Primitive Communal Mode of Production, primitive type of cooperative or collective production, the first of the five modes of production known to history. It first appeared some two million years ago. Its essential features are: relations of production based on collective ownership of the means of production by individual communes; extremely backward productive forces; primitive tools of labour; collective labour. Collective labour and common ownership of the means of production determined the collective appropriation of the products made. All this predetermined economic equality of the primitive people, the absence of exploitation of man by man and of classes and consequently the absence of the state. Primitive society’s economic development was subdivided, as Engels said, into two periods: "The period in which knowledge of the further working up of natural products" was acquired, or the period of the appropriating economy, and "the period in which knowledge of cattle-breeding and land cultivation was acquired, in which methods of increasing the productivity of nature through human acivity" were mastered, or the period of the reproducing economy (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 209). During these two periods, the organisation of society moved on from the primitive human herd to the tribal commune and then neighbours’ (territorial) commune. In the first stage, man learned to manufacture primitive stone tools and to strike fire. The tribal commune is marked by the natural division of labour by sex and age, and the organisation of a community of people bound by blood relationships. Several clans made up the tribe. In the initial stage of the tribal system, the commune was ruled by the women (matriarchate) who gathered wild fruit, cooked the food, and engaged in primitive forms of crop growing and stock-raising. As the productive forces expanded further, stockbreeding (shepherding) and more developed land cultivation became increasingly important, and the dominant position was assumed by men (patriarchate). The further development of cattle raising, crop growing and then the crafts led to the social 286 division of labour and to exchange. In these conditions, growing labour productivity and the appearance of a surplus product resulted in the industrialisation of production. Individual family economies came into their own and the neighbours’ (territorial) commune emerged. The industrial labour of individual farms gave rise to private ownership of the means of production in the tribal commune. The emergence and development of private property created property inequality and ultimately exploitation of man by man. It became profitable to turn prisoners of war into slaves in order to obtain a surplus product. As slave-owning relations evolved, the primitive commune completely disintegrated. Classes appear and, along with them, the state. The primitive communal mode of production was replaced by the slave-owning mode of production or feudal mode of production, depending on the specific historical conditions.