THREE STAGES OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION
It is possible for us today to identify three main stages of the general evolution of human society. These are the primitive pre-class society, class society and the classless society taking shape before us over a large area of the world. Such a broad division of social evolution is not intended, of course, to overlook the fact of uneven development of different peoples. Nor is it meant to ignore the sub-stages of the pre-class society and more particularly those of the class society. What nevertheless needs to be emphasized is that we are liable to miss something of basic significance about human history if we do not begin with these three main stages of social evolution.
Notwithstanding the grave anxiety caused these days by the development of the thermo-nuclear and biological wea-pons of mass destruction, the normal expectation of human survival on the earth-and, therefore, also of the classless society of the future-is for an immeasurable period of time. While looking back at the past, we have a somewhat similar impression. The period covered by the primitive pre-class society was immeasurably longer than the career of class society. On a rough estimate the latter "is at best one hundredth part of the time during which men have been active on our planet."
In the time-scale, therefore, compared to the primitive pre-class society of the past and compared also to the clast-
1. V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, Penguin 1957 ed, p. 7.
less society of the future, the life of class society is rather trifling, howsoever spectacular the human achievements may be during this comparatively insignificant period and vastly complicated though the contemporary problem is of man's march forward to the classless society.
That, historically speaking, the class society is only a transitory phenomenon was emphasised over a hundred years back by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81), to whose masterpiece of field anthropology Marx and Engels owed their first full knowledge of the primitive pre-class society. While lifting the veil on the past, Morgan revealed also an inspiring vision of the future. Here is his judgment on private property and class society:
"Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the right of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career 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 which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come.
The great antiquity of mankind upon the earth has been conclusively established. It seems singular that the proofs should have been discovered as recently as within the last thirty years, and that the present generation should be the first called upon to recognize to important a fact.
Mankind are now known to have existed in Europe in the glacial period, and even back of its commencement, with every probability of their origination in a prior geological age. They have survived many races of animals with whom they were contemporaneous, and passed through a process of development, in the several branches of the human family, as remarkable in its courses as in its progress.
Since the probable length of their career is connected with geological periods, a limited measure of time is excluded. One hundred or two hundred thousand years would be an extravagant estimate of the period from the disappearance of the glaciers in the northern hemisphere to the present time. Whatever doubts may attend any estimate of a period, the actual duration of which is unknown, the existence of mankind extends backward immeasurably, and loses itself in a vast and profound antiquity.
This knowledge changes materially the views which have prevailed respecting the relations of savages to barbarians, and of barbarians to civilized men. It can now be asserted upon convincing evidence that savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind, as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization. The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.
It is both a flatural and a proper desire to learn, if possible, how all these ages upon ages of past time have been expended by mankind; how savages, advancing by slow, almost imperceptible steps, attained the higher condition of barbarians; how barbarians, by similar progressive advancement, finally attained to civilization, and why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of pro gresssome in civilization, some in barbarism, and others in savagery. It is not too much to expect that ultimately there several questions will be answered.
Inventions and discoveries stand in serial relations along the lines of human progress, and register its successive stages; while social and civil institutions, in virtue of their connection with perpetual human wants, have been developed from a few primary germs of thought. They exhibit a similar register of progress. These institutions, inventions and discoveries have embodied and preserved the principal facts now remaining illustrative of this experience. When collated and compared they tend to show the unity of origin of man-kind, the similarity of human wants in the same stage of advancement, and the uniformity of the operations of the human mind in similar conditions of society.
Throughout the latter part of the period of savagery, and the entire period of barbarism, mankind in general were organized in gentes, phratries and tribes. These organizations prevailed throughout the entire ancient world upon all the continents, and were the instrumentalities by means of which ancient society was organized and held together.
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