Although man returns to the starting point in his development, this happens on an infinitely higher level of civilization than that on which he started. Primitive society held property in common in the gens, in the clan, but only in the rawest form and at the most undeveloped stage. It is true that the process of development that occurred since then reduced common property to a small and insignificant vestige, broke up the gentes, and finally atomized the whole of society; at the same time, however, in its various stages, this process of development also mightily increased the productivity of that society and the diversity of its requirements, and it created nations and great States out of the gentes and tribes, although again it produced a condition that stood in violent contradiction with social requirements. The task of the future is to end that contradiction by the broad retransformation of property and productive powers into collective property.
Society reclaims what was once its own, but, in accordance with the newly created conditions of life, it allows people of walks of life to exist at the highest cultural level; that means that society guarantees to all that which under more primitive circumstances was the privilege of individuals or individual classes only. Now woman again fills the active role that once was hers in primitive society – she is not man’s mistress, but rather his equal.
“The end of state/governmental development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns. The maternal-material existence starts and rounds off the cycle of human affairs,” writes Bachofen in his work “Das Mutterrecht.” Likewise, Morgen writes:
“Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expansive, and its management so skillfully carried out in the interests of its owners that it has become an unmanageable power vis-à-vis the people. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, however, when human intelligence will assume control over property, when it will define the State’s relationship to the property that it protects and also determine the obligations and limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relationship. The mere hunt for riches is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time since the dawning of civilization is but a tiny fragment of the lifetime of man, and yet another tiny fragment of that yet to come. The dissolution of society threatens to become the endpoint of a historical course whose end goal is property, since such a course contains the very seeds of its own self-destruction.
Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, will initiate the next – and higher – level of society toward which experience, intelligence, and knowledge are steadily tending.
It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”*
* Morgan’s “Ancient Society.”
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