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.
Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, a vital influence on and precursor to Marxist communism.
The 1st century BC Roman philosopher Seneca believed that humans had fallen from a Golden Age of primitive communism
Inside the urban centre Kuélap of the Chachapoya culture.
Ely S. Parker, co-author of The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois
Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. 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.
Ely S. Parker
Lewis H. Morgan
Venus figurine found in the Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological complex, Russia
Mbendjele hunter-gatherer meat sharing