Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/43

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NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE
11

are of such primitive nature that everybody can procure them easily at any time (stones and sticks, spears with flint heads, bows, etc.). The same is true of the means of defence. As there is not yet any division of labor worth mentioning,—except for the most primitive of all divisions of labor, that between man and woman,—all members of the community performing approximately the same social function exercised by their respective sexes; thus, as there do not yet exist any economic or political forms of domination armament cannot be the prop of such forms of domination within the community. Even if forms of domination existed arms could not support them. With armament in its primitive stage of development only democratic forms of rule are possible.

In those lowest civilizations arms can at most be used within the community for settling individual conflicts, but a change takes place as soon as class-division and the art of manufacturing arms develop. The original communism of the lower agricultural peoples with their gynarchy (rule of women) knows no social, and therefore