No title {Further reflections} Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #623)

development from the old Stone Age societies where people lived by hunting and gathering wild fruits and roots. All societies without exception, the Europeans, Asians, the Mayas in Mexico and the Incas in Peru have gone through primitive communal stage in which all people lived and worked together as equals and where there was no human exploitation. Classes and the oppression of some people by others only developed much later in all these areas. Even if Europe had not conquered Africa, the people of our continent would in due course and on their own have found this social system a fetter to further development and destroyed it. Classes would have emerged and all the social conflicts that have repeatedly rocked Europe, Asia and the empires of the Incas and the Mayas throughout their long history would have come to Africa as well. Feudal lords would have emerged, developed ideas of private property in land, grabbed it and otherwise free peasants would have been turned into serfs tied to the land and ruthlessly exploited. The present wars that started with the Great Peasant War in Germany in 1525 and that spread to practically every country in Europe and Asia reaching far off Japan with the Shimabara Revolt in 1637, would have torn our continent from top to bottom. Once this revolutionary change took place there would be no doubt at all to further developed and more advanced forms of society. Any economic theory that is built on the study of social conditions in a particular continent and that does not focus its attention on human history as a whole will at best express only a half truth.