Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins
Communities such as those (which Marx referred to, in the aggregate, as "primitive communism") have no need of laws or formal governments.
Everybody knows everybody, the culture (to the extent any exists, at all) is wholly homogeneous, and kinship ties are well-understood.
That means any conflict can be (and usually is) resolved through either personal vendetta, or enforced conformity via social pressures backed by threat of exile.
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Well, yes. But it's not communism in the sense of "everyone is guaranteed that they will be freely given what they need to survive." The very smallness and informality mean that there is very little room for free riding/social loafing. They may not explicitly say "my price for this haunch of antelope is that you have to promise me a side of pig next week" (for one thing, hunting's not that predictable!), but if you don't contribute, they'll start looking at you and saying "I gave you a present last week. . . ."
I don't think that the qualifier about whether they have a culture is valid at all. A human society can't be without a culture, at least unless it's becoming extinct, if then. I've read, for example, that language studies of small, isolated groups find that they have incredibly complicated and irregular grammars, much more so than English or Mandarin or Arabic. . . .