Individualistic And Collectivistic Analysis

We will try to delve into the ancient period and will examine the individualistic and collectivistic characteristics of the society. Also we will raise some questions from ethical point of view about their traditions. Are these traditions necessary or they are redundant? Why they are morally necessary? How these traditions or their way of living are related to communism? Etc. In all the history of humankind... it can always be seen that societies based on altruistic philosophies (collective) always have firm societal structures and hierarchies like castes systems in ancients and totalitarian system in the new societies like communists whereas it can always be seen that societies based on selfish philosophies (indivi) never have firm societal

They used to hunt in groups and after that they equally according to their necessities divide the food which they earned. First we will understand the structure of their societies. The basic unit of society was called the band, which typically consists of a small number of families related by kinship. Bands have less number of persons. All foraging groups seem to take this form. Bands are widely scattered over relatively large territories, yielding low population densities. Although hunter-gatherers have individual rights to have a personal property but no typical property rights exist for the natural resources that they share. Many intellectuals mainly those who were the advocators of Marxism believed that early man lived in a state of primitive communism. There are some mentioned information about this in Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, first published in 1877. According to Morgan, there was standard practice of communism among primitive peoples. Karl Marx was highly influenced by Morgan’s views. Production was done collectively and the earned food was distributed evenly among the members of the

All adult members worked as hunters and gatherers. The productivity of the adults cannot vary greatly in these activities. Some hunters are more talented than others, but these kind of unevenness are likely to be relatively small. Therefore, in such a society all will be at the same level in financial terms. Due to large population and its extensive division of labour or availability of technology leads to misbalance in distribution of income. Since some part of population have more access to technology and some have less, this leads to misbalance in distribution of economy. In a hunter-gatherer society, special talent in a person was not easy to get recognition. Hence talented person were treated as same with normal person. So some serious questions arises on the communism and its validity.

Since every person were allowed to earn proportionately to his/her hard work, we can say that primitive societies allowed the individuals to have personal rights (like right to have any amount of valuable material since at that time there was no concept of money).They were collective at the level of their family but outside the family they respect the individual’s