The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
io9.com
io9.com
"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 "god" 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 "tambos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.
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/free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.
That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu).
I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn't until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists."
edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.
"almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution"
Then how are any of these an actual implementation of Marxism? There have been implementations of totalitarianism claiming the label of Marxism, sure. You might also said it got co-opted real quick, and that that still reaches into today, when people equate, say, Stalinism with Marxism. I wouldn't even want to guess the ratio of people having a negative opinion about Marx' ideas, and the people who read Marx.
Lenin actually advocated a blended socialist/market approach, including private enterprises and private property, but that quickly disappeared when Stalin took real power even before Lenin's death.
They may not necessarily be an 'actual implementation' of what Marx intended, but even early on, those outcomes were predicted as a logical conclusion of Marxism by other philosophers.
reposting from a branched sub-thread:
"First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Marx, its founder, concluded that the only way to abolish the class monopolies was to centralize and consolidate all industrial and commercial interests, all productive and distributive agencies, in one vast monopoly in the hands of the State. The government must become banker, manufacturer, farmer, carrier, and merchant, and in these capacities must suffer no competition. Land, tools, and all instruments of production must be wrested from individual hands, and made the property of the collectivity. To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes. Product and capital are essentially different things; the former belongs to individuals, the latter to society. Society must seize the capital which belongs to it, by the ballot if it can, by revolution if it must. Once in possession of it, it must administer it on the majority principle, though its organ, the State, utilize it in production and distribution, fix all prices by the amount of labor involved, and employ the whole people in its workshops, farms, stores, etc. The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly. Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx."
Benjamin Tucker, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)
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: http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/men_make_their_own_history_...
The synopsis is this: Communism tended to develop in poorer (and therefore militarily weaker) countries, and communism was vehemently 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.
Given that communist movements were attacked quite violently by foreign interests, it stands to reason that those countries which implemented a "softer" approach to communism did not survive. Foreign propaganda, wars, and coup d'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Marx, its founder, concluded that the only way to abolish the class monopolies was to centralize and consolidate all industrial and commercial interests, all productive and distributive agencies, in one vast monopoly in the hands of the State. The government must become banker, manufacturer, farmer, carrier, and merchant, and in these capacities must suffer no competition. Land, tools, and all instruments of production must be wrested from individual hands, and made the property of the collectivity. To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes. Product and capital are essentially different things; the former belongs to individuals, the latter to society. Society must seize the capital which belongs to it, by the ballot if it can, by revolution if it must. Once in possession of it, it must administer it on the majority principle, though its organ, the State, utilize it in production and distribution, fix all prices by the amount of labor involved, and employ the whole people in its workshops, farms, stores, etc. The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly. Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx."
Benjamin Tucker, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)
Tucker is not exactly the most popular american philosopher of all time, especially not among the political classes, so it would seem unlikely that the american political system would conspire to see to it that his predictions would come true.
But to apply some historical facts to the theory:
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.
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.
To claim that Cuba isn't a failure is just silly, and Venezuela (which isn't labelled communist, by the way) is failing very fast.
Also, the internal oppression didn't exactly peter out after the intervention was over in 1920. The OSS (predecessor to the CIA) wasn't formed until WWII.
Please be clear on what you mean by "failure".
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's level of development.
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/or scaled down in Russia without outside intervention once things had settled down.
This kind of thing has nothing to do with economic organization and can be found in capitalism as well. Just look at what'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'etat was quite brutal.
> You yourself conceded that these measures were eliminated and/or scaled down in Russia without outside intervention once things had settled down.
Oh, I conceded no such thing. The Cheka existed until 1922, but it didn't disappear, it was reorganised into the NKVD which later became the KGB. Both changes represented a step up, not down, in ruthlessness and brutality.
> During and in the aftermath of revolutionary phases, there tends to be violence.
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is not something you shrug off as a regrettable but necessary fact of life, it's a huge and important argument against revolutions.
> This kind of thing has nothing to do with economic organization
Yes, it has everything to do with economic organisation, because the evidence strongly suggests that you need to violently force people to live under such organisation.
The simplest explanation, imo, is that power accretes in all civilizations, perhaps moreso in ones that face internal strife or hardship, and that power structures eventually collapse. Regardless of economic or political system.
And from another angle, if a capitalist society fails, is the most likely explanation also the ideology itself? And if both ideologies are to blame for their failure, what's left?
It's been a long time since I've read any pre-Columbian history, but I seem to remember that in addition to infectious disease, a lot of the South American empires were easy to conquer because the subjects generally hated their rulers, and the Spanish had no trouble finding indigenous allies.
The book "The Last Days Of The Inca" describe a scene were ~20 armored conquistadors are in a town that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. The Incas managed to call in enough people that the hillsides were all completely covered with tens of thousands of people waiting to attack. When they did, the entire population was slaughtered by the 20 conquistadors on horseback (there were so many dead bodies that new waves of attackers had to struggle to climb over them), and the Incas managed to kill only a single conquistador.
If you want to finally abuse yourself of the fairy tale notion that somehow justice will always prevail in the world, I recommend reading "The Last Days Of The Incas."
Most of the defeats the Spanish suffered were when some of the more clever Incan generals used the brutal terrain against them: triggering landslides, creating obstructions to disrupt a cavalry charge, etc. While that works in mountain passes, places like Lima (established by Pizarro mid-1500s), were on flat terrain known by the Spanish, so those sorts of tactics did not help during those sieges. The siege of Cuzco (or Cusco, whichever) was in a similar situation to that of Lima.
Something that I felt was missing from the Last Days of the Inca was an emphasis on the number of Spaniards, and ignoring the number of shock troops that Pizarro & Co. had recruited by that time. Remember, by the time Manco Inca had decided to "rebel", the Spaniards had been in Cuzco and some neighboring cities for several years.
This is ridiculous. The problem was that the Incans didn't have access to (or had developed) the polearm (ie, spear axes), guerilla warfare or basic combat engineering (read: trenches/moats). 10 decently trained pole-armsmen could easily best an armored horse, and well-laid traps or ambushes could easily have netted them closer to 1:1 numbers. An occasional ditch or two could easily have prevented any charges, nullifying the mobility advantage.
More likely, the Incan slave/poor populace was split and easily co-opted by the Spaniards.
Why is this either/or? The above statement is undoubtedly true, but that doesn't mean what I said is false.
The problem, is, as you say, that the Incans only had access to cloth armor, copper axes, and stone clubs, as I said in my comment. They eventually developed guerilla tactics, but such tactics are not effective when you are sieging your capital, trying to take it back from invaders. Also, I cordially invite you to try and organize the digging of ditches when 50 to 90 percent of your population has been killed, most of the rest are in rebellion because your rule was, frankly, never terribly popular, and the remaining percentage are currently facing down a thousand pound warhorse. I would also like to point out that decently training a pole-armsmen is no easy feat when you have never done it before, and your empire is in disarray.
Also, the Spanish had plenty of experience in the European style of warfare based on cavalry supported by foot, since the European cultures had access to horses for many centuries at this point, whereas the Incans and other cultures and empires that arose in the Andes had access to the llama. Llamas are not, shall we say, renowned for their martial prowess. It takes time to develop new ideas and technologies in the face of change in the best of time. Saying "oh come on, just dig ditches and train spearmen" is a tad unrealistic.
The idea of someone riding a llama and going out to battle gives me laughs.
Obligatory llama pictures:
* Llama face: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/269279233/llama270977_s...
* Llama standing on steppe: http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0...
That's completely and utterly ridiculous. What were the conquistadors? Supermen?
>There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners
This implies that markets would have arisen in Incan society but were suppressed. Is there evidence of markets organically manifesting in Incan society?
Anyway, the point is, some of the people the Inca conquered, like the Chimu, may have had the beginnings of markets. However, the conquest of the Incas (who tended to claim that anyone they conquered were uncivilized and barbaric), and then the Spanish (who also waged an informational war), and compounded with the smallpox (which may have killed 90% of the large urban populations of South America), meant that most oral history was lost, and the method of reading the written history (if there is any, there's some debate there) was seriously crippled.
ANYWAY, getting to the point, there's some evidence but we don't really know.
Here are a couple of good books that go in to detail on exactly how complex these devices were.
Signs of the Inka Khipu by Gary Urton http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/urtsig
Signs of the Inka Khipu goes into detail describing the binary coding mechanisms used in quipu which included not just a dimension of relative placement of knots. Color coding, left or right twisting, sub threads and top or bottom position relative to the central cord were a number of other mechanisms used to communicate binary information. I think that if x86 or MIPS are primitive, so are the quipu.
Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu by Marcia and Robert Ascher http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Incas-Code-Quipu/dp/048629...
This is a demonstration and exercise book demonstrating some of the mathematical expressiveness of quipus. Again, it is hardly primitive.
These devises were used for accounting, recording keeping and other ceremonial uses for an empire stretching most of the length of the South American continent at a time when the major communication mechanism was relay runners. These were likely detail documents, whether more like a spreadsheet or a database or also involving prose is debatable. The complexity and flexibility of the system could have supported both. Like a Turing machine, if there were an infinitely long quipu, there is nothing it could not calculate.
As far as I know viruses imported from Europe to America wiped millions of people, not the Spanish themselves. It's well known that Pisaro's forces were minimal in the New World and the fights usually just involved a few hundred or thousands men. Viruses, OTOH, did wipe millions of people, and this was widely reported and observed in many tales of the New World.
Then you can give everyone equal money for their labour and let them trade the surplus goods and services on the free market.
1. The Inca state had no internal trade system whatsoever. This is, if accurate, indeed unusual for a society of its size.
2. Despite this, they still managed to acquire great "wealth", which the article defines as infrastructure and public works. This is not surprising at all, since historically even societies that had markets did not usually rely on them for civil engineering projects.
One thing to remember about the Inca's though is that though they had no written language, they did have a record keeping system involving knots in string. Only a very few Incas knew how this system worked so it's possible that here was no efficient reckoning system available to the masses so large scale trade would have been impossible in a lot of ways.
Another thing to think of, is that when talking about the 'Incas' we should avoid conflating the Incas themselves, who were relatively few in number, and the vast number of peoples that they ruled over. The bulk of the Incas themselves were soldiers in the military and were provided for directly by the government, while the conquered peoples were reputedly pressed into labor and made to wear uniforms corresponding to their social statuses. It's possible that the various tribes traded amongst themselves before they were conquered by the Incas and had their societies radically transformed.
Second, that story is post-conquistador. It is in fact the Spanish who are demanding the gold and silver, which is of course what the Spanish used for currency. So it's really an observation on the Spanish, not the Incans.
It looks like a fairly universal currency: Roman soldiers were paid in it (at least, "salary" comes from the word for salt), as were soldiers in the American War of 1812. In Timbuktu they traded salt for slaves. It created cities and the Polish kingdom. It was taxed for hundreds of years in Europe.
These days salt is practically free, but when the only way to get it was from mining or by evaporating ocean water (neither very readily accessible in many parts), and unlike gold, you tended to consume it in preserving food, it was worth a bit more.
> it's univerally a good currency
There's a concept called 'store of value'. Gold is regarded by many to function as a strong store of value. In fact, recently it hasn't - it's gone up significantly for several years and then down this year.
But that's a different thing to currency. And it's not unique to metals - land and cocaine tend to have those properties also.
> It may be that the Inca never used gold as
> currency, but it would be hard to substantiate
> that claim, I would think
The article says there's an absence of evidence of markets from the Incas, and painted a picture of how life worked. If you think that gold was valued as a currency, show some evidence.
Actually it really was. Spanish, Europeans, Asians, and perhaps other nations elsewhere, tried different methods of exchanging goods. In the beginning they would have exchanged good directly (salt for sheep), but they found this would be very hard because you could not readily divide certain goods and you had to buy significantly more or less of what you needed. Other forms of payments were introduced in different parts of the continents including salt, silk, and even nails in some regision, etc... Then came metal. It wasn't easy to divide, but soon enough they introduced small equally sized weighted metal. But as you can imagine the crooks would mixed different metals, which in the long run lead to coined money to certify authenticity. However Kings started to reduce the quantity of gold to repay debts they owed because it was not so much based on weight, but more so on "coin." There is more, but you would want to read the Origins of Wealth of Nations by A. Smith for more on the subject.
Gold seem to have been a good "currency," (but then again what do you mean by currency) and could have remain such, but the problem has always been the value it was based on and what you could have afforded with it. There layed the problem.
The above is what I understood from Adam's Smith Wealth of Nations, Book I, but I must admit I am still at my first read and perhaps by read 3 I will have a better understanding.
I know very little about the Inca, and make no claim about them. I'm merely skeptical of the article's claims (which may very well be right).
But money is special: it's a unit by which all economic value is measured, and it's universally swappable for any other kind of value.
[1] Unlike bartered goods or services, gold (like other good currencies) is readily divisible and transportable, transfers without any skill, and stores indefinitely. Unlike many commodities, gold is not valued primarily for its functional value (food can be eaten, cloth provides warmth, etc.)
The reason we know Romans had money is that we still have some of their money. If they did have money and you're asserting it was gold, then it should be up to you to come up with some of their golden money. There are certainly plenty of other artifacts from the era.
A quick google search - http://hsc.csu.edu.au/ancient_history/societies/near_east/pe...
And - "Men, women and children worked in ancient Persia to support a diverse economy. Workers were paid in wine and grain, with skilled laborers paid more than unskilled, and supervisors paid more than workers. Men were paid slightly more than women, but female supervisors were paid more than the men working under them. Young women received maternity leave and were paid money for each child they had."
http://www.ehow.com/about_5414474_jobs-did-ancient-persians-...
It makes sense, people were paid for their ability to add to society. Men paid more possibly due to their greater strength; carry more, build more faster and women for having children.
That's not pay, it's logistics. Even on the worst forced labor projects they're still usually feeding the prisoners.
More exactly, once person A had worked for you for two days you had to pay back by working two days at her place, let's say helping her collecting potatoes or whatever, "number of days worked" was a sort of currency. And providing food to the hired workers was also part of the deal.
Obviously things have changed now, as even then (25 years ago) this practice was beginning to fade off.
If one farm needed some temporary labor, it would've been easier to trade labor-days with another farm than to settle in cash.
I don't know about other Soviet bloc countries, but I would not be surprised if they used a similar system. 25 years ago would've been towards the end of the Communist era, which would also explain why it was fading.
You are fully aware that you can offer work in exchange for things rather than gold or fiat money?
From the other link we'll find
>Free workers were even recruited from neighbouring satrapies at harvest time (Dandemaev and Lukonin, 1989: 157). Paid free-born labourers worked on the Babylonian canals, and free non-citizen farmers worked the land of the state, temples and the rich (Dandamaev and Lukonin, 1989: 152), and provided the corvee labour at such sites as Susa and Persepolis (Kent 1953DSf 22-58). They could not be sold, and so were not actually slaves, and could be considered non-citizen workers.
(my emphasis)
The discussion is more complicated than quoting a couple of random non-related articles on the Internet. But simply changing the meaning of a given statement and dismissing the entire counter argument is dishonest.
A. Market based, in which a certain reward is provided for performing a certain amount of work. Workers are generally free to come and leave, and respond accordingly to variations in wages.
B. Command based, into which workers are essentially corralled by threats of force (explicit or implicit), and often provided with nourishment so they can keep laboring until their obligation is fulfilled.
It's possible to talk of "payment" under scenario B [1], but it cheapens the term and it definitely doesn't indicate market-based relations. Transfers of food and drink (which make for poor currency, especially in places that are already minting coins [2]) are on the contrary a good indication of the corvée system at work.
[1] See e.g. this Wikipedia entry: "Corvée [...] was unpaid labour imposed [...] by the state [...] The corvée was the earliest and most widespread form of taxation [... The] Medieval agricultural corvée was not entirely unpaid: by custom the workers could expect small payments, often in the form of food and drink consumed on the spot." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee
Although if I may digress and make a small comment. The market economy could be argued somewhat "command based" too. The difference being that you are given money to buy the food and shelter you need (rather than being given them directly). And then you have the entire "debt economy" when it comes to "laboring until their obligation is fulfilled".
While I now understand your argument, I saw the issue more as the state at least acknowledged an exchange, and a right for the worker to receive some compensation. Perhaps not the most valuable. But something, in a time were you could easily have slave labor; "payment" in its simplest form without any connotation to specific economic models.
Speaking of slave labor however. There was a part about slaves (in one of the articles I quoted). It stated that more skilled labor (doctors, nurses and teachers) were kept as slaves. Now, in a market economy those kinds of skills would (should) be especially rewarding in the model A you are talking about.
When I think about it, I can't say that lower skill work really would seem to differ in the two models you mentioned. In today’s world you could find lower skill work that pays more than simply keeping a person alive (e.g. in many European countries), but generally speaking this is not true in all (most?) places.
But I digress. Again.
This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish.
The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary because of a severe lack of written sources. Archeology is a poor substitute for history (relying on actual written records from the time studied) because it is hard to figure out what people were thinking. The rather rapid conquest of the Inca empire by a badly outnumbered group of Spanish explorers surely relied most on the epidemic diseases that the Spaniards inadvertently brought with them, but it appears to have relied as well on dissatisfaction with Inca rule on the part of many Inca subjects. People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. Maybe the greatest mystery of the Inca empire is that it lasted any length of time at all. The empire collapsed rapidly once a new, tiny group of potential rulers arrived. South America's Andean territories soon became viceroyalties of Spain, far away.
You don't think the Russians fought hard?
I could very well be wrong, as I took WWII history in the US (which tends not to focus on European involvement in WWII).
Of course the schools I've been to have also stayed away from trying to teach creationism as biology so maybe it's different elsewhere in the U.S.
Soviets paid two for one in terms of casualties, though. But they could keep doing that for longer, and their industry could keep up as well (war production figures for Reich vs USSR are rather telling).
Some keywords to look up: Hiwi, Russian Liberation Army, Lokot Republic, Ostlegionen.
Any society would collapse like a house of cards if it wasn't in its prime, but was instead just a bunch of bewildered, shell-shocked survivors of a 90% die-off event triggered by new microbes. Pizarro was dealing with people who were basically living in a post-apocalyptic universe. The gods were angry and all that stuff.
The thesis of Icebreaker [1], a controversial history book by an ex-GRU officer, is that Stalin was planning an invasion of Germany right when Operation Barbarossa happened. However, his interpretation is disputed by most historians.
What is certain is that the Red Army was caught with its pants down and got a sound beating at the beginning. However, they did fight with tremendous tenacity (eg, at Stalingrad) later on, and eventually pushed back the Germans.
You'll also note that Germans and Japanese troops fought with particular determination even when it became clear that defeat was the only possible outcome. Contrast this with the dismal performance of French and British troops during the Battle of France.
I actually recall reading regarding Germans that there was a very peculiar distortion of perception there when even during late 1944 and early 1945, with Soviet armies literally at the door, a lot of people genuinely still believed that a victory (at that point defined as peace on non-debilitating terms) was highly likely - based on letters and other personal correspondence from that period, journals etc.
Contrast this with the millions of people who died in Germany and Japan because of that determination (or should I say their rulers' determination!), without avoiding the final outcome at all. The French government understood very fast they were completely behind and were going to lose and they did the right thing to avoid a massacre which would have prevented nothing.
And besides, in Germany and Japan people were forced into fighting until the end (even teenagers in Germany), it's not like it was the "nation in arms" or something. Nobody wants to lose their life on purpose.
I was more thinking in terms of low troop morale and lack of aggressivity of (in particular) French high command.
A contrario, German troops, although outclassed both on the Western and Eastern fronts by the end of the war, managed a fighting retreat in mostly good order, even mounting a daring counter-offensive in the Ardennes in 1944 which caught Allied troops flat-footed.
> And besides, in Germany and Japan people were forced into fighting until the end (even teenagers in Germany), it's not like it was the "nation in arms" or something. Nobody wants to lose their life on purpose.
You are thinking of the Volkssturm, which had a relatively minor impact on the war, and only existed for a few months. On the other hand, regular German units did not collapse and disintegrate under pressure, when they could simply have surrendered to the Allies (at least on the Western front). As for Japanese units, just read about the battle of Iwo Jima. I'm not aware that Japanese units on the island were more "forced to fight" than any other body of troops, but still fought almost to the last man, in spite of their poor physical condition.
They fought out of despair since they were told they would be tortured if they ever get caught (and most of them killed themselves instead of surrendering in the end). And it's not like they had anywhere to go at Iwo Jima. They were on an island.
Some additional info from the tv channel who broadcasted it http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/047580-000/les-gaulois-au-dela-d...
Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society.
Isn't this just a variant of feudalism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee
While a part of feudal practice, it is far more ancient and widespread, having been part of Sumerian culture.
A more fair comparison would be to North Korea. They're still old-school communist, and really not doing well.
The concept of nobility implies hereditary transfer of privileges, which was not the case in Soviet system. It was certainly easier for children of Party bureaucrats to get their own spot, but it was not guaranteed to them, they could lose it at any time, and "commoners" could get into the ranks (and it was not something exceptional).
So Party was the ruling elite class, but it was not an estate/caste, as nobility was in feudalism.
The main difference seems to be the centrality of supply distribution. With serfdom, the serfs were basically required to work for the lord/noble and then had to also do their own food growing/production to survive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom)
Having a central authority ensuring no-one starves and everyone had all the essentials allowed for much better specialization and efficiency. Other cultures evolved into similar specialization via trade and offered distributed societies. The Inca-style state would have similar limitations to Soviet Union, where all goods that were not produced within its boundaries were virtually unattainable by the common people.
This also stifled innovation in areas that the state was not focusing on. Just look at the Soviet consumer car manufacturing sector - an automatic transmission was virtually unheard of until 90s imports started pouring in.
(see one of the plot elements from the book)
They would also have been familiar with the primitive currency used by the groups they conquered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies
Granted, this was in the most recently conquered area of Incan expansion. The blood had hardly dried before the Spanish came but the subjects of the Inca would have been familiar with these concepts.
I also think that it wrong to talk about the descendants of these people as though they don't exist any more. Indigenous culture is quite strong and in the Andes. There was a change in power but it wasn't like turning out a light switch. Even the Inca, themselves, (who were really just a noble class) were able to self identify and organize a rebellion in the late 1700's, 200 years after the initial conquest.
The unusual thing about the Inca is that they preferred to tax labor even from those who produced goods. Potato farmers wouldn't tithe potatoes. They'd spend some of their time working government lands that grew potatoes. The fact that farmers were feeding themselves and the state out of different fields probably had some rather interesting effects.
I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.
Only with technological progress are we capable of stronger individualism.
I only mean to answer the question, "Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor?"
That said, we currently use money to build roads and provide food and other goods to the military, which we fund through taxes. Taxes are just a more nuanced, easier-to-administer form of "provide x% of your labor to the central authority". The evil part here is the absolute monarchy that makes self-interested decisions about what to do with that labor, but the Inca were hardly alone in that respect.
Ayway, it's easier to organize efficiently an economy based on a dozen of stable products with well known necessities than it is to organize one on our times.
Also, an ecomomy being efficient does not make it a good one to live under.
1775 called, it wants its understanding of economics back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
Also without the terror component the Soviet state became stagnant.
More surprising to me than the lack of money is the fact that they did not have the wheel.
Probably no Incan had gotten around to inventing the concept of token economies yet. I don't actually believe this lack of markets benefited them. It must have been an awkward way to run a society with a couple of thousands of members.
Sanity alone explains their remarkable success. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Money is a symptom.
That and (towards the end) a couple of kings who had absolute power. Like ... Stalin.