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Karl Marx was fascinated by the political activities and economic lives of Native Americans. From his reading of Henry Lewis Morgan, Marx sharpened his appreciation of the delicacy and sophistication of our political institutions, particularly as evidenced the League of the Iroquois. At the time of his death in 1883,
Karl Marx was in the midst of an extensive study of Natives;
he had filled several notebooks with material in 1880 & 1881. Freidrich Engels, as the collaborator & literary executor of Marx's estate, assembled and rewrote this material to form "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," published in 1884 with the subtitle: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H Morgan."; Engles calls the Iroquois League "a wonderful constitution" under which there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, king, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no
lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course."; The Kinship States of Native People became in Marxist thought exemplars of primitive communism. Living as we did without the "state" or private ownership of property, we knew neither exploitation or social class. As Engles described life among the Iroquois, there "cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities toward the old, the sick, and those disabled in war." They became in Marxist theory the ideal to
which industrial communism would return once the worker smashed private property,
classes, & the state. The final communist society would be an industrialized version
of the Iroquois social system in which "all are free and equal - the women included."; When Joseph Stalin exiled fellow revolutionarie
Leon Trotsky in 1929, it was to Mexico, home of the first revolution, that Trotsky retreated.
In subsequent decades other revolutionaries from the underdeveloped world have also looked to
the Zapata Revolution for guidance in peasant warfare. The Iroquois served as a model for primitive communism, & the Europeans look to the Incas as exemplars of how to manage a socialist economy without private property, money, or markets. But we offered more than inspiration for European thought. We also provided models of action. Many of the earlier efforts such
as the red stick movement failed, but with the movement
of Zapata, the world had its first truly peasant revolution. ☭
