Top: Quetzalcoatl by Hunt Emerson in Dawn of the Unread (Issue 7)
Bottom: Communist red flag with classic hammer and sickle design
I.
The concept of primitive communism is often credited to Marx and Engels and advances the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and the common ownership of resources, distributed in accordance with individual needs.
It seems that Marx and Engels took the notion from the pioneering anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan - best known for his work on kinship and social structure amongst the native peoples of North America (particularly the Haudenosaunee) - although it might be argued that the idea of primitive communism can also be traced back to Rousseau and his celebration of the noble savage.
Wherever they picked up the idea, it obviously excited the imagination of Marx and Engels and they developed it broadly, applying it, for example, not only to wild hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous peoples, but to barbarian societies formed by the ancient Germanic tribes beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.
Marxist scholars and theorists - perhaps embarrassed by the romanticism of all this - attempted to downplay the significance of primitive communism in the work of their idols [1].
However, the madmen of the Khmer Rouge, looking to build on the revolutionary fantasies of Marx and Mao, really ran with the idea. Indeed, the party's General Secretary was so impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived that he relocated the urban population to the countryside and forced it to work on collective farms. This resulted in approximately a quarter of Cambodia's population dying from malnutrition and disease, but at least he gave it a go.
Still, never mind Pol Pot - what about D. H. Lawrence? Was he too someone seduced by the fantasy of primitive communism?
II.
According to John Pateman, The Plumed Serpent can be read as an allegorical work that isn't so much concerned with ancient Aztec gods as promoting a political vision of a possible future Mexico based upon a model of primitive communism.
For Like Marx, argues Pateman, Lawrence was interested in how human development might involve a radical return to pre-modern social relations. Thus, the hymns which Lawrence writes for his fictional neo-pagan religious movement should be heard as a revolutionary call to action, comparable to The Communist Manifesto (1848).
I have to say, I think there are problems with this reading of Lawrence's novel. And, push comes to shove, I'm with the German hotel manager who describes Ramón's Quetzalcoatl movement as another form of national socialism - not primitive communism [2].
However, as I don't have advance access to the paper that Pateman is due to present to the D. H. Lawrence Society next month, I shall refrain from offering any criticisms here and now. Instead, let me just remind readers of my own readings of The Plumed Serpent, which can be found in several posts, including here, here, and here.
In sum: The Plumed Serpent is - for me at least - Lawrence's rather frantic attempt to create what Deleuze and Guattari would call neo-territorialities based upon old fragments of code and the invention of new forms of jargon and myth [3].
Unfortunately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, artificial and archaic and, at worst, fascistic and malignant. As Kate's dead husband once told her: "Evil is lapsing back to old life-modes that have been surpassed in us." [4]
Notes
[1] There was very little research into primitive communism among Marxist scholars and would-be revolutionaries beyond the 1844 study by Engels until the 20th century when some, like Rosa Luxemburg and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, took up the idea and developed it.
Non-Marxist scholars of pre- and early-history
did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally examined if only then to be swiftly dismissed; for it soon became clear that Morgan's work was flawed (to say the least).
Today, there are still those who insist that we could learn much from (matriarchal) societies that practice economic cooperation and communal ownership, but they rarely (if ever) use the term primitive communism. For such thinkers, it is the dominant culture's bias
against any alternative to capitalism (and the patriarchy) that is the problem - and if it hadn't been for Western colonialism and imperialism, we'd still find many peoples living happily and peacefully in a non-alienated manner.
[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 103.
It's interesting to recall that Kate, the middle-aged Irishwoman at the centre of the novel, refuses to accept this estimation of Ramón and his followers; for her, they were real men who wanted something more than modern pettiness: "She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting", writes Lawrence. But this, surely, is one of the great dangers of nihilism (and helps explain the attraction of fascism); one searches desperately for something or someone to cling on to. Even the most dangerous political invalids and the most fanatic of religious lunatics can suddenly seem attractive and find their ideas taken seriously - something that Nietzsche explicitly warns of.
[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257.
Of course, it wasn't just Lawrence who oscillated from one pole of delirium to another and it's not just fascist society that works in this way. For as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, liberal capitalist societies - born of "decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine" - are also "caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritoriaizing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold." [260]
In other words: "They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia [...] They are continually behind or ahead of themselves." [260]
Having said that, sometimes an unexpected force of radical change can erupt "even in the midst of the worst archaisms" [277], whilst, on the other hand, a revolutionary line of flight can quickly lead into a black hole of some kind. Thus, we can never say in advance with absolute certainty where a literary experiment or political revolution might take us.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 137.
In a sense, this was also Lawrence's conclusion: you can't go back or cluster at the drum. See 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120.
Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Primitive', from the debut studio album Killing Joke (E. G. Records, 1980): click here for the remastered version (2005).
