Primitive Communism

WITHIN the past two or three months the press has been full of discussions as to the condition and prospects of a party whose name and objects had hitherto been considered foreign to the American system of government and society. The appearance of socialism, a product of European growth, on this side of the Atlantic seems to show that the great economic differences originally established between Europe and America have rapidly lessened, if they have not almost disappeared. Modern socialism derives its origin, as everybody knows, from the simultaneous development of democratic power and of wealth undemocratically held. Speaking roughly, the suffrage is now, in the leading countries of the world, enjoyed by every male of legal age, and the enjoyment of it has familiarized the public at large with the fact that by united effort of the masses almost any desired political change may be effected. Through the instrumentality of popular majorities enormous changes have actually been introduced, not merely in political machinery, but in matters of common right. Women’s property interests have been secured against their husbands; the right of disposition by will has been curtailed; slaves have been enfranchised. Notwithstanding, wealth in its accumulation has followed rigidly the laws of economic distribution and accretion. Capital has produced capital; the strong and prudent and wise have got what they desired of the earth’s abundance, and the weak and thriftless and foolish have wasted their substance. Gigantic fortunes have been kept together for generations; and though the condition of the poor has, absolutely considered, improved, their relative position in the order of society does not seem to them greatly better than it was. Being taught to believe that the power is theirs, they have cast about them to see how their lot can be made more endurable; and the result is socialism. Stripped of its disguises, the idea at the bottom of the socialist programme is that the modern democratic power should be used to remedy the inequality of conditions produced by the struggle for existence.

It is fortunate for the peace of the world that, at the moment when this movement seems to be attaining great strength and importance, the researches of investigators into primitive institutions should have thrown a flood of light upon the whole question of the development of property, which enables us to understand the exact bearing of the present agitation.

The inquiries of Haxthausen, Von Maurer, Nasse, Mill, Morgan, and Laveleye have made the history of property as plain as the fossil remains of early periods make the development of animal life. It is now established that the first dawn of the idea of property in the human mind grows out of the enjoyment by family groups, or larger societies, of lands and chattels in common. In other words, property first appears as a communistic institution. Without going minutely into the subject, it may be stated generally that the early institutions of mankind, in all races and all countries, have rested on what we now know as communism. The laws or customs governing it have been different in different places, but the process has been substantially from ownership by family or village groups to what we are familiar with as individual ownership. With regard to land, man has passed through three stages,—the nomadic, pastoral, and agricultural. In the first, no settled occupation or ownership is possible. In the second, the idea of property, limited, however, to the spot where the herds of the tribe are accustomed to graze, springs up, the herds of each tribe being necessarily restricted to a particular portion of land; but “ the idea that a single individual could claim a part of the soil as exclusively his own never yet occurred to any one; the conditions of the pastoral life are in direct opposition to it.”Gradually part of the soil comes under cultivation, and agriculture springs up; but the land occupied remains the common property of the tribe. The land obviously divides itself into three kinds,— arable, pasture, and forest. In order to get the utmost possible return from it, the cultivated land is divided into parcels, which are distributed by lot amongst the several families, a mere temporary right of occupation being allowed to the individual; and it is curious to observe that this most ancient method of distribution still survives, philologically, in our word “ lot ” of land, which, however, now carries with it, more perhaps than any other word of the sort, the idea of individual property and absolute ownership. Of primitive communists there seem to have been many varieties. Without entering upon controverted questions, or attempting to preserve the historical order, they may be said to divide themselves roughly into house communities, village communities, and family communities. In the time of Tacitus the soil of Germany was the collective property of the clan, to whom it returned from time to time, with periodical repartitions. This system is found in force to-day in the Russian mir. In Italy and France in the Middle Ages, as in Servia at the present time, parcels of land were held in the hands of groups of patriarchal families “dwelling in the same house and working together for the benefit of the association.” Finally individual property appears.

Now the main economic causes of this development from primitive communism to the modern system of individual ownership are well understood. The means of subsistence are wrung from the soil, and in all cases the object of any clan, tribe, or organized community of men is to obtain subsistence in the easiest way. Hence, in the earliest stage of agriculture, the idea of fixed property being still very rudimentary, and there being as yet no accumulations of capital which can be used for this purpose, the only means of providing a constant supply of food is by tilling large tracts of land for the common benefit, and after the soil is exhausted resorting to new land. The land first used then lies fallow for a long period, after which it is again brought under cultivation. This method, which to us seems crude and barbarous, is in fact the only way in which, in the absence of capital, any agriculture is possible. With the progress of civilization, however, and of invention, new means are found of making the soil yield subsistence, while at the same time the pressure of population on the area of land makes it more and more difficult to find new territory. In this way cultivation becomes constant and what is called “ intensive.” In other words, capital is employed to make a given area of land yield a constant supply of food. It is the change from extensive to intensive agriculture which seems to be the prime cause of the development of individual ownership. So long as the area of land is very great, and rotation of crops on a large scale is possible, the communistic system works very well. The cultivators, of course, have only a usufructuary interest; but they need no more. Permanent possession of a tract of land by individuals offers no particular attractions when a changing possession secures the only object in view. But when the process has reached the point at which the soil will not yield a subsistence except by the steady and persistent application of capital, a longer tenure of the land by individuals becomes a necessity. Some compensation is essential if they are to make permanent investment of labor or capital, and the only compensation that is possible is permanent possession. Hence, when the economic process reaches this stage, communism begins to disappear, and individual ownership to take its place.

The change is unquestionably attended with many immediate evils. The great advantage of the primitive system is that under it every one has an interest in the soil. He does not own it, but he has a definite right to an aliquot share in the distribution of it; and hence pauperization on a large scale is impossible. The Russians have frequently called upon the rest of Europe to observe the operation of their mir, or village community, in which the right of each member to a periodical allotment of land is preserved, as a safeguard against all the evils with which countries that have adopted individual property are afflicted. Wherever individual property has appeared it has been followed by the dispossession from the soil of large numbers of people, who, having no fixed residence or means of support, become a sort of nomadic proletariat horde, dangerous to the public peace. On the other hand, the privately owned land exhibits a tendency to accumulate in large quantities in the possession of a few owners.

The question therefore naturally arises whether anything can be done to remedy these tendencies, and it is to the solution of this question, among others, that M. Laveleye has directed his studies. Reformers of the last generation, who undertook to deal with the same problem before investigation into primitive institutions had revealed what may be called the natural history of property, arrived, by the light of nature, at the conclusion that some form of socialism was the only cure. They made the suggestion of a reintroduction of communistic life, and wherever it was attempted it failed. It is interesting now to examine the reasoning on the subject of property which came into fashion after the French Revolution, and to see how entirely it was based on abstractions as remote from reality as any found in Plato. From Gracchus Babeuf to Proudhon, the French socialists founded their utopian systems on the metaphysical notion of an equality of right. If this is assumed, individual property is of course founded in injustice. Further, it is an injustice established by the government, and by the government it ought to be removed. Every man, Proudhon maintained, has a right to a share in the world’s goods by the very fact of his existence, and of the impossibility of continuing his existence without something which he can possess and cultivate; moreover, since the number of possessors is altered continually by births and deaths, it follows that the amount which each laborer can claim varies in like manner with the total number; consequently, the limits of possession are always determined by the population, so that it is not possible for possession to remain fixed, or to ripen into individual property. The answer made to this argument was that whatever the abstract right of the matter might be, property was a valuable institution, and must be maintained at all hazards. The discovery that property does not derive its origin at all from constitutions or laws, but is a growth, and that by the operation of known economic laws individual ownership, at a certain stage in the march of civilization, inevitably succeeds communism, has necessarily changed the whole aspect of this discussion. The question of abstract right disappears altogether, and the speculations of Proudhon and Fourier become of no more value than investigations into the transmutability of metals.

Still, is there not an opportunity for the birth of a new and philosophical school of socialists, who, accepting all that science has discovered, may yet find room for an argument in favor of a better system than that with which the slow laws of evolution have familiarized us? Cannot the economic processes which have been sketched above be arrested, retarded, or mitigated by the action of man? It is evident that both the ancient communism of our forefathers and our own system of individual ownership have their good sides. Cannot we retain the good features of both? Some such question as this is always before M. Laveleye, and his book on Primitive Property ¹ is written partly to show that an affirmative answer may be given. The matter is important enough to deserve more attention than it has received.

It must be said at the outset that the question ought to be very precisely put before an attempt is made to answer it.

An objector to M. Laveleye might fairly say that while it is admitted that the modern system of ownership has its evils, and while it is admitted that the ancient communal system had its advantages, it has not by any means been proved that a perpetual union of the two would be better than either. Indeed, this is the very point to be proved, and the facts as far as they are known —that is, that civilization and all the inestimable advances produced by it have been made pari passu with the destruction of the communal system — tend the other way. Many of the advantages claimed for the ancient system, looked at from a modern point of view, are of doubtful value, or are real evils which are eradicated by the change to individual ownership. The partisans of the Russian mir, for example, are cited by M. Laveleye as claiming for it five distinct advantages: —

First, every laborer having the right to a share of the land, a proletariat cannot arise. On the other hand, the causes which prevent a proletariat prevent an intensive system of agriculture, and make the Russian peasant one of the most backward and barbarous on the face of the earth; the proletariat is avoided only by reducing all to a dead level of mediocrity, as in a trades-union.

Second, the children do not suffer for the idleness, the misfortune, or the extravagance of their parents. But is this an advantage? Does not the danger of such suffering in society as we know it constitute one of the strongest inducements to prudent and virtuous lives in the parents?

Third, each family being a usufructuary of a portion of the soil, there exists an element of order, of conservatism, and of tradition, which preserves the society from social disorders. But the very question is whether society is not the better for a change from such conservatism and tradition.

Fourth, the soil remaining the inalienable patrimony of all the inhabitants, there is no ground to fear the struggle between the contending forces elsewhere known as capital and labor. It might be replied, This is very true, but it is because in the Russian mir there is no capital for labor to have a conflict with.

Fifth, the system of the mir is very favorable to colonization, — an enormous advantage to Russia, which still possesses in Europe and Asia vast uninhabited territories. This, however, can hardly be considered true, as the great colonizing countries of modern times, England and the United States, are precisely those in which individual property is most securely established and guarded.

In fact, there is no end of this sort of argument. There is probably no institution in the world which is not so well suited to those who live under it that ingenious arguments may not be discovered which will prove its superiority to the customs prevailing in other countries. The true way to state the question would appear to be this: The history of the world shows a gradual development of the modern property system out of that prevailing in the antique world. Do those countries in which the modern system has reached its most extreme development exhibit, on the whole, most general economic, intellectual, and moral growth, or do they not? Stated in this way, there can be but one answer. The idea that anybody in England or America could be brought to envy the condition of the communistic usufructuary of the Russian mir is preposterous.

Considerations of this nature have brought most of the investigators into the history of property, though by an altogether new route, to precisely the conclusion that conservative people, the world over, reached after an examination of the schemes of Proudhon and Fourier: that the highest product of civilization and the main-stay of modern society is that right of property which Proudhon denounced as " robbery.” M. Laveleye, however, is not altogether of this opinion, for he represents, standing nearly alone, what may be called modern philosophical socialism. His book is consequently not a mere collection of the facts with regard to primitive property, but a tract as well. Feeling the difficulties in the way of a decision of the question when approached in the manner of the partisans of the Russian mir, he has endeavored to solve it more scientifically. He has looked about for a country in which the ancient communistic system still exists, and which is yet acknowledged to be a civilized country. He has found it in Switzerland. In the Allmends of that country he thinks we may see an institution of the primitive communistic type, yet modified so that it is in accord with the spirit of the modern world. Here we have common ownership, and yet the tenure of land by each joint owner is made long enough to guarantee intensive cultivation. We will not pursue him into the details of the subject. We will grant all he insists upon. But are we seriously to look at the property system of Switzerland as foreshadowing that of the world ? It seems too much to ask us to believe that this little corner, its very existence insured only by the jealousy of its neighbors, with a simple mountain population, and few large cities or diversified industries, has discovered a system of property which the rest of the world is to imitate. After Switzerland has imposed Allmends, as Rome imposed “ Quiritary dominion,” not on the institutions of Europe and America, but on those of a single neighboring nation, it will be time to discuss the probabilities of a general extension.

Enough has been said to show the general scope of M. Laveleye’s interesting and valuable work. His speculations on the possibility of future changes in our system of property are only a part of it, the rest being made up of historical and descriptive chapters, tracing the rise and growth of primitive notions of property and their development into modern conceptions; and also descriptions of the numerous archaic systems belonging to all periods, still existing in various parts of the world. These of themselves appear to us the most effective refutation of the propagandist part of the work.

To go back to the point at which we started: in the light of modern investigation, what future has socialism, as a political movement, before it ? The Darwinians have a term which expresses the tendency constantly showing itself in the animal world towards a return to primitive types and forms. Long after the struggle for existence has produced a permanent modification in a species, individual members of it appear of the type as it existed before the modification became fixed. The same sort of atavism, as it is called, exhibits itself in the mental operations of the human race; and it is now clear that the socialistic projects with which reformers have perplexed and disturbed the world for the last hundred years have their root in this curious tendency. One of the most interesting chapters of M. Laveleye’s book is devoted to showing that in the classical world utopian speculation of all kind, was based on a living tradition of the “ Saturnian days,” when property did not exist, but men lived together as brothers. This is now seen to be not a mere fancy, but a memory of a real communistic state of society, in which individual ownership did not exist, and men were brothers in a literal sense, the family being the social unit. The tendency always existing to throw a halo about the past produced a feeling that this early condition of society had been much better than the existing state; and it is easy to see how, reinforced by a highly speculative philosophy, it might account for a large part of the platonic scheme for the reorganization of the world. With the disappearance of the classical world, the tradition of primitive communism, as a lost Utopia, died out, and left nothing but abstract philosophizing for new schemes to be based upon. Accordingly, we find that for the last hundred years the socialists have rested their case upon the abstract sense of justice and assumed equality of right. Now this basis has been swept away by the discovery that the assumed equality of right is opposed to a great economic law, which in all ages and in all countries has been slowly compelling the substitution of the system of individual for communistic ownership. There is left, then, at one extreme, the modern philosophical socialism of M. Laveleye, the principal objection to which is that it remains to be proved to have any chance of obtaining a lasting hold upon opinion; at the other, we discover Justus Schwab and “ Citizen ’’Maddox plotting over their beer for a redistribution of the world’s goods. To say that there is a connection between Plato and the pothouse communism of Chicago and New York may seem a grotesque fancy, but it is certain that our Schwabs’ minds, could their operations be exhibited, would in social speculation betray a much closer resemblance to the Platonist mental operations than to those of most of their living fellow - creatures. When they dream of a world in which there shall be no more property, or in which every man shall have his just share of it, this mental operation presents a case of atavism which carries us back to an intellectual condition two thousand years old. Atavism, however, can never be a living social force. It is opposed by the whole weight of accumulated civilization and progress attained since the primitive Schwabs wandered naked through the German forests. To suppose that it is to succeed is to suppose that the world is to go backwards, and that we are to relapse into the primæval night and chaos out of which we sprang. Civilization may be destroyed, but not reversed; and, if the chain of reasoning furnished by modern investigation is not altogether wrong, mankind at large will in the future be less and less likely to risk a plunge into the bog of primitive communism in the hope of overtaking the glimmer of what a long and weary pursuit has proved to be a social ignis fatuus.

Arthur G. Sedgwick.