"The theory of the nonalienated original condition has come to seem familiar in Marxism, thanks to Engels, who develops it at length in his wellknown work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. After having described the social constitution of the Iroquois, he com- ments: "And this gentile constitution is wonderful in all its childlike sim- plicity! Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes or police; without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons; without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned - the gens or the tribe or the individual gentes among themselves... Those concerned decide, and in most cases century-old custom has already regulated everything. There can be no poor and needy - the communistic household and the gens know their obligations towards the aged, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are free and equal - in- cluding the women. There is as yet no room for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of alien tribes ... And the kind of men and women that are produced by such a society is indicated by the admiration felt by all white men who came into contact with uncorrupted Indians., admiration of the personal dignity, straightforwardness, strength of character, and bravery of those barbarians

A similar conception can be found in H. Lefebvre, who enthusiastically writes about the primitive man: "In his reality he lived and realized all his potentialities. With no deep discord in himself he could surrender - in this wonderful equilibrium of the village community - to his spontaneous vitality."

Thus some Marxists think that man was originally nonself-alienated, "uncorrupted," that he successfully realized all his possibilities.

Marx himself thought that man had been thus far always self-alienated, but that he, for this reason, need not always remain so. Like Engels, he thinks that man can and ought to come into his own. In this sense, Marx, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, speaks about communism as a society which means "the positive supersession of all alienation and the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e., social life (existence)"

Such a conception of communism as a negation of alienation forms the basis of the later works, of Marx. Although he always emphasizes that slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are not irrational states, but states which were necessary at a certain stage of man's development, he never reduces the difference between those states and communism simply to the difference between an earlier and later necessity, and not even to the difference in the degree of realized humanencess. He clearly contrasts the contemporary and the future society as the alienated and the nonalienated one, as the inhumane and the really humane one."

--- Marx's Theory of Alienation, Gajo Petrović

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"Marx, like the pre-mils (or "millenarians"), went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse ("the darkness,before the dawn"). For Marx as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuveson,

The evil of the world must proceed to its height before, in one great complete root-and-branch upheaval, it would be swept away ...

Millenarian pessimism about the perfectibility of the existing world is crossed by a supreme optimism. History, the millenarian believes, so operates that, when evil has reached its height, the hopeless situation will be reversed. The original, the true harmonious state of society, in some kind of egalitarian,order, will be re-established.'

"

--- Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist, Murray N. Rothbard