‘And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all
its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no
nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits -
and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are
settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the
tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and
exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital
punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all
the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many
more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is
maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the
land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted
provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a
trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its
ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most
cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries.
There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the
gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those
disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is
no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other
tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the
Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to accept them into the
confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had
refused that they were driven from their territory. And what men and
women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in
all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by
the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage
of these barbarians.
‘We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The
Zulus a few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago -- both of them
tribes in which gentile institutions have not yet died out -- did what
no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without
firearms, under a hail of bullets from the breech-loaders of the
English infantry - acknowledged the best in the world at fighting in
close order -- they advanced right up to the bayonets and more than
once threw the lines into disorder and even broke them, in spite of
the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact that they
have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of
endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English
that a Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a
horse. His smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord,
says an English painter.
‘That is what men and society were before the division into classes.
And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming
majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the
present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the
old gentile society.
‘That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization
was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes
already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent,
and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the
Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was
not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars
were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other
animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The
gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America,
presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore
an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to
nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange
incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious
conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to
strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens,
and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power
established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself
unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive
the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely
undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still
attached to the navel string of the primitive community. [5] The power
of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But
it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a
degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile
society. The lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid
avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth -- inaugurate the new,
civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means -- theft,
violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is
undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the
two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been
anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense
of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more
than ever before.
‘[5] ‘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 unified him with his
fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations
of domination and subjection.’ -- (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 51,
New York.) Ed.’
<http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm
