Were Native Americans communists?

[MrDibble]

@psychonaut

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.

It’s not the language, it’s the ridiculously outmoded evolution of civilization model he’s using.

[Malthus]

@leahcim

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.

There were, in fact, civilizations that built monuments before the advent of metal tool-using - in fact, before the advent of pottery or agriculture.

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

[MrDibble]

@leahcim

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.

They must have done more than just “not care much”, they would have had to have made a conscious, comprehensive effort to erase all traces of prior civilization strata, for us not to find any evidence.

Hell, the Egyptians tried to erase just one regnum, and they didn’t succeed at that at all. You’re talking about an entire stage of civilization, there, orders of magnitude more difficult. Never happened.

[MrDibble]

@Malthus

There were, in fact, civilizations that built monuments before the advent of metal tool-using - in fact, before the advent of pottery or agriculture.

But the original question specified “monumental architecture and state-level social organization” - Göbekli Tepe was awesome, but it wasn’t part of a state.

[Malthus]

@MrDibble

But the original question specified “monumental architecture and state-level social organization” - Göbekli Tepe was awesome, but it wasn’t part of a state.

Well, to be fair, we really have no idea of what form of social organization built it, though of course you would be right to say it is highly unlikely to have been a state-level one.

If the issue is “old world” civilizations that had monumental architecture and state-level social organization, but no bronze tools", what about Jerico? It had a city wall and monumental tower (pretty decent evidence of a state-level organization, though of course, we cannot be certain) well before the use of Bronze tools.

Walls of Jericho

[Hector_St_Clare]

@psychonaut

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.

I can believe that Lenin described the NEP as state capitalism, but Stalin ended the NEP and moved to full central planning in the 1930s. Do you have a citation that the Soviets referred to the centrally planned economy under stalin and his successors as ‘state capitalism’?

[Hector_St_Clare]

@smiling_bandit

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.

This isn’t true. The Soviet economy had plenty of monetary incentives for work performance (Alec Nove, “The Soviet Economic System” is my source for most of this). The issue is that, in the absence of market pricing, they didn’t have a good way of simulating qualitative demand, so they ended up relying on quantitative indicators of performance instead (i.e. kilograms * hours of loads carried, for truckdrivers). The issue was then the truckdrivers would load up their trucks with steel bars and drive on pointless journeys through the countryside to rack up their kilometer*hour counts. They had plenty of financial incentives, it’s just that they were usually for not quite the right things.

One solution to that is market socialism along the Titoist, Yugoslavian lines where you do rely on market pricing, and another more speculative argument suggests that if the Soviets had had access to modern computing power and data analysis techniques they might have been able to better simulate demand and figure out finer, more accurate quantitative indicators. There are probably other solutions too, but such as it is, that was the key problem of the Soviet economic system.

There have been a few regimes, notably Cuba in the 1960s when the ultra-left Che Guevara was a key figure in the government, where they did try doing away with monetary incentives entirely, and relying on moral incentives instead (basically, exhortation, social approval, etc.). The Soviet Union for most of its history was a much less radical form of communism though, and they did at least try to use financial motivation (again, though, they usually provided incentives for the worng things).

[MrDibble]

@Malthus

Well, to be fair, we really have no idea of what form of social organization built it, though of course you would be right to say it is highly unlikely to have been a state-level one.

There’s no evidence for even a village-based polity in the vicinity, is what I mean. It’s possible there was a more-distant state that built the sanctuary, but there’s no evidence for it.

If the issue is “old world” civilizations that had monumental architecture and state-level social organization, but no bronze tools", what about Jerico? It had a city wall and monumental tower (pretty decent evidence of a state-level organization, though of course, we cannot be certain) well before the use of Bronze tools.

Not to sell Jericho short, but I hesitate to call a 12ft tower “monumental”.

[Little_Nemo]

@MrDibble

People owned lots of things more than 300 years ago. To suggest otherwise is just bizarre.

It certainly would be. I’m so glad I didn’t say it.

I never said people didn’t own property (you’re the one who brought commons into the discussion not me). I said their system of ownership was based on different principles than our current system.

[Little_Nemo]

@psychonaut

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.

Nobody said it was fair. All I’m claiming is that capitalism works. The results it produces can be fair or unfair, good or evil.

And none of your examples disprove that. They’re all examples of people using capital to make more capital. I’m no Marxist who’s deluded into thinking labor is the sole basis of production. Production is based on labor and capital - the more you can provide of one, the less you have to provide of the other.

[MrDibble]

@Little_Nemo

It certainly would be. I’m so glad I didn’t say it.

Not verbatim. But it’s certainly what your words mean - an assertion that fee simple isn’t the commonest, and default, setting for property holding - and was so from at least 1290, much earlier than the 200-300 years ago you alleged. It’s the same land holding we use today.

I never said people didn’t own property (you’re the one who brought commons into the discussion not me).

:dubious:You can’t have usufruct without the commons…

I said their system of ownership was based on different principles than our current system.

Yeah - specifically, what you said was:

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
But if you weren’t actively using it, somebody else could come along and, by working it himself, acquire the ownership of that field.
[/QUOTE]

So it wasn’t you who came up with this, then? Usufruct is intimately tied to the commons, and it was you that brought usufruct up, in your first post.

Never mind that you’re wrong, and most property was held as freehold by someone. Just how successful do you think a peasant would have been in 1450 if he’d moved into the New Forest and started farming it “because no-one was using it”…?

I said their system of ownership was based on different principles than our current system.

Yeah, no, that’s just wrong. - ours is fee simple, theirs was fee simple. Differences in the details, lots of jurisprudence built up over the centuries, kings, fealty and manors don’t come into it as much nowadays, but the common law principle is the same one.

[Little_Nemo]

This has nothing to do with usufruct or commons, neither of which I mentioned.

Seeing as you appear to be having a debate with some imaginary person in your head in lieu of reading my posts, my presence doesn’t seem to be required.

If at some point in the future, you decide you want to actually learn something on the subject, I’d suggest Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater.

[MrDibble]

@Little_Nemo

This has nothing to do with usufruct or commons, neither of which I mentioned.

:smack: You … you don’t actually know what usufruct is, do you? Because you mentioned it in all but name.
You:\

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.

Wiki:

In tribal cultures, usufruct means the land is owned in common by the tribe, but families and individuals have the right to use certain plots of land. Most Indian tribes owned things like land as a group, and not as individuals. The family never owned the land, they just farmed it. This is called usufruct land ownership. A person must make (more or less) continuous use of the item, or else he loses ownership rights. This is usually referred to as “possession property” or “usufruct”.