Long before the Revolutionary War, North America was home to an egalitarian society. Men and women had equal rights, democratically elected leaders, and a constitution with a sophisticated system of checks and balances.

It was called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—better known as the Iroquois—a political structure based on the unity of five, and later six, Native American nations.

By 1776, the Iroquois had spent decades contending with European colonists for territory in what is now New York. The Revolutionary War unleashed a new reign of terror against the Iroquois and other indigenous tribes. Understanding the events that shaped this bloodsoaked continent requires looking at the living forces of history.

Internal development

Human societies are highly complex and undergo a constant process of development. Engels studied the development of pre-state societies in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He drew on the Iroquois to show characteristics common to a certain stage in this process.

Engels described Iroquois society as “primitive communism.” “Primitive” because its methods of production were relatively undeveloped, and “communism” because there were no social classes or state. Their economic basis may have been low, but in terms of social and political organization, their society was in many ways far more sophisticated than the modern US.

The vastly different social organization of the Iroquois was apparent to the colonists. The Iroquois had not yet passed from a matrilineal society to a patrilineal or patriarchal one. Europeans often balked at the presence and political authority of Iroquois women at land-treaty negotiations. Indigenous women often exercised control over the land and food production, since it was the female line that provided continuity in the communistic household.

The formation of the Confederacy was driven by internal developments which preceded contact with the Europeans. Increases in population led to divisions into new tribes. Nations that had been separated by wide distances and only acted together in temporary emergency situations now came into closer contact. In response, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca united to form the Iroquois Confederacy sometime between 1142 and 1500. From then on, the Iroquois stood and fought together to maintain a continuous stretch of territory.

The Confederacy’s oral constitution, the “Great Law of Peace,” was based on the democratic traditions of the tribes. Every adult had an equal vote. Among the Iroquois, Engels explained, there were “no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, or lawsuits—and everything takes its orderly course.”

He continued:

All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected … Although there were many more matters to be settled in common … there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications … All are equal and free—the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes.

Contact with the Europeans

The Iroquois first encountered class society and “all its ramifications” not by evolving class divisions endogenously, but through the arrival of the colonial powers—starting with the French, who descended from the north in search of fur-hunting territory in the 16th century.

The French had firearms, “the decisive weapon” of civilization—an advancement over the bow and arrow and the iron sword of previous eras of social development. To keep up, the Iroquois needed to make a technological leap. They began participating in the fur trade themselves in order to buy guns, primarily from Dutch colonists.

Increased fur hunting led to conflicts with other Native tribes in the area. Trade with Europeans had its own impact on the internal life of the Iroquois, as imported metal tools and textiles replaced items previously produced within the tribes.

The Iroquois adapted and strengthened themselves through these new developments, becoming a dominant power in the Northeast as competition for land intensified in the 17th century. Traditions that built the Confederacy—the ability to stand united and make democratic decisions in the interest of the whole—contributed to the resilience of the Iroquois in the colonial period.

War and division

The American Revolution caused the first significant split among the Iroquois. The Tuscarora (who had joined the Confederacy in 1722) and Oneida fought on the revolutionary side, because they traded more with the American colonists. The other tribes sided with the British, as the Crown had, on paper, restricted incursions onto their land.

On August 6, 1777, pro-loyalist Mohawks and Senecas ambushed American militiamen and Oneida warriors at the Battle of Oriskany. It was the first time Iroquois tribes directly fought one another, and one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war.

Through revolution and war, forces were gathering which would largely destroy the Iroquois and other Indigenous nations of North America. As soon as the new US ruling class formed the Continental Army, Washington began using it to raze indigenous settlements. On his explicit orders, the scorched-earth Sullivan-Clinton Campaign destroyed 40 Iroquois towns. By razing crops and food stores, the army scattered the Iroquois population, interrupting the transmission of agricultural know-how from mother to daughter.

Capitalism needed to destroy any stateless, classless, private-propertyless order that stood in the way of its mission to take hold of the natural abundance of this continent and plow it into the machinery of production for profit.

Today we are at the other end of this process. Capitalism has conquered virtually the entire planet, but the development of human society is not over. The next American Revolution will destroy capitalism and begin to unlock the full potential of humanit