>>2883864>These communities had no permanent hierarchies, no inherited positions of power, no state institutions and no ruling class at all: decisions were made through collective consensus, and people with particular experience or skill held only temporary authority rooted in mutual respect, never the power to coerce others.This isn't true. We can't know for certain how those communities lived because they are all long gone. The myth that forager societies don't have hierarchies and are literally egalitarian is clearly false when we look at the ethnographic and historical record of these societies today. There are plenty of forager societies that defy the stereotypes political theorists paste onto them. The idea of the primitive, not to mention primitive communism, is a modern assumption that is retroactively back projected onto the human past. This romanticism began with Rousseau and found its way to Marx and Engels through Lewis Henry Morgan. It fulfilled an ideological function, if human societies are naturally communist then you had to explain why they don't live that way now and one easy way to do this was create a degeneration narrative.
You also seem to assume that certain values (hierarchy) inherently contradict such things as mutual respect e.g. throughout much of human history, hierarchy has been key to fostering mutual respect (e.g. the Confucian idea of filial piety). Even societies that are seemingly stateless today, such as various Bedouin groups, have strict internal hierarchies, or at least asymmetrical roles between persons based on their age, gender, knowledge, wealth or whatever position they have within their kin group. Is hierarchy always a bad thing? Why do moderns see hierarchy as bad, while other societies did not? A particular leftist set of virtues (equality, gender equality, no property) is being read into societies where these very ideas (created by a bunch of Western intellectual elites) might not be relevant to those people anyway.
I suppose there are interesting things non-modern non-Western societies can teach us about how to organize life, but primitive communism isn't one of them and the general tendency of leftist intellectuals of the Marxist stripe is to paint such people's uncivilized enemies anyway. We see this clearly in how leftist intellectuals reacted after 9
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