The Problem of Property in Contemporary American Ethnography

Abstract

The question of the historical sequence of collective and private land ownership among primitive tribes in the hunting-and-gathering stage has been discussed for nearly forty years in the American ethnographic literature. polemic is one of the manifestations of the reaction of bourgeois science directed, seemingly, against Morgan's concepts of primitive society, but actually against a materialist solution of the problem of property and the related doctrine of the predictable replacement of certain socio-economic forms by others, as developed in the writings of the classical Marxists. On the basis of scientifically-verified data, historical materialism establishes the fact that social orders differ on the basis of the forms of property in the means of production. As we know, primitive communism is a social order based on collective ownership of the means of joint labor and equalizing distribution of the products of labor. This primitive type of collective or cooperative production, Marx ...