• hazefoley [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    If wikipedia is to be trusted on this, the Incans were not socialist. Which is fine, you really can't be socialist without capitalism first existing.

    "The Inca Empire functioned largely without money and without markets. Instead, exchange of goods and services was based on reciprocity between individuals and among individuals, groups, and Inca rulers. "Taxes" consisted of a labour obligation of a person to the Empire. The Inca rulers (who theoretically owned all the means of production) reciprocated by granting access to land and goods and providing food and drink in celebratory feasts for their subjects."

    That's literally just feaudalism with zero money instead of a little

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's not, I'd say it's closer to Ancient Egypt and other Bronze Age command economies that Marx lumped in with Rome as "Slave-State" but are probably more "Warrior-Theocratic" where the land is ruled as an autocracy via central grain control but warriors directly act as companions given a PMC sort of function rather than as a semi-sovereign kind of deal like in feudalism.

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's also not clear they didn't have money. They have an elaborate symbolic knot system which could have been a form of writing or accounting (implying debt and credit), but we just don't know what they were for.