> Slavery in the new world isn't really comparable to chattel slavery That's not relevant though, it's a good example of a foraging culture practicing somethin

> Slavery in the new world isn't really comparable to chattel slavery That's not relevant though, it's a good example of a foraging culture practicing something completely unlike pre-Marxist communism. My point is that this was a highly stratified culture that raided neighbors for slaves and held them as personal property and symbols of status. Its a perfect counter example to the notion that anything like communism was a norm among non agrarian cultures. > stratification doesn't necessarily imply non-egalitarianism. That's a very different goal post. Egalitarianism is clearly a spectrum and even at one extreme it isn't synonymous with proto-communism. > One-vote-per-person elections, for instance, as you see with the Haudenosaunee The Haudenosaunee practiced agriculture so they don't demonstrate anything about "hunter-gatherers". I'd also like to point out that their "Mourning Wars" show something about as far from egalitarianism as I can imagine. Ritually sacking neighboring towns to torture and kill people to find cosmic justice for your own towns dead is... well hardly friendly. With respect to women in the Five Nations, they did in fact own land, homes, and various small goods and the lands and homes were hereditary. This is not pre-Marxist communism. >In fact, this is discussed in the first few chapters of Dawn of Everything—see the bit about how the natural economy allows people to basically walk away from coercive social structures, especially in high-resource areas like wetlands and river deltas. Right, but that isn't communism or even really related. Yes you could clearly just fuck off before the world was so full of people. > Anyway, as I think you can read, I wasn't arguing for ubiquity, but rather the existence of it or a comparison to the social stratification we are forced to deal with today. It's an interesting set of comparisons, but it's really apples to oranges. I'd certainly rather live in the US today than to be a neighbor or slave of the Salish people or to be captured and tortured to death by a Haudenosaunee war band. I'm happy to not have to bow to a Natches sun king. I think if you read The Down of Everything more carefully you find that the message is not that people in the past necessarily lived freer lives, but that their social arrangements were more experimental across time and place, and that there were more different ways of living. Some were at times and places freer in some key ways, but it's hard to generalize. Moreover all of the talk about pre-Marxist communism just feels like a warmed over attempt at historical materialism which is a dead idea.