Inca communism; a slight revision of my last post!

Jon brought the hammer down on me during the England-Serbia football match earlier today. Reading my recently uploaded post, he remarked that I clearly had not been to the class on Mariategui – which was true, I was ill. In attacking his generalization of socialism, I was unaware that Mariategui highlighted forms of the Incan government as communist, which does take some wind out of the sails of my previous point (but not all of it). Reinforcing this is a line from the Silverblatt reading: “…the institutionalized generosity that bound chiefs to provide tools, seeds, and festivities during labor exchanges, denied them any rights over the peasantry’s personal production, and required chiefs to sponsor lavish celebrations for communitywide benefit” (2004, 191). I can see the elements of what Jon called ‘despotic communism’. Is this what it’d be like if the U.S. government, for example, required the wealthiest classes (maybe like the 1%?) to use personal wealth to provide social services for the working class? Obviously, there are vast contextual differences between chiefs of the Inca Empire and the wealthiest class of Americans today, but it’s really interesting to analogize that within a system I’m more familiar with. It’s sort of just super awesome taxes! Another aspect of it is the emphasized generosity of these chiefs, which adds an interesting dimension to the whole system. Were these rules in need of enforcement by the Inca elite, or did chiefs generally abide, perhaps even enthusiastically? I’m sure it varied greatly, as did general attitudes throughout the vast territory of the Incas that combined countless different Andean cultures. Furthermore, I wonder if a contemporary socialist revolution in the West would, at least temporarily, take a form similar to this ‘despotic communism’? The dissolution of the West’s centralized personal wealth into the hands of the workers could maybe borrow some Inca strategies: a strong executive with the people’s goals in mind, exerting legislative influence to redistribute wealth. If it doesn’t go as smoothly as that, we can still just eat them! And lastly, I do contend that my lack of knowledge on Mariategui’s viewpoints entirely negates my argument in the previous blog post. While Indigenous Andean and other Indigenous societies in North America (who had certain ‘communalist’ practices) had communist-esque economic and social practices, is it ok to generalize all of that as simply socialism? While it wasn’t meant in the way I interpreted it as, what does it say about other Indigenous cultures that may not have socialist-esque ways of being? I could be projecting a fear of generalizations, so this may be going too far. What do you, my faithful reader(s), think of Mariategui’s statement in the context of Indigenous ways of being?