Early humans were closely bound to nature. This bond was gradually broken with the development of urban life, and the division between town and country, which has reached monstrous proportions under capitalism. The rupture between human beings and nature has created an unnatural world of alienation. A further manifestation of this is the complete divorce between mental and manual labour, that unwholesome social apartheid which separates the modern priest-caste of knowledge from the “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. It is not just the alienation of humans from nature. It is the alienation of humanity from itself. To break out of the condition of utter dependence on nature, to rise above the merely animal nature, to acquire consciousness – these are what define us as human. But this gain is also a loss, and one that is felt ever more keenly as time goes on. The process has gone so far that it has turned into its opposite. As cities become ever vaster, more overcrowded, more polluted, a nightmare is in the making. In the next few decades, Shanghai alone will have more inhabitants than Great Britain, on present trends. Bad housing, crime, drugs, and a general process of dehumanisation faces millions of people on the eve of the 21st century.

The suffocating one-sided, artificial nature of this “civilisation” becomes increasingly oppressive, even for those who do not suffer the worst conditions. The yearning for a simpler form of life, where men and women could live more natural lives, free from the intolerable pressures of competition and conflict expresses itself in a trend among a layer of young people to “drop out” of society, in an attempt to re-discover a lost paradise. There is a misunderstanding here. In the first place, the life of primitive people was not as idyllic as some imagine. The “noble savage” was always a fiction of Romantic writers, with very little in common with reality. Our early ancestors were close to nature, only because they were the slaves of nature.

However, there is another side to this. These “primitive” people lived quite happily without rent, interest and profit. Women were not regarded as private property, but occupied a highly respected position in the community. Money was unknown. So was the state, with its monstrous bureaucracy, and special bodies of armed men, soldiers, policemen, prison warders and judges. In primitive tribal communism, there was no state in the sense of an apparatus of coercion, but the elders had the respect of all, and their word was law. Later, the tribal chieftain ruled through the voluntary respect of the community. Coercion was not necessary, because all shared a common interest. This was the basis for a deep social bond of co-operation and unity. No modern ruler could ever know the respect enjoyed by the heads of the old gens, underwritten by a sense of mutual identity and duty, which was “codified” in oral tradition as tribal lore, known to all and universally accepted. This respect must have been similar to the feelings of a child for its parents.

In our supposedly enlightened age, many people, including those who like to think themselves educated, find it unthinkable that men and women could ever have got along without such necessary phenomena as money, policemen, prisons, armies, merchants, tax-collectors, judges and archbishops. And if they did manage to do so, it can only be explained in terms of the fact that, being “primitive”, they had not yet come to realise the blessings that such institutions bestow upon humanity. Even some anthropologists, who do not have this mentality, are not immune from introducing into early human society entirely alien concepts, like prostitution, derived from the “civilised” world where everything is for sale, including people.

Anyone who has seen films of the life of tribes still living in stone-age conditions in the Amazon cannot fail to be impressed by their naturalness and spontaneity, resembling that of children, before it is crushed out of them by the rat-race of life under capitalism. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (18:3) In the process of growing up, something important is lost, never to be regained. It is the Fall from innocence, which in the book of Genesis is identified with men and women gaining knowledge. Modern society can no more go back to primitive tribal communism than a grown man or woman can become a child again.

It is considered unnatural and unhealthy for an adult to wish to go back to childhood. The word “childish” is used as an insult, a synonym for incongruous ignorance. In any case, it is a futile wish, because it is impossible. But alongside ignorance, the child also displays other qualities – a spontaneous gaiety and naturalness, which is foreign to most adults. The same is true of “primitive” peoples, before the advent of class society, and the one-sided and stultifying division of labour twisted human nature inside out. What modern artist would be capable of producing paintings of such breathtaking immediacy and natural beauty as the work of the cave-artists of Lascaux and Altamira?

It is not a question of going back, but going forward. Not a return to primitive tribal communism, but forward to the future socialist world commonwealth. The negation of the negation brings us back to the starting-point of human development, but only in appearance. The socialism of the future will base itself on all the marvellous discoveries of the past, and place them at the disposal of humanity. To use the language of Hegel, it is a case of the “universal, filled with the wealth of the particular.”

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish,” writes Marx. “But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.”[48]

  1. Marx, K. Grundrisse, p. 111.