Our modern system which views everything as a piece of property that has a specific perpetual owner is a fairly recent invention. It arose within the last two or three centuries.
Prior to that, the more common system was based on use. You owned the stuff you were using. If you were working a field, it belonged to you. But if you weren’t actively using it, somebody else could come along and, by working it himself, acquire the ownership of that field.
I disagree. A society in which one man effectively owns everything is nowhere near communist. It was a centrally-planned state, but that’s a mechanism, not an ideology. They were a theocractic-flavoured monarchy.
Bullshit. The existence of commons doesn’t negate the many, many, many pre-1700s records of outright property ownership (and inheritance).
There’s also the matter of the size of societies. It’s easy to get something that could be loosely described as “communist” when your society consists of a tribe of perhaps a few hundred individuals, but it’s far harder to get it to work when you’ve got tens or hundreds of millions.
It was a centrally planned state with large scale redistribution and full employment, and contemporary Spanish accounts claim that the Inca common people were the best nourished of any ordinary people they’d ever seen.
This guy is perhaps the most famous associated with the Incas-were-communists claim, but there are many more like him.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/1928/essay03.htm
For that matter, the ruling parties of Peru and Bolivia today both have elements that think communism of a sort would be a good idea, and that the Incas were forerunners of it. (No, Morales and Humala aren’t communists, but they certainly include communists among their supporters.)
“Native Americans” is such a broad category that it’s a huge mistake to make blanket assertions about them. There were vast difference among the Native American nations.
Some were nomadic, some were urban
Some were hunter/gatherers, some practiced large-scale agricuture.
Some were virtual anarchists, some had very elaborate and complicated codes of law.
Some were ignorant and superstitious, others had mathematicians and scientists.
Some were peaceful, some were highly warlike.
Some lived communal lives, while others were merchants- capitalists, if you like.
You can’t treat dozens of groups who lived in vastly different settings as if they were all the same.
Agreed. Doesn’t make them communist - they had a strict social hierarchy, an aristocrat class, and that “full employment” included large periods of enforced servitude.
So, not like communists at all, then
I missed a smiley at the end, there.
Early Christian communities worked in much the same way. Read the Acts of the Apostles.
For small, tight-knit communities, “primitive communism” is pretty much the natural social order. It tends to break down as societies grow larger, and attempts to replicate it on a national scale (ie, Communism) have so far ranged from “failure” to “disaster.”
Also, Marxism (or Marxism/Leninism or whatever) has inherent ideological aspects that primitive cultures did not have. Marx was very anti-religion and believed that money spent on religion was a waste. Most primitive societies, even if communal, spent a lot of effort toward appeasing whatever gods they acknowledged. Also, according to the Book of Acts, the early Christian church (which wasn’t by any means a primitive society), was communal in nature in terms of having no private property. But it clearly wasn’t Marxist.
So one question that I have is whether someone or some society can be Communist but not Marxist.
Your use of “(say)” here indicates that the Inca are a “stand-in” intended to represent American Indian societies as a whole. As astorian points out, this is ludicrous.
I have no doubt many different Marxist writers in South and Central America have likened native societies to Communism. They have (and had) their agendas. I will go really far out on a limb and say that Communism itself did not exist before, oh, to pick a date, 1800. That is, those structures and forces in the world - political, economic, societal, etc to which Communism was a reaction were not in place. They certainly were not in place on this continent (or South America) before, say, 1400. So if we need to come up with a term, I would prefer something like “communalism” rather than “communist”. “Communist” is freighted with enormous loads of baggage in this day and age.
Yup. It’s same principle behind why I tend to dislike portmanteaus and compounds like ‘Islamo-fascism’. They just end up confusing the issue.
No, I didn’t make any remarks about Native Americans as a whole, or their modes of production. I said specifically that the Incas have sometimes been described as practicing communism of a sort (and not really primitive communism, since they were anything but primitive).
‘Communalism’ has negative baggage of its own, but I’d agree that modern communism and socialism are, uh, modern, and the terms shouldn’t be used without qualification to describe premodern societies. The Inca Empire had certain similarities to communism, and modern communists often find it an inspiring model, let’s leave it at that.
As far as I know, not even those regimes claimed they had implemented communism. I don’t know much about the Cambodians, but at least the Chinese and Soviet ruling parties pretty openly claimed that they were running a capitalist system (albeit one which was largely administered by the state, supposedly for the common good).
I’ve thought that for the most part, they were just nomadic hunter-gatherers with stone age technology.
Um, what?
Native Americans in the eastern United States, the southwestern United States, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Amazonia, and I think the Caribbean basin were all agriculturalists, not hunter-gatherers. I’m pretty sure hnomadic unter-gatherers were overwhelmingly exceptions.
No, they claimed to be socialist (not communist) states, in a state of transition to communism.
Some dissident Marxists claimed the Soviet Union and its satellites were ‘state capitalist’, but that certainly wasn’t their self-description. Even Trotsky considered the Soviet Union to be a deformed worker’s state, not a capitalist one.
This sort of claim pops up over and over again in discussions of native americans, and it’s really hard for me to understand why. I mean, isn’t every American kindergardener taught the story of the Pilgrims, and how the Indians taught them to plant corn (maize)? And neglecting to point out that the Pilgrims chose the site of their settlement because it was an abandoned Indian village with already cleared fields, since the entire village had died of smallpox a few years earlier.
The people who lived in the area where the Pilgrims settled were farmers. The people who lived in the mid-west were farmers. The people who lived in mesoamerica were farmers. 95%+ of all Indians were farmers. Yes, in Canada and Alaska and the Pacific Northwest most people were hunter-gatherers. But people who live in villages and plant fields of corn aren’t nomadic hunter-gatherers.
The “stone age” part I’ll grant you, with an asterisk. There was plenty of gold and and silver and copper working done in the Americas, but with a few exceptions there wasn’t any bronze or ironworking. But stone age tends to conjure up in people’s minds “nomadic hunter-gatherers”. But bronze tools aren’t a necessary precondition to agriculture, sedentary living, monumental architecture, or state-level social organization.
The nomadic plains-living horse-riding buffalo-hunting Indian cultures that we tend to think of as the prototypical Indian lifestyle only existed for a very short time, after most of the farmers had been pushed off their lands and exiled to the west.
Anyway, back to “communism”. I think it is extremely misleading to compare traditional social structures and land use customs to communism. Communism is a modern industrial-era notion and it doesn’t makes sense to call traditional agricultural societies communist, any more than it does to call a family communist just because the parents don’t charge their children rent.
For the same reason, I always bristle when someone asks if Alexander the Great/Jesus Christ/someone else who lived thousands of years ago was gay. Sexual orientation is a social construct, and it doesn’t even map well to other cultures today, let alone in ancient times.