Primitive communism

Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation. The idea has been criticised by anthropologists as too ethnocentrically European a model to be applied to other societies, whilst also romanticising non-European societies. Anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other "primitive societies" and provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property.