Were Native Americans communists?

Factual Questions
41

Bullshit back atcha.

Sure there were some cases of outright property ownership in our modern sense. I never denied this. But it wasn’t universal. It was, in fact, more the exception than the norm.

The example you gave illustrates this: look at the old laws on inheritance. A person usually didn’t simply inherit the ownership of a piece of property and then have full rights to it. It was common for inheritances to involve an entail, which said the heir had the use of the property during his lifetime but had the obligation to maintain it and pass it on intact to his own heir with the same entail in place.

42

Especially the horse-riding part, since horses were extinct in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans re-introduced them.

43

Slight hijack: that’s something that always bugged me. How come there were never any “old world” civilizations that had monumental architecture and state-level social organization, but no bronze tools? Why did the development of civilization follow such a different pattern in the Americas?

44

You are mistaken; “state capitalism” was indeed the Soviets’ self-description, going all the way back to Lenin himself:

That’s the very beginning of a 1918 pamphlet of his, “The Present-Day Economy Of Russia”; the rest of the pamphlet is basically one long argument for the implementation of state capitalism in Russia. In 1921 Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, which continued the official government program of state capitalism, and his pamphlets and speeches during this time made repeated positive references to the “state capitalism” developing in the Soviet Union.

Stalin continued the same state-capitalist policy of his predecessor, and while he himself didn’t use the term to describe the Soviet economy, he had no qualms favourably quoting those who did. You’re correct that Trotsky didn’t like the term either, though many of his most famous supporters did.

45

Is it really obvious that there weren’t such civilizations in the old world? If they existed at the level of pre-Columbian native Americans in 4000BC, and were replaced by (or just became) bronze-age civilizations later, would we be able to tell from the archaeological record?

It seems to me that the there’s a lot of space between stone-age hunter-gatherers and say, predynastic Egyptian civilization, that could have been occupied with civilizations of that type.

46

What is it, exactly, that you are objecting to? You’re not going to find historical texts where the writer presciently adheres to modern-day social attitudes and politically correct language. This doesn’t mean that whatever observations they make should automatically be discounted. Pliny the Younger, for example, accepted the institution of slavery, was a slavemaster himself, and wrote some disturbingly patronising comments about his own slaves. But this doesn’t make the factual details he has passed down about how slavery operated in Ancient Rome wrong.

47

Surplus was in the form of food (the only resource they cared enough to hoard of which they could meaningfully have a surplus) which was preserved to the limits of technology and stored for winter, when most of their industries shut down and they had to survive in sedentary villages eating their surplus food. Surpluses were, again, shared, if not absolutely equally, then at least to ensure nobody starved.

Also, about the “nomad debate”: The people I’m referring to, who still exist as a distinct group (or groups), had what’s known as a “seasonal round” whereby they traveled around to root-gathering locations, fishing spots (which, again, were owned, albeit not individually), and hunting spots, visiting the same locations each year, and then coming back to a set location to wait out the winter in a camp of semi-permanent houses. They didn’t farm or practice animal husbandry, but they were tied to a region just the same.

So once again there’s a little wrench thrown into the nomadic hunter-gatherers/sedentary farmers (agriculturalists, etc.) division.

48

Depends on your definition of communism…

Jesus definitely was communist - he abhorred riches, and urged his followers to give away their wealth for the rest of the community to use. the parable of the workers in the vinyard - everyone gets the same wage no matter how long they work? Jesus endorses the AFL/CIO. And so on… Early Christianity was definitely centered around the idea that what was one, was everyone’s. True, he didn’t abhor religion in the true Marxist sense.

Most small tribes - the ones we think of as hunter-gatherer, but usually more complex - had a communal lifestyle. they varied from a few dozen engaged in hunting and gathering, to larger villages more dedicated to agriculture. How close this comes to “communist” is debatable, but the same can be said of communist countries.

Basically, there was no higher organization capable or ready to step in and solve the village’s problems, so everyone had to fend for the common good of the village/tribe, and everyone sinks or swims together. After all, most members were deeply related to everyone else in the village. So if one man kills a deer, the whole village shares in the feast (Or if we’re talking a few hundred people, all the people close around him socially.) Nobody starved while someone else got fat.

Another point was that many of the villages were nomadic. Even the more established villages, like the Iroquois longhouse vllages, would move every few years; so they tended not to accumulate a large collection of “personal possessions”.

This contributed to a more relaxed view of “private property”. If you aren’t using the canoe you made this day, why can’t Running Bear use it? It would be a greedy act, like if your dad said “I bought this TV, everyone else out of the room when I watch - you can’t watch it, buy your own!” there would be some personal private and untouchable things, but very little.

That’s the other problem - along with a limit on what a person could reasonably own, since their possessions had to be portable - there was no money. Money is essentially a way to store possessions in a small, easily carried form. Without money, with a limit on personal possessions, sharing is automatic - it’s a different form of money stored as obligation. I share my meat so Running Bear will share his when he hits the hunting jackpot.

Even the North American Native societies that reached beyond this stage, to the proto-empire and empire stages, still had the difficulty that they had no form of money - so again, their ability to accumulate personal possessions was limited to barter. The local villages, as far as I know, retained this “sharing” model for local interactions. Presumably, like proto-empires elsewhere, they just had to contribute food and labour to the central government.

The potlach is an interesting illustration of this. The west coast tribes, because of the abundance of resources like salmon, could live a non-migratory lifestyle. They could build large, complex wood villages in fixed locations (although much of the complex large-scale decoration like totem poles evolved after contact with the white man and the acquisition of metal woodworking tools). Their larger villages were organized in a heirarchy where some “nobles” owned some resources like fish runs and the lesser tribe members paid them (in barter) for the use of these. Without money, they had a familiar dilemma - you can only use so many blankets, wood chests, fancy clothing, pots and spoons, etc. When a family accumulated too much, they had an “orgy of giving” and gave away all their possesions - aggain, effectively creating a currency of stored obligations; it didn’t hurt too, that this display also enhanced social status.

So was it communism? Or simply pragmatic self interest to ensure the entire village was “taken care of”? Or is the label meaningless other than Marx thought a city of a million people would see the same self-interest in helping everyone?

The problem is, the bigger the group, the easier it is for someone to get a “free ride”. Even a few decades after they were founded, the Israeli kibutz members were finding the same problem as the Russian collectives - that often people did not work hard when most others would reap the reward. Of course, unlike Indians, modern society is secure in the knowledge that as long as there is not chaos in the state, everyone will survive whether they help their immediate neighbours or not.

49

Well, yeah. I mean, if we found remains of similar monolithic structures surrounded by stone tools at a number of adjacent sites, then we’d have proof of “Eurasian Mayans or Incas”, wouldn’t we?

50

Good points!

In a small, nomadic society, pretty much everyone was family. There might be a few people who had joined from other groups, but integration into the tribe would more or less have constituted a familial adoption of some kind. So telling your neighbors that you can’t use the canoe you just built was more or less the same thing as some kid fighting with his sister over what to watch on TV. Dad comes around and tells them to stop fighting and get along.

51

This is essentially why Communism doesn’t work. On the small scale, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a “free ride” when everyone is scrambling just to survive. Not pulling your weight would be likely to get the tribe killed, or at least would be noticed as a huge deal and you would be brought before the council or whatever. In a huge, process-oriented industrial bureaucracy, it’s easy to hide in the cracks for a while and not have the entire factory fall down. Sure, some level of work was required. And someone would eventually have to do it. But only enough work to prevent the thing from falling down. After that, it’s back to goofing off.

52

I guess capitalism doesn’t work either, then, since everything you describe also goes on to some not insignificant extent in the process-oriented industrial societies of today.

53

He gets the reason partly wrong, but his conclusion isn’t wrong. Communism has three severe flaws, and they are all interrelated. But the most critical for this particular discussion is that lacks positive motivators. As a society becomes more complicated, a system of private property becomes more important. There are more complex unresolved questions and less personal communication about how to deal with them.

54

Sure, but we also have some very good reasons why those sites would not exist even if European civilization went through such a phase – all of the “good” sites where one would expect the centres of large-scale stone-age civilizations to be have also been long occupied by later civilizations who didn’t care much about preserving archaeological evidence of their forebears.

55

Not really. Capitalism makes no promises that you will get whatever you need. It comes right out and says you can fail in a capitalist society. On the flip side, capitalism also says that if you do more work you can get more stuff.

So capitalism has rewards and punishments built into the economic system. Communism lacks these rewards and punishments in its economic system so it requires the support of a political system to keep its economic system going. Which is why no communist system will ever achieve its ideal of having the political system wither away.

56

Not quite. Yes, in a large bureaucracy, with lazy bosses, you can get the same effect. However, the boss is (usually) motivated to do a better job in the same way his workers are. He gets the bonuses and promotions (usually) for doing a recognizably good job, and he has the ability - carrot and stick, paycheque or be fired - to impart the same motivation to his minions. Oddly, the place where this logic seems to fail most often is the place most resembling a communist state, the civil service. Your pay grades are set by rules, the productivity is only measured in the aggregate so if you fail to perform, as long as others do, everyone gets paid. If everyone fails, the only necessity is a good cover-your-ass excuse. larger corporations tend to fall into this same pattern.

But in a small subsistence village, I guess you could say it is communist, since the workers own the mean of production. It’s only when a society becomes large enough, centralized, and organized that there is a leisure class, doing little or no labour but living the high life off the backs of others, that the system breaks down.

Marx IIRC saw the priests and church hierarchy as living the same life of parasitism as the nobility or the ownership class, doing “nothing” but living off the work of the proletariat. Some few American societies had evolved to that level, but most were still in the village phase.

Not an expert on Marx by any means, but I believe he also thought that eventually the state would not need money, people would produce and the production would be distributed by need without resorting to cash. If this is how the Inca society worked to some extent, then I guess they were somewhat communist. However, Marx did not envision his workers’ paradise run by a god sun-king and a hierarchy of nobles and temple priests.

57

It also says that you can get a great deal of stuff by doing no work at all, such as by inheriting it, or by allowing others to use it for rent or interest, or by employing other people to produce it for you. (And most people who aren’t lucky enough to have accumulated a lot of wealth the first way won’t have much opportunity to accumulate it the other two ways.) As far as reward systems go, it certainly isn’t a particularly fair one.

58

Well, there’s no need to believe that the system is fair, in the sense that everyone gets what they deserve and never get what they don’t deserve. It clearly happens constantly that people get an undeserved advantage or disadvantage.

The key question is, if we implement one set of social policies or another, what results do we get, and do we prefer those results to another set of potential results? Obviously some people would prefer absolute equality of result, even if it meant that some people did all the work and some people did nothing, and there was a very low level of production. If equality of result is your highest good, and you implement social policies to ensure that equality of result, then you have to live with the consequences of those policies as actually implemented by actual human beings.

But it turns out that we can’t really design human societies from the top down and the bottom up, because the human beings who make up those societies often refuse to play along. And even when they try to act according to a particular set of rules, they often fail. And so every actually existing human society is hodgepodge of social and political and economic rules and customs that were partially designed, partially adapted, partially traditional, and partly irrational. Sometimes traditional customs exist for very good reasons even if on the surface they don’t seem to make any sense, and sometimes they really don’t make any sense.

59

No they were the first communists. That’s where the term “better dead than red” started.

(:smack::smack:that was so wrong, I need to be sent to bed without dinner - I couldn’t help myself :D)

60

“some cases” is an understatement. People owned lots of things more than 300 years ago. To suggest otherwise is just bizarre.

Again - cite?

Cite for the “usually” there.

Which estate didn’t exist before 1285, and was never as common as fee simple, so your point is?

Which negates private ownership how, exactly? It merely devolves the owning entity from an individual to a family. It’s not like the property devolves to the commons at death - common law fee tail exists to keep property in the family line - that’s not communism, that’s just a restriction on ownership.