Author Topic: Ancient candidates for socialism  (Read 535 times)

Zea_mays

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 563
    • View Profile
Re: Ancient candidates for socialism
« on: March 04, 2022, 10:24:00 pm »
Communists and anthropologists influenced by Marxism claim that farming and state societies which developed after the Neolithic marked the beginning of mass inequality and an end to ancient "communalism".

In reality, early Neolithic societies were the first to enact real socialistic policies. The surplus economic goods produced (e.g. grain) could be managed and _redistributed_ by the state to ensure a fair distribution and to ensure those who needed more resources would be alloted them.

I also wrote about how hunter-gatherer societies were _so_ stratified by "class" (specifically, gender), that the results of that unjust hierarchy has been written into our DNA... Communists are so obsessed with economics, that they have ignored much more important forms of oppression and tribalism.
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/how-the-extinction-of-ice-age-mammals-may-have-forced-us-to-invent-civilization-/msg9708/#msg9708

----

I only skimmed this publication, but it describes the "redistribution economy" that existed in the Susa cultural sphere from ~7200 BC to ~2000s BC.
Quote
A farming redistribution economy was an extraordinary accomplishment in human cooperation. It was nothing less than the second greatest economic event in the evolution of mankind. The first was when our ancestors, the hunters, broke rank from the other primates by sharing their catches with the band (Wilson 2014: 22–23; Hayden 2014: 36).
[...]
7th Millennium BC – Initial Village Period – Neolithic Administrative  Technologies

Farming and the corollary redistribution economy prospered in the entire Near East in the 7th millennium BC.

Quote
The temple, and the terrace decorated with clay cones it stood upon (Canal 1978b: 173), demonstrated a quantum jump in the amount of resources collected from the community. It brings the evidence that, after 2,000 years, the redistribution system had reached a new level of magnitude. The Susa I temple had enough wealth to afford large expenditures for building and decorating monumental structures as well as supporting a large work force of architects, masons, carpenters and ceramicists (Wright and Johnson 1985: 25).
[...]
One would expect that the transformation of the redistribution economy would lead to major administrative changes, but the people of Susa I still reckoned measures of cereals with exactly the same plain tokens, in the same shapes and sizes as in previous millennia.
[...]
The indigenous Susa I redistribution economy, managed with plain tokens, was based on an agricultural society. That of Uruk and Susa II vastly expanded to draw upon both agrarian and urban populations.
[...]
Among the innumerable scenes carved on cylinder seals appears the “En,” the awesome priest- king of Uruk (Amiet 1986: 61), who was certainly heading the redistribution economy, since the sign for his title appears on the Uruk tablets (Green and Nissen 1987: 197).

Quote
Sharing resources did not stop with the agriculture revolution. On the contrary, it further advanced when the first farmers initiated a redistribution economy mostly based on cereals and small cattle. The operation was complex because multiple households contributed and consumption was deferred over weeks or months. The new economy required a new leadership of managers able to administer the communal wealth by 1. Establishing the amounts of goods to be contributed by the community; 2. Controlling the deliveries; 3. Protecting the reserves from weather, rodents, raids and thieves; 4. Overseeing the redistribution. The leaders adopted tokens to count and control the communal resources at each step of the process.

The sites of Susiana and Deh Luran illustrate with surprising clarity the evolution of administrative technologies to implement the redistribution economy in Greater Susiana. Tokens were adopted at the same time as agriculture in the first levels of occupation of Ali Kosh and Chogha Bonut, ca. 7200 BC. Two millennia passed until the management of goods with plain tokens was complemented by stamp seals to communicate oficial information from an office or a person. The establishment of a temple at Susa, ca 4000 BC, did not cause any change in the plain tokens or stamp seals because it still relied on an agrarian economy. The next groundbreaking steps in administrative technologies – complex tokens and cylinder seals – came together to Greater Susiana from the neighboring Mesopotamian metropolis of Uruk. The new technologies were adapted to an urban economy.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat. (2018). Prehistoric Administrative Technologies and the Ancient Near Eastern Redistribution Economy – The case of greater Susiana. Published in Javier Alvarez-Mon, Gian Pietro Basello, and Yasmina Wicks, The Elamite World. Routledge, London.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/prehistoric-administrative-technologies-and-the-ancient-near-eastern-redistribution-economy-the-case-of-greater-susiana/

Susa and the Uruk culture:




https://aryan-anthropology.blogspot.com/p/worlds-oldest-swastikas.html#Susa

----

The same archaeologist has a few other papers on this topic. She notes that similar tokens were found across the world, coinciding with the emergence of farming in those regions as well.
Quote
The Chinese, European, and African tokens from Khartoum share material, forms and size with their Near Eastern prototypes. Most importantly, they were based on the same symbolism, and served a similar economic function.
[...]
From the origin, the Near Eastern tokens served to keep track of amounts of goods in the early agricultural communities. For instance, the earliest examples of 7500 BC were recovered in level III of the site of Mureybet in Syria, which marked the transition to agriculture. Tokens occur in the sixth millennium BC in China and in the fifth and fourth millennium in Europe and Africa, where they also coincided with the beginning of agriculture. The need for counting and record keeping therefore may be attributed to farming, and in particular to the economy of redistribution typical of the early agricultural settlements.

It is important to understand that counting – the ability to determine the number of items in a collection – changed the economy. Counting and counters gave power to impose contributions and enforce their delivery. In other words, they gave control over the production and exchange of real goods. As I have discussed elsewhere (Schmandt-Besserat 2001), it is likely that the Near Eastern prehistoric tokens served for the administration of goods collected from communities on the occasion of seasonal festivals. The created surplus of staple goods, such as grain and animal on the hoof, was the fulcrum of the redistribution economy and tokens played a key role in its administration.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat. (2012). Tokens in China, Europe and Africa – The Significance. Scripta, 4: 1-12.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens-in-china-europe-and-africa-the-significance/

Aryan farmers used counting to ensure fairness and a just distribution of resources in society. When Turanian herders gained literacy and numeracy, they used more complex forms of counting to gain an unfair advantage in society...

Quote
Sharing food in the Neolithic Period

When cereal agriculture spread in the Fertile Crescent, people became increasingly sedentary, and by doing so, they became vulnerable to famine during the harsh Near Eastern winter months or the unpredictable lean years.20 The early farmers had the wisdom to join forces to amass the amount of food necessary for every individual in the group, the strong and the weak, to survive dire times.21

The farmers were not the first to altruistically partake of food communally. Already thousands of years earlier, Palaeolithic hunters broke rank with the other primates by dividing their game catches between the members of their band.22 In both instances, sharing resources increased the chances of survival of the group.

The practices of sharing, however, were very different. During the Palaeolithic, the distribution of meat took place as the hunter came back to camp. It was an immediate and direct operation because tradition assigned a specific morsel to each individual according to his or her kinship rank. But during the Neolithic, the lengthy and complex process of accumulating, protecting and redistributing communal reserves fairly necessitated formal management. And, as communities grew and resources multiplied, the administration required the mastery of counting and accounting.23
[...]
For example, with the help of tokens, a leader could compute the yields of the forthcoming harvest, request contributions in correspondence with the estimated surplus and control the actual delivery of the goods. Once the collected grain was stored in communal granaries and the quantity of the reserves calculated, a leader could allocate amounts for: a) seeds; b) a reserve for subsistence in dire times; c) ritual offerings to the gods; d) the preparation of festivals.26

There was no hiatus between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age accounting procedures in the ancient Near East. From 9000 to 2700 BC, tokens and written tablets formed a straight trajectory: both served exclusively to register the same goods in similar quantities and both acted in tandem with the same system of seals.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat. (2019). The Invention of Tokens. Published in Antonino Crisà, Mairi Gkikaki and Clare Rowan, eds., TOKENS, CULTURE, CONNECTIONS, COMMUNITIES. Royal Numismatic Society, Special Publication No 51, 2019.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-invention-of-tokens/

----

The leftist Jewish economic historian Karl Polanyi argued in the early/mid 1900s that the ancient Mesopotamian economy was solely based on the redistribution system and did not even have a market economy. (Which is basically as close as you can get to a communist centrally-planned economy in the pre-industrial era, although I don't know if Polanyi ever tried to draw that parallel). Apparently Polanyi is the one who coined the term "redistributive economy" as well.

The following economic paper argues that the assertion that there was no market economy in ancient Mesopotamia is unreasonable, but concedes that the redistribution economy was certainly an important aspect of society. A more interesting question to think of is whether the economy was in part _centrally directed_ in addition to being directly managed via redistribution.
Quote
In 2005 the Assyriologists Johannes Renger and Michael Jursa published papers offering a reconsideration of Polanyi's theory in the light of new written evidence and new analytical techniques. This present paper summarizes and evaluates their contributions.

With respect to the fourth and third millennia, Renger's main revision is that reciprocal exchange was less important than Polanyi had assumed. However, Renger fully agrees with Polanyi on the unimportance of market and on the supreme importance of redistribution.

Quote
“Most obvious is the redistributive nature of Mesopotamian society and economy in the fourth and third millennia B.C. … [P]ractically the entire populace was taken care of for their living within the redistributional system. Thus, there was neither demand nor supply to create a functioning market”
Morris Silver. (2007). Redistribution and Markets in the Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi. Antiguo Oriente, 5: 89-112.
academia.edu/2360528/Redistribution_and_Markets_in_the_Economy_of_Ancient_Mesopotamia_Updating_Polanyi