Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/40

 24 find the "chief inhabitant," who is judge, police and tax-gatherer in one; the book-keeper who keeps the accounts of the village, the Bramin, water-overseer and other officials exercising authority."

Communism is, psychologically, economically and morally, a return to the primitive and barbarous. Socialistic and communist writers, consequently, when they write and show that communism in any form is workable because it has worked, are bound to revert for their instances to an immature and primitive civilization, just as Marx does. What they advocate is therefore regression—in truth they become "extreme reactionaries," This return to the primitive and crude inevitably affects every department of life. It affects most vitally the "family"—the keystone of civilization.

Anthropologists are now generally agreed that man's original state was one of comparative sexual promiscuity. The earliest attempts at organization brought about the Mother Age or Matriarchy. The uncertainty of paternity resulting from sexual promiscuity naturally thrust the mother, the only known parent, into the position of prominence. Group marriage, where the men of one tribe or clan make common use of the women of another {probably the original form of exogamy) is merely a socially limited form of promiscuity. It is still based upon a form of matriarchy in which the women must be to some extent communized and the offspring become the children of the