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Urgesellschaft (meaning "primal society" in German) is a term that, according to Friedrich Engels, [1] refers to the original coexistence of humans in prehistoric times, before recorded history. Here, a distinction is made between the kind of Homo sapiens as humans, who hardly differed from modern humans biologically (an assertion disputed by anthropology), and other representatives of the genus Homo such as the Homo erectus or the Neanderthal . Engels claimed "that animal family dynamics and human primitive society are incompatible things" because "the primitive humans that developed out of animalism either knew no family at all or at most one that does not occur among animals". [1] The U.S. anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and translations of his books also make use of the term. [2]
In specificity, this long period of time is not directly accessible through historical sources. Nevertheless, in archaeology, the study of material cultures provides a variety of opportunities to gain a better understanding of this period, work that is likewise present in sociobiology and social anthropology, and in religious studies through the analysis of prehistoric mythologies.
The so-called primitive society, or more appropriately, the primitive societies, probably span by far the longest period in the history of mankind to date, more than three million years, while other forms of society have existed and continue to exist for only a relatively short period in comparison (less than 1 percent of the period).
The Stone Age is an archaeological term for the period in which stone tools (fist wedges) are the oldest chronologically classifiable and roughly datable finds. [3] Other, even older tools and objects made of natural or animal materials (wood, bones, skins) decayed and did not survive. This Stone Age also includes the development of new social structures about 20,000 to 6,000 years ago. Generally, the advent of arable farming and livestock rearing is considered to be the transition to the New Stone Age and the end of this phase. The Neolithic Revolution was followed in some areas by the Bronze Age (around 2200 to 800 BC), but in some cases ran in parallel.
Age | Period | Duration | Human species |
---|---|---|---|
Stone Age | Paleolithic | Lower Paleolithic: 3.3 Ma–300 ka Middle Paleolithic: 300–50 ka Upper Paleolithic: 50,000–12,000 BC | Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis In Middle Paleolithic: Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens |
Mesolithic | Europe: 15,000–5,000 BC Middle east: 20,000–10,000 BC | Homo sapiens | |
Neolithic | 10,000–4,500 BC (2,200 BC in Western Europe) | ||
Bronze Age | Early Bronze Age Middle Bronze Age Late Bronze Age | 3300–1200 BC (900 BC in Europe) | |
Iron Age | Between 2000 BC and 800 AD, greatly varies per region |
A society is formed by different-sized social groups acting together. At different times in history, as well as in different climates and ecozones, human societies were quite different.
The gradual dispersal of early human groups (estimated at 1 to 10 kilometers per year) initially placed few demands on them and their generational succession-they did not perceive any changes, especially in equatorial regions. However, drastic environmental changes such as ice and warm periods, to which the migrants were exposed in the target area, caused new forms of adaptation with corresponding social structures. Food gathering and weather protection as well as the use of fire were socially successful. However, a high social differentiation of primitive social forms of organization cannot be assumed. The first graspable societies as well as similar present groups appear relatively equal (egalitarian).
The isolation of individual groups, e.g. during the glacial periods or in insular settlement areas, led to culturally different traditions as well as to phenotypic, also racial theoretical differentiations. [4] The comparatively rare contacts were found by a pedestrian, overall stationary society in the nearest vicinity. Whether the exogamy (external marriage) indicates that people became aware of reproductive biology (procreation) is doubted; exogamy is sociologically seen rather as a proving safeguard of (re-)integration of diverging groupings (for example, in lineage or clan alliances with intermarriage).
Some religious traditions also speak of a primal society, referring to the preforms of later religions spread across all hunter-gatherer groupings, derived from the social practices of their members. In written cultures, the distinction between shepherds and cultivators that persists to this day is evident, for example, in the biblical Story of Cain and Abel. [5] Still, in modern macrosociological theories, there are sophisticated assumptions about common features of a primitive society, for instance in Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Engels.
Whether early humans lived dominion-free or anarchic or already formed consolidated leadership positions (chiefs) is in each case only a justifiable assumption, the same going for whether they organized themselves as social hordes, cultivated religious cults (with ancestor cult or totemism?) and culturally already knew narrators or familially already the Kernfamilie. Economically, this society is based on an occupation economy, depending on the geological time or vegetation zone to dictate whether one takes the profession of hunter, fisherman, or gatherer. [6] During the Ice Age, for example, their focus in Central Europe and North America was on hunting, while elsewhere gathering and fishing also became important, as in Central Europe after the migration of large animal fauna in the Middle Stone Age (compare Scandinavian middens).
In Marxist theory on the social development of mankind, especially in historical materialism, primitive society is also called classless primitive communism [7] because, just as in the "communism" that followed capitalism, there was no private property in the means of production.
Friedrich Albert Lange was a German philosopher and sociologist.
Leonard Nelson, sometimes spelt Leonhard, was a German mathematician, critical philosopher, and socialist. He was part of the neo-Friesian school of neo-Kantianism and a friend of the mathematician David Hilbert. He devised the Grelling–Nelson paradox in 1908 and the related idea of autological words with Kurt Grelling.
Nevalı Çori was an early Neolithic settlement on the middle Euphrates, in Şanlıurfa Province, Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. The site is known for having some of the world's oldest known temples and monumental sculpture. Together with the earlier site of Göbekli Tepe, it has revolutionised scientific understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic period. The oldest domesticated Einkorn wheat was found there.
Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844.
Peter Josef Dietzgen was a German socialist philosopher, Marxist and journalist.
Johann Joseph "Hans" Most was a German-American Social Democratic and then anarchist politician, newspaper editor, and orator. He is credited with popularizing the concept of "propaganda of the deed".
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan is an 1884 anthropological treatise by Friedrich Engels. It is partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877). The book is an early historical materialist work and is regarded as one of the first major works on family economics.
The Mauer 1 mandible is the oldest-known specimen of the genus Homo in Germany. It was found in 1907 in a sand quarry in the community Mauer, around 10 km (6.2 mi) south-east of Heidelberg. The Mauer 1 mandible is the type specimen of the species Homo heidelbergensis. Some European researchers have classified the find as Homo erectus heidelbergensis, regarding it as a subspecies of Homo erectus. In 2010 the mandible's age was for the first time exactly determined to be 609,000 ± 40,000 years. Previously, specialist literature had referred to an age of either 600,000 or 500,000 years on the basis of less accurate dating methods.
Influences on Karl Marx are generally thought to have been derived from three main sources, namely German idealist philosophy, French socialism and English and Scottish political economy.
Feldhofer 1 or Neanderthal 1 is the scientific name of the 40,000-year-old type specimen fossil of the species Homo neanderthalensis, discovered in August 1856 in a German cave, the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte, in the Neandertal valley, 13 km (8.1 mi) east of Düsseldorf. In 1864, the fossil's description was first published in a scientific magazine and officially named. Neanderthal 1 was not the first Neanderthal fossil discovery. Other Neanderthal fossils had been discovered earlier, but their true nature and significance had not been recognized, and, therefore, no separate species name was assigned.
Jenny Laura Marx was a socialist activist. The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868. The two committed suicide together in 1911.
The Schöningen spears are a set of ten wooden weapons from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1999 from the 'Spear Horizon' in the open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Helmstedt district, Germany. The spears are among the oldest hunting weapons discovered and were found together with animal bones and stone and bone tools. Being used by the oldest known group of hunters, they provided unique proof that early human ancestors were much closer to modern humans in both complex social structure and technical ability than thought before. The excavations took place under the management of Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage (NLD).
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement, there were already similar ideas in the past which one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop.
Neue Marx-Lektüre or NML is a revival and interpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, which originated during the mid-1960s in both Western and Eastern Europe and opposed both Marxist–Leninist and social democratic interpretations of Marx. Neue Marx-Lektüre covers a loose group of authors primarily from German-speaking countries who reject certain historicizing and empiricist interpretations of Marx's analysis of economic forms, many of which are argued to spring from Friedrich Engels role in the early Marxist workers' movement.
Ilse Schwidetzky was a German anthropologist.
Primitive communism is an attempt to describe the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared within the group as communism. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept, 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 German Ideology, also known as A Critique of the German Ideology, is a set of manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher, but the work was retrieved and first published in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. The book uses satirical polemics to critique modern German philosophy, particularly that of young Hegelians such as Marx's former mentor Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. It criticizes "ideology" as a form of "historical idealism", as opposed to Marx's historical materialism. The first part of Volume I also examines the division of labor and Marx's theory of human nature, on which he states that humans "distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence".
Wilhelm Christian Weitling was a German tailor, inventor, radical political activist and one of the first theorists of communism. Weitling gained fame in Europe as a social theorist before he emigrated to the United States.
Friedrich August Carus was a German philosopher. He was the father of surgeon Ernst August Carus (1797–1854).
The Communist Correspondence Committee was an association of communists founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with committees in Brussels, London, Cologne and Paris with the aim of politically and ideologically organising socialists of different countries to form a revolutionary proletarian party.