How Does a Communist Economy Work?

[Sophia]

The wiki article I linked to wasn't the most graphic. It's hard to believe anyone could have gone through the stuff in this following article without being seriously traumatized for life:
http://www.vice.com/read/full-v13n4

That's really bad! :-( yes, it's surely torture.

 

[Salvador]

Well ok s for the article on vice news , every army can be shown in bad light , take the US and their scandal of the treating of afghan prisoners or the constant flow of whining about Guantanamo etc I don't like when something is presented as a one way street or a thing that happens only in that part of the world.
Of all the news I watch I couldn't say Vice does the most authentic job although they have some good pieces from time to time.

That being said yes the Russian army is a tough place , but trust me it's not only because of the supervisors or policy it's because Russians are tough people , their mentality is such , if you can't understand this then there is nothing much one can say.
I hope liberals all around the world have long stopped dreaming about this global world which enjoys peace and democracy , it will never happen , it's not like I don't want it but It cannot happen much like Communism cannot happen , people are people they differ from country to country from nationality to nationality from family to family.The Russians like their "drinks strong" while Europeans might think otherwise and Americans might want no drinks at all so what ?

For those who think Russia would be better off with a liberal democracy driven government well think twice, Russia is sort of like the middle east , one territory many times even one country but so many different tribes and directions and they fight all the time and clash.

Let me give you an example, watch the Russian "Stop ham" videos were young folks go around the city and demand drivers to park their cars correctly , you know what they get mot of the time ? an aggressive response , an with the word aggressive I mean real physical force , threats and sometimes even physical injuries so they go atleast 4 people a group.
This is the Russian mentality - force.One wise man once said that Putin is the best you can wish because his tough and keeps things in check , if the Kremlin would soften up chaos would arise and then all I can say is God help us.
Look what chaos does in the middle east to the rest of the world (9/11 etc ) Think about what would chaos mean for the worlds second or third strongest military with sophisticated weapons systems and a huge nuclear arsenal.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Now since this idea and ideology wasn't natural it requires some force some outside power to make it happen , about this Lenin wrote extensively , the need for a revolution and he managed to make one using the popular uprising against the old Czar and his monarchy.Much of the society was poor and enslaved so Lenin used that moment to ride his idea on top of it and win the October revolution.But after the revolution the force couldn't be taken away , the idea of the USSR only works if you have a hardcore government with an almost perfect and limitless secret service underlining and scanning every part of the society , this role was undertaken by the NKVD later the famous KGB.
A country like this needs a strong dictator or as he was called general secretary , it simply doesn't work otherwise.All the attempts later on to humanize the USSR and make it more like the western world only lead to it's collapse.

So, what you're saying is that communism is a system whereby, in order to make people's lives better, it is necessary to oppress them even more than they were under the old regime. I see.

 

[Salvador]

Hey Zooby , no hard feelings but don't blame me for any of what I said , I'm just trying to tell you the way it is, there's nothing personal about any of this , at least not for me.
A system which asks people to do the things they would rather not do must use force as that is the only means of keeping that system running.Take physics for example , a car only moves somewhere especially uphill if it has some force acting on it , naturally the car doesn't want to go anywhere.
The society is no different , there is no way on this Earth one can peacefully just ask the majority to "Hey, let's all now work for a better tomorrow in the name of a more advanced society"
All people want a higher paycheck for themselves and better stuff for themselves they don't care whether their neighbors have that or not.

take the US current administration as a good example , I'm personally again am not in favor of anyone I'm neutral but just as an example , when the administration tries some social reforms that would be considered tiny with respect to even socialistic countries like Sweden or Norway not to mention the USSR look at how much the backlash is , and that's just a tiny reform , now can you imagine why I said that social experiments on the size of USSR simply cannot be done without force? ...

 

[Sophia]

Thanks @Salvador, it's totally right, post USSR countries may not be so rich as Western, but at live just like anyone else. It's not all grey and serious in here. Yes, it's not customary to smile all the time and we may not be so open to strangers, but once you get to know people, they are nice and kind and helpful. There are some mean psychopaths like anywhere else. But in general, it's totally true as you said, people lived, loved and laughed during socialism, too.
Yes, if you got into trouble it was terrible and there was a high chance your career and career of your children were ruined. That is truth.
However, everyone knew he would have a job and a home to live in. No one had to be afraid he couldn't pay medical bills. Even if parents were poor, their children could attend university (true - if they were politically ok).
Everyone could afford quality food. There was no water and chemicals added to meat to make it heavier as they do today. The bread was made from real yeast, not from quick - yeast as now, which makes bread puffy and light. There's only one shop in my town where you can get a real bread. During socialism, it was everywhere and it was cheap.

Also the care for children was especially good. Free or very cheap from kindergarten to university. Lots of after school activities and summer camps available to everyone. Educational TV programmes for kids and youth that could include real content because the producers weren't pressed by need to sell adds. Of course, the programmes were censured by the Party, but they still had much higher value than the BS produced today.
You could buy cheap books, there used to be many cultural activities, theatre, opera etc. Everyone could afford them.

I'm not writing this to glorify socialism. It had many very serious flaws. And in the first place, the ideology is against human nature as Salvador said. I don't want socialism to return here.
But I feel it is important to stress that even in these countries, life wasn't only about continuous torture and inability to fulfil basic needs.

Edit: corrected several typoes. I wrote on mobile and the keyboard changed some words

 

[Bystander]

(These are the good old days)
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
(These are the good old days)
(These are the good old days)
(These are the good old days)
(These are…..the good old days)
Writer/s: CARLY SIMON
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

 

[Salvador]

Exactly Sofia , we as intellectuals or atleast us trying to be ones must see life how it is not how some agenda wants to portray it to us.
We must see where there was evil and we must also see where there was good.Simply saying all was bad is basically being ignorant and uninformed - not the properties of a good character.

Healthcare was free and quite good in the USSR although I must say the dentist could have had better equipment actually many things that were free could have been better but then again it's the problem of socialism stuff that's free tends not to be so high class as that for which you pay large sums , well maybe I'm judging it too harshly because I grew up in later times and technology advanced in recent decades alot.It's just that a dentist scares me more than any dictator ever... :D

Movies were good , haven't seen anything so down to Earth and real as those old ones and this can be said both about the USSR film production and also about Hollywood's golden age which I like to watch.Just to stir a little controversy , of all the bad things about Stalin he had some very excellent , one of those were his passion for classical arts , a thing also Adolf was known of.
If someone wants just type in google St Petersburg metro station or Moscow metro and most of these stations were built back in his day with a very strong accent on classical architecture and they look very beautiful.
The other fine thing I liked about the USSR is that people who were criminals and other scum of society were forced to do good to society as prisoners built or helped building many many factories , roads and other infrastructure.
Want to hear some fun story, the apartment block in which I live is actually built by prisoners and it was built for police officers.
Why let them simply rot and waste their time in prison , give them a chance at making their bad works pay off with some good stuff ,Surely in a capitalistic economy prison labor is of no interest to business man since there is enough cheap labor out there ready to work for 1$ a day in third world countries.

 

[Sophia]

(These are the good old days)
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
(These are the good old days)
(These are the good old days)
(These are the good old days)
(These are…..the good old days)
Writer/s: CARLY SIMON
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

It's not only about the good old days nostalgia. It's trying to objectively describe life in the USSR. We describe both good and bad and ugly.
You can't describe something only from one perspective.
For me, American freedom which says that you have to pay incredible money for health care (and I've even read here on this forum that someone refuses to pay health care of others from his taxes!)
That is something so morally wrong and cruel to me, which I can't understand. But that is not the reason for me to claim everything in the US is bad. I wish that people reading this could understand me and Salvador when we are trying to point both morally wrong and good that was in our countries. And not mark it as a nostalgia.

 

[Sophia]

I like the idea of real criminals working, too, but let's be honest much of the work was done by political prisoners and intellectuals. They used to work in uranium mines without any protection in incredibly though conditions. Those who survived had consequences all their lives.

 

[Salvador]

Yes political prisoners did their "fair share" of work but they were a minority because as always real criminals outweigh in numbers those who go to prison for something they haven't done.
People have committed murder and rapes and theft all the time whether back in ancient Rome or not so long ago in the USSR so they constituted the majority of prisoners and were put to work because let's face it what other value do they possesses ?

It's just that we always hear about those political prisoners because their cases are amplified and spoken about but the majority of prisoners are never talked about because there is not much to say about them anyways.They are the silent majority.
By the way political prisoners were often not put into ordinary prisons together with rapists and murderers.They had a special division in the KGB and special prisons for the highly educated intellectuals who sometimes decided to oppose the regime.They were tortured more psychologically than physically because the men working at the KGB were no fools they knew damn well that every level of society needs a different approach, starting from physical beating for the simple thief to a highly advanced method of psychological manipulation in order to correct a scientist willing to deflect or any other skilled person who wanted to try to be a rebel.

 

[Sophia]

I don't have statistics about numbers.
The political prisoners were tortured more than normal criminals. They were beaten, too, given electric shocks, sleep deprivation, psychological abuse (basically similar to Guantanamo) and they were made to work. For example, in the uranium mines in Jáchymov that I'm talking about. These were made especially for intellectuals and were full of clergy.
Concerning the idea of forced work for criminals, I agree with it. It should be done in appropriate conditions and protection, together with learning social skills so that they can return to society. But that would be another topic for discussion.

 

[Salvador]

Let's be honest criminals don't get justice much even in countries like US , in a state like USSR they were worked to their death which then became their sentence.
The world longest railway the Trans Siberian express was constructed of prison labor.
Yes religious folks especially the top ones were extremely hated in the early days of the USSR, since Soviet union was officially atheist.Sure they got the "best" of uranium mining.

Ok I think we need to let others speak too after all this thread was originally about the economy of a communist state or should have been more properly called " the theory of a communistic economy" since it never came into existence.

 

[m k]

I'd say it's still just simple supply and demand.

Back in the USSR a group could eat and drink the whole day with used jeans or few pantyhoses.
Cabbage was freighted long distances in open trucks but so what, there were plenty of it.

Only after China started producing the consumer supply of goods is meating its demand in the west.
So next socialism era is much closer to balanced comparison than the first.

 

[Salvador]

Oh someone brought up China finally , yes I can agree @m k on the purely human level having a full stomach at the end of the day is the very first and underlying prosperity and safety of each nation or state, then when a society is physically fit and ok then there are those who think about higher stuff like the politics of education and welfare and maybe even philosophy.

China is rather funny for Marxists because the only thing it has kept from it's beginnings is the authoritarian power model and Communist ideology but that's it only ideology , practice is actually purely capitalist.After all they trade and manufacture for profit.And they literally make all the things found on this planet.

I didn't understand what you meant with your last paragraph about the next socialism era etc...?

 

[russ_watters]

Yes. Nobody starts a thread on "How does a fascist / Nazi economy work?" , with response posts asserting that there were never any true fascist economies because psychopaths took them over before they could reach their true potential. Not surprising I suppose given the media output. Hollywood has put out uncountable films demonizing the Nazis, and still has a taste for them. Hollywood also put out a pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin propaganda film at the behest of the US government during WWII.

While it is possible I'm using that disclaimer because I've been beaten into submission over countless discussions with apologists and I was trying to avoid an argument, there is another way of looking at that:

Capitalists/democracy-ists really do try to faithfully execute the principles of their systems, but there isn't a singular, specific definition. The systems today may be heavily modified, but the concepts have been developed, tested and implemented over hundreds of years, with many contributors and flavors. These are highly developed and mature and they can't be attributed to a single philosopher.

Communism was invented basically by one guy and was a naive, almost crackpotish vision that shouldn't have gone anywhere. It probably isn't possible to implement it on a large scale, because it just doesn't make sense. And it has never really been developed further to see if it could. But it had some useful features that guys like Stalin were able to incorporate into their reigns. Does that mean communism can only ever be used in the way Salin used it? Maybe, but most people who buy-in to communism want to implement a form of Marx's vision and yes, want to pretend that what the 20th century despots did with it wasn't about communism. Maybe they are right and maybe they aren't, but the reality remains that most people who ask about communism are referring to Marx's vision and unlike capitalism/democracy, nothing like Marx's vision has really ever existed. So while when discussion "capitalism" you can discuss capitalists countries, but when discussing "communism" I do think it is reasonable to focus only on Marxist philosophy and point out that his philosophy wasn't implemented "properly" because it doesn't work.

And "How does a fascist/Nazi economy work?" wouldn't have any posts asserting there never were any because "Nazi" is a specific reference to Hitler and his philosophy most decidedly was implemented by someone who should know what he intended. There was no 19th century philosopher who wrote a book about it that Hitler borrowed concepts from when constructing his government...at least as far as I know.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It's just fact that, as with so many things, the stated theory doesn't ever end up authentically getting put into practice.

Aye. No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

 

[mheslep]

...There was no 19th century philosopher who wrote a book about it that Hitler borrowed concepts from when constructing his government...at least as far as I know.

Hitler's National Socialists in their manifesto called for much the same authoritarian power grab as did the international Socialists, but with Hitler's nationalistic twist and antisemitism. That is, much the same set of philosophers that inspired Marx provided the foundation for fascism in Italy, Spain, Germany, e.g. Rousseau, Hagel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program#The_25-point_Program_of_the_NSDAP

 

[Salvador]

@russ_watters , If you want russ I suggest you go and dig deeper , as you somewhat already said it yourself that it's weird such a crazy idea like Marxism found such a widespread appeal and even though was never implemented to it's full extent many of it's features and certainly it's titles were used extensively mainly by the USSR but also by China and countless others across the globe.
Hasn't it ever occurred to you or anyone for that matter how come it's so weird why would a theoretically sound but practically impossible idea that was at Marx's time only in the head of him and his friend Engels became basically the whole 20th century and the Cold war and everything that we know of.
I mean , sure it would be hard to prove but I think that folks like Stalin , Mao, and maybe even the whole USSR wouldn't have been a historical fact if it wasn't for Marx's "das kapital" and his Marxism.Sure folks may have been upset by the Czar and could have thrown him down and killed his family as the Bolsheviks did, but I do believe Russia and the whole world would have been different , probably much different , if it weren't for a young and troubled Jewish man living in Germany dreaming about a better tomorrow , you see what I'm pointing out here , a single idea can forever change the history of the world , sometimes even a crazy one, an unrealistic one.Or like you, russ called it a "crackpotish" one.

You see the stage was set perfectly , the industrial revolution was away and going full throttle , workers were having hard jobs as back in the day with all that old steam technology the jobs were hard and often deadly , wages were low and there was a large unrest in the workers but it alone was not enough yet Marx idea found it's perfect nest , the Russian monarchy and it's large peasant labor force which was probably angrier than other workers about their situation and it also has to do with Russian mentality , so with a genius like V.I.Lenin on board the Bolshevik train was rolling full steam , the workers already showed their unrest in 1905 but back then the Czar somehow managed to set things back on track but not for long , as in 1917 the as it is called "Great, October revolution" made things right once and for all.
The rest is wikipedia history stuff.

For anyone to understand USSR better , I suggest reading the biographies of people like Moses Hess , surely Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels etc the list is long but what is common among many of these men is, especially about Marx and Engels is that they both came from rather wealthy Jewish families and their main income was that which is at the heart of capitalism , small and medium business with workers and paid labor.Probably the first paradox of communism that somehow a bunch of rich bearded men decided to live a bohemian lifestyle and invent a system that could in theory benefit only the poor and less lucky.

But more down to the core why I suggest reading up on Marx and his fellow ideologists is that they all had a unifying feature , they had troubled lives , Marx's vision of the world at some points was to destroy it as he saw no use for this world and the people living in it , surely you won't find it written down as a political manifesto but he did some literary works while he was younger in his twenties and I have read some of them also the comments on them and they show a rather dark soul.Also his father showed some disbelief and worried about the path his son had chosen for his life.
I don't want to go into speculation as I or nobody else can prove this, that's why I will stop here but let me just give you a small hint , guess why such a beautiful idea like that of Communism/Marxism which came from a man with a rather great "classical facade" -that of a political philosopher and writer has managed to put together people with notoriously evil characters and form one of the deadliest if not the deadliest empire in human history alongside various less deadly empires which have killed by the millions and some of them are still going strong while others are resurrecting.
The road to hell is always paved with roses and good intentions.

Or as Mick Jagger sang in his most famous sympathy for the devil

"I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain"

Although I do apologize as what I wrote takes a bit of faith to believe and see how it works out , maybe I'm in a better position to do that as I have seen both the USSR and a lot of "unearthly " things bonus to that.
But don't feel bad you will not miss a thing as the idea behind the USSR hasn't gone anywhere , the system may collapsed but it's algorithm is unbeatable and it will rise again sooner or later sure the form and the title may be different but so what.And I'm not speaking about 5 year plans and planned economy , that is dead for good I'm speaking about the inner burning coal fire titled "world domination" which will inevitably lead to WW3.
So Zoobyshoe was right there is a "ghost" only it's not Stalin's it's a different one.P.S. Yes @mheslep you basically agreed to what I said earlier that Nazism was actually a branch of soviet communism , only in soviet communism all races were sen equal but in Nazism they were not, apart from that not much difference , oh maybe just a tiny one , the Germans preferred to burn the bodies while the Russians often being lazy simply dug a huge hole with a bulldozer and let worms and insects do their "fair share of taxes" instead of using extra resources like gas "zyklon b" and furnaces.

 

[Salvador]

Also another interesting fact , judging by the overall negative attitude towards Communism and the USSR from many of the well known posters here in this thread I can almost certainly say you are either 40 years of age or older , there is no way you are under 30, no way :D:D

That being said it doesn't bother me , it's just an interesting sidepoint for me to see how the attitude towards Russia differs from the younger generation up to 25/30 who haven't seen the Cold war and were not taught extensively about the "evils of the USSR" and how to "duck and dive" under your school desk when the Soviet nuclear bombs are incoming and WW3 is starting , to the one coming from the older generation who grew up in the times when Ronald Reagan called it the evil empire and while still up until mid 90's the US was in a defensive position against the east , then for some brief years things relaxed and the western world almost thought they have won and can do whatever they want but now Putin has put the eastern counterbalance back on the table together with China as a superpower and maybe that's not bad after all the stage is more interesting with multiple actors on it instead of just one doing all the coup d'etat for other third world countries in order to gain geopolitical victories and gain power worldwide.

From one aspect I miss the Cold war even though I only got the last years of it , back then school was more fun as you had to take classes where you were taught to dismantle assault weapons and shoot an AK47 and 74 and all the other countless modifications of that great classic rifle in case of global war when you would become a soldier much like the young men of both my country and Russia became soldiers in the red army fighting against wehrmacht.

But for anyone who thinks that Cold war was the most armed standoff , look at Israel , even girls have to serve mandatory military service there and can't say they complain much about it.

 

[m k]

I didn't understand what you meant with your last paragraph about the next socialism era etc...?

My prediction is that humans will have a socialistic period again.
If not earlier then when shore lines start climbing inlands.
Before that there propably is quite bad period of capitalism also.

Is economy just numbers.
In USA corn cyrup is everywhere.
It has increased its penetration for few decades.
During that time medical science has leaped.
Those genarations are not very old so we don't know yet but is it good economy if owners of the product chain die young.

 

[m k]

Sorry about the inconvenience.

IMO, life of an owner is sort of irrelevant.
Owning is not an operative task and heritage will replace it automatically anyway.

Life of a consumer is much more relevant.

 

[AgentCachat]

Voluntary communist societies have formed from time to time, like New Harmony, Indiana. They always fail due to human nature. You can rail against human nature all you want, but reality is what it is.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

Voluntary communist societies have formed from time to time, like New Harmony, Indiana. They always fail due to human nature. You can rail against human nature all you want, but reality is what it is.

I think that's the essential point. Lenin spoke of the "communist man." (I can't say if he meant women too). The problem was the "communist man" wasn't quite human. I find it interesting the the pre agricultural Native Americans formed effective collectives that successfully lived off the land, sharing what they had. They had no real concept of private property, rigid hierarchy or strict boundaries of territory. It was a way of life that did not depend on constant growth and which survived for possibly tens of thousands of years if you include their asian origins.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I find it interesting the the pre agricultural Native Americans formed effective collectives that successfully lived off the land, sharing what they had. They had no real concept of private property, rigid hierarchy or strict boundaries of territory. It was a way of life that did not depend on constant growth and which survived for possibly tens of thousands of years if you include their asian origins.

You're saying it's interesting because it seems counter-intuitive, or because it demonstrates something like, "communism is a natural default human state?" I really don't get why you mention it, your implication.

 

[Salvador]

Probably the reason why those ancient tribes could have had a form of communism without them even realizing it is because the very nature and level of their technology back in the day required this collective living together as the only real means of surviving , as man progressed and modernized he has become more of an egoist than before because today we all have these things like phones and machines and cars and the feeling that we might not survive being alone has long passed.

Humans have actually moved away from being very social to now being less social even with all the "social media" that we have around.

@zoobyshoe I think you need to take stuff that starts or ends with the word communism with less of a fear and hatred.It's not the 1950's McCarthyism anymore.
No offense just saying.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

You're saying it's interesting because it seems counter-intuitive, or because it demonstrates something like, "communism is a natural default human state?" I really don't get why you mention it, your implication.

It was a natural human state. However, once we invented agriculture (which already existed in parts of pre Columbian America) there was no turning back. Populations increased, urban societies developed, etc. We're not going back there. Lenin's scheme was a response to industrialization, but apparently wasn't even compatable with pre industrial societies since the various collective experiments didn't last.

 

[Mark44]

only in soviet communism all races were sen equal

But some races were "more equal than others" - to quote George Orwell, in "Animal House."

My problem with communism and other forms of collectivism is the overemphasis on "equality" at the complete expense of liberty and freedom. Equality is not much of a virtue if how people are equal is in their misery.

Probably the first paradox of communism that somehow a bunch of rich bearded men decided to live a bohemian lifestyle and invent a system that could in theory benefit only the poor and less lucky.

But in practice, the ones who benefit the most are the ones who are doing the redistribution.

Also another interesting fact , judging by the overall negative attitude towards Communism and the USSR from many of the well known posters here in this thread I can almost certainly say you are either 40 years of age or older , there is no way you are under 30, no way :D:D

The reason for that is ignorance.

@zoobyshoe I think you need to take stuff that starts or ends with the word communism with less of a fear and hatred.It's not the 1950's McCarthyism anymore.

There's a lot that McCarthy got right, though.

The apologists for communism in any of its ilks alway say that the reason it didn't work in XYZ was that the people there didn't do it right.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I find it interesting the the pre agricultural Native Americans formed effective collectives that successfully lived off the land, sharing what they had. They had no real concept of private property, rigid hierarchy or strict boundaries of territory.

What they had was certainly a natural human state given their circumstances. Your description of their society isn't complete, though, or completely accurate. They certainly had private property: if you tried to grab another man's horse and ride it, or another man's bow and quiver, you'd be in for a harsh beating. At the same time they did, in most cases, strictly share food and a lot of their resources, there were definite and constant maneuvers to gain status and influence by owning the most or best of one thing or another, or by being the best at something. The guy who killed the most game soared in status. A guy with 3 wives had more status than a guy with only 1, and the guy with the fastest horse had more status than the guy with the second fastest. Native Americans were extremely status conscious people. The fact everyone in the group was automatically granted food, clothing, and shelter wasn't an implication they were all equal. That's what the feathers in the war bonnet are all about: each individual feather is a status symbol granted for a specific meritorious deed in battle.

On top of that, they were essentially un-communist in that every part of their lives was imbued with mysticism and superstition. Within every band there were all kinds of secret religious societies that kept their practices hidden from the other societies. For them, there was a vast spirit world that was more real and important than the physical world, and which had to be constantly tended to.

It was a natural human state. However, once we invented agriculture (which already existed in parts of pre Columbian America) there was no turning back. Populations increased, urban societies developed, etc. We're not going back there. Lenin's scheme was a response to industrialization, but apparently wasn't even compatable with pre industrial societies since the various collective experiments didn't last.

Right. Native Americans were glued together by threat of starvation or death by enemy in a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural world that can't be regained.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

. Your description of their society isn't complete, though, or completely accurate. They certainly had private property: if you tried to grab another man's horse and ride it, or another man's bow and quiver, you'd be in for a harsh beating. At the same time they did, in most cases, strictly share food and a lot of their resources, there were definite and constant maneuvers to gain status and influence by owning the most or best of one thing or another, or by being the best at something. The guy who killed the most game soared in status. A guy with 3 wives had more status than a guy with only 1, and the guy with the fastest horse had more status than the guy with the second fastest. Native Americans were extremely status conscious people. The fact everyone in the group was automatically granted food, clothing, and shelter wasn't an implication they were all equal. That's what the feathers in the war bonnet are all about: each individual feather is a status symbol granted for a specific meritorious deed in battle.

On top of that, they were essentially un-communist in that every part of their lives was imbued with mysticism and superstition. Within every band there were all kinds of secret religious societies that kept their practices hidden from the other societies. For them, there was a vast spirit world that was more real and important than the physical world, and which had to be constantly tended to.

You must know more about pre Columbian pre agricultural Native American societies than I do. However, I do know there's no evidence they had horses, which were later imported from Europe. Some of what else you describe seems to be the somewhat stereotypical view of 19th century native people.

In fact, I said the pre Columbian society was collectivist. Are you equating "collectivist" with "communist"? The fact that Leninism was atheistic does not imply that all collectivist societies lacked religion. Some were founded on religious principles.

I also think I made it clear in two posts that I believed that Leninism was a flawed concept.

 

[Mark44]

You must know more about pre Columbian pre agricultural Native American societies than I do. However, I do know there's no evidence they had horses, which were later imported from Europe.

I'm pretty sure that's correct - no horses. The Incas had llamas, but they didn't use them for human transport.

Some of what else you describe seems to be the somewhat stereotypical view of 19th century native people.

In fact, I said the pre Columbian society was collectivist. Are you equating "collectivist" with "communist"? The fact that Leninism was atheistic does not imply that all collectivist societies lacked religion. Some were founded on religious principles.

Or most were...

I just finished reading "Custer and Crazy Horse" by Stephen Ambrose. It gives an excellent view of the cultures in the mid-19th century of both men of the title. In ways they were similar, and in ways they were very different. I really appreciated learning about how the nomadic Sioux lived (especially Crazy Horse's band, the Oglallas), and how expert they were as horsemen, able to ride at full gallop, holding and firing a bow with one hand, with a fistful of arrows in the other.