seen complex urban civilizations. Yet these are precisely the parts of the world where such movements are likely to have been most widespread and successful. Most of human history - especially the history of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas - is simply lost to us. Owing to the very limited nature of our sources, it’s extremely difficult to establish how common such movements really were, let alone to get an accurate picture of their aims and ideologies. 500 CE), as are smaller sectarian groups (such as certain groups of Essenes) who formed utopian communities based on communistic principles. Social movements that aimed to abolish all property divisions are occasionally attested for the ancient world, from the Chinese ‘School of the Tillers’ (c. Finally, the term has been applied more loosely to mass political movements or regimes that aim to bring such a society about in the future. Secondarily, it refers to social experiments, often religious in inspiration, which try to recreate such arrangements on a smaller scale in the present day. This is an idea of a society that either once existed or might exist at some time in the future, which is free of all property divisions and where all things are shared in common. Even capitalism can be seen as a system for managing communism (although it is evidently in many ways a profoundly flawed one). Everyday communism then is not a larger regulatory body that co-ordinates all economic activity within a single ‘society,’ but a principle that exists in and to some extent forms the necessary foundation of any society or human relations of any kind. As an expectation of mutual aid, communism in this sense can be seen as the foundation of all human sociality anywhere as a principle of co-operation, it emerges spontaneously in times of crisis as solidarity, it underlies almost all relations of social trust. It also relies on a certain notion of totality: once upon a time there were tribes, some day there will be nations, organized entirely on communistic principles: that is, where ‘society’ - the totality itself - regulates social production and therefore inequalities of property will not exist.Įveryday communism (with a small c) can only be understood in contrast by rejecting such totalizing frameworks and examining everyday practice at every level of human life to see where the classic communistic principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ is actually applied. Mythic Communism (with a capital C) is a theory of history, of a classless society that once existed and will, it is hoped, someday return again. They might as easily be referred to as ‘ideal’ and ‘empirical’ or even ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ versions of communism. Communism may be divided into two chief varieties, which I will call ‘mythic’ and ‘everyday’ communism.
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