<story><title>The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)</title><url>http://io9.com/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-empire-was-its-strange-1198541254</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mseebach</author><text>&amp;quot;Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly&amp;quot; is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam&amp;#x27;s razor) cause of communism&amp;#x27;s failure, which is the ideology itself.&lt;p&gt;But to apply some historical facts to the theory:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps; ran the Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Cheka existed from 1917 to 1922. Even if the US was scared of communism, nothing like the CIA existed to undermine the revolution in Soviet Russia. And yet, violently putting down riots by workers and peasants was necessary. It takes a special kind of ideological arrogance to blame the USA for that.</text></item><item><author>nhaehnle</author><text>&lt;i&gt;But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I recently came across a very interesting thought, which is that this observation (which I also believed until coming across that thought) is induced by a kind of selection bias. The original article in which I encountered this thought is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/men_make_their_own_history_but_they_do_not_make_it_as_they_please&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pieria.co.uk&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;men_make_their_own_history_...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The synopsis is this: Communism tended to develop in poorer (and therefore militarily weaker) countries, and communism was &lt;i&gt;vehemently&lt;/i&gt; opposed by the ruling elite in capitalist countries. The worldwide interference of the CIA is probably the clearest evidence of this. So from the start, communist countries had to defend themselves against powerful adversaries.&lt;p&gt;Given that communist movements were attacked quite violently by foreign interests, it stands to reason that those countries which implemented a &amp;quot;softer&amp;quot; approach to communism did not survive. Foreign propaganda, wars, and coup d&amp;#x27;etats sponsored by capitalist nations killed communism in many place where it had been democratically legitimized and could in principle be sustained with the consent of the people.&lt;p&gt;But, to put it bluntly, the consent of the people may not be enough when what really counts is a handful of oligarchs in the US.&lt;p&gt;So the examples of communism that survived are those that were able to defend themselves ruthlessly against equally or even more ruthless aggressors. This defense then grew abominations like secret police and what have you.&lt;p&gt;The secret police was thus not a function of communism, but of the paranoia caused by foreign aggressors. Look at what secret state organizations in western capitalist countries are doing these days, and the idea that the development of secret police is related to economics starts looking a bit far-fetched.&lt;p&gt;I am not certain that this is the ultimate answer in this debate. However, it is a plausible enough story which has a lot of historical facts on its side.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>It definitely didn&amp;#x27;t share Marx&amp;#x27;s original concepts of decentralized states and communal distribution. But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. So it&amp;#x27;s a fair statement, if taken as the commonly held meaning.</text></item><item><author>PavlovsCat</author><text>Lost me at &amp;quot;Marxists&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Marxism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.</text></item><item><author>vijayboyapati</author><text>A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao &amp;quot;god&amp;quot; Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in &amp;quot;tambos&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Tambo_(Incan_structure)&lt;/a&gt;) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.&lt;p&gt;OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap&amp;#x2F;free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.&lt;p&gt;That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Quipu&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn&amp;#x27;t until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nhaehnle</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly&amp;quot; is a very rich genre.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please be clear on what you mean by &amp;quot;failure&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For Russia itself, communism was actually very successful economically speaking: Their economy grew more quickly than the average for other, non-communist countries that were at Russia&amp;#x27;s level of development.&lt;p&gt;With this aside, and going back to what we were talking about (i.e. state violence and repression), your point is a rather weak one. During and in the aftermath of revolutionary phases, there tends to be violence. You yourself conceded that these measures were eliminated and&amp;#x2F;or scaled down in Russia without outside intervention once things had settled down.&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing has nothing to do with economic organization and can be found in capitalism as well. Just look at what&amp;#x27;s been going on in the Middle East and Egypt in particular. Those are far from being communists, and yet the cleaning-up after a coup d&amp;#x27;etat was quite brutal.</text></comment>
<story><title>The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)</title><url>http://io9.com/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-empire-was-its-strange-1198541254</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mseebach</author><text>&amp;quot;Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly&amp;quot; is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam&amp;#x27;s razor) cause of communism&amp;#x27;s failure, which is the ideology itself.&lt;p&gt;But to apply some historical facts to the theory:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps; ran the Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Cheka existed from 1917 to 1922. Even if the US was scared of communism, nothing like the CIA existed to undermine the revolution in Soviet Russia. And yet, violently putting down riots by workers and peasants was necessary. It takes a special kind of ideological arrogance to blame the USA for that.</text></item><item><author>nhaehnle</author><text>&lt;i&gt;But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I recently came across a very interesting thought, which is that this observation (which I also believed until coming across that thought) is induced by a kind of selection bias. The original article in which I encountered this thought is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/men_make_their_own_history_but_they_do_not_make_it_as_they_please&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pieria.co.uk&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;men_make_their_own_history_...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The synopsis is this: Communism tended to develop in poorer (and therefore militarily weaker) countries, and communism was &lt;i&gt;vehemently&lt;/i&gt; opposed by the ruling elite in capitalist countries. The worldwide interference of the CIA is probably the clearest evidence of this. So from the start, communist countries had to defend themselves against powerful adversaries.&lt;p&gt;Given that communist movements were attacked quite violently by foreign interests, it stands to reason that those countries which implemented a &amp;quot;softer&amp;quot; approach to communism did not survive. Foreign propaganda, wars, and coup d&amp;#x27;etats sponsored by capitalist nations killed communism in many place where it had been democratically legitimized and could in principle be sustained with the consent of the people.&lt;p&gt;But, to put it bluntly, the consent of the people may not be enough when what really counts is a handful of oligarchs in the US.&lt;p&gt;So the examples of communism that survived are those that were able to defend themselves ruthlessly against equally or even more ruthless aggressors. This defense then grew abominations like secret police and what have you.&lt;p&gt;The secret police was thus not a function of communism, but of the paranoia caused by foreign aggressors. Look at what secret state organizations in western capitalist countries are doing these days, and the idea that the development of secret police is related to economics starts looking a bit far-fetched.&lt;p&gt;I am not certain that this is the ultimate answer in this debate. However, it is a plausible enough story which has a lot of historical facts on its side.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>It definitely didn&amp;#x27;t share Marx&amp;#x27;s original concepts of decentralized states and communal distribution. But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. So it&amp;#x27;s a fair statement, if taken as the commonly held meaning.</text></item><item><author>PavlovsCat</author><text>Lost me at &amp;quot;Marxists&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Marxism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.</text></item><item><author>vijayboyapati</author><text>A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao &amp;quot;god&amp;quot; Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in &amp;quot;tambos&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Tambo_(Incan_structure)&lt;/a&gt;) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.&lt;p&gt;OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap&amp;#x2F;free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.&lt;p&gt;That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Quipu&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn&amp;#x27;t until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>int_19h</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Allied_intervention_in_the_Russ...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>