Quote Originally Posted by Ronin View Post
Communism is deeply flawed on a basic level because it goes against human nature......at some point on the road to communism someone or a small group of people will always seize power and turn into a dictatorship.....so you can never reach the target...the process defeats itself.

there have been a number of countries governments that have claimed the name of communism...an those governments did horrible things ...but none where communist...they are your run of the mill dictatorships.
Although I do not know if Communism would apply so much as a Socialist format, many Native communities -- most in fact-- were cashless and many had controls over personal acquisition of "wealth." (Though it wouldn't have been thought of as "wealth" as much as "that guy is hogging way too many animal skins and using up more animals than he needs".) A lot of that "acquisitive" nature was more in the direction of prestige than ownership of property, though you can find some instances of personal wealth acquisition in Native societies, especially large southern hemisphere ones. With a lot of the nomadic tribes, though, the socialist themes were pretty overt, including limits on how hunters couldn't eat what they hunted and fishermen couldn't eat what they caught. This made sense pragmatically as not overstretching your sustainable (if properly accessed in moderation) resources was a survival trait for non-agricultural societies. The idea instead of "how much corn can I get for myself right this very moment" was more like "how much corn will there be for everyone season after season" so to speak.

There are also many very humorous stories about the Spanish priests in the Mission System trying to ... "get across" the idea of labor for profit, which was apparently quite foreign to many of their "wards." Trying to get them to make bricks, for instance, for the construction of other buildings, there was this story of how the Indians would make the bricks until they filled up the small warehouse behind the church where they were told to stack the bricks. When it was done, they would all immediately stop working and go to various leisure activities. And the priests (the whole "work ethic = godliness = good Christian morals" thing being part of the missionary charter for conversion) would have a cow and be like, "Why did you stop working?!" The Indians (from these particular tribes at least) did not have any conception of the notion of making more than what you needed, because of some imaginary (monetary) future value in the excess. Very foreign concept. (This is also, incidentally, why so many Indians got into trouble even in the early 20th century with the concept of "credit", which was often exploitively "introduced" to Indian communities as a way of getting them to unwittingly get involved so deeply that before you knew it, their land was taken away from them for the coverage of debts for things like kettles and blankets and animal feed.)

We could get into, I'm sure, myriad discussions over which of these socities were more consumerist and which were more socialist, and to what degree they were socialist, and if their socialist hallmarks could have weathered a much larger society. But I think to say socialism has not and can never work because of something inborn into human nature is false, I've always thought so, and it's very much a westernism to assume that all of human society has always been "x way" and that therefore it's universal human nature. The whole concept of surplus and profit is man-made... so how can desire for it be inborn? Doesn't make sense.