Leon Frotsky 🏳️‍⚧️ on Nostr: Chat, is this based? > Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out ...
Chat, is this based?
> Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions that characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, villagers had spent part of their time working in teams on community projects. Alternately bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti expanded the service obligation unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land and property belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons, artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home. While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them—all from goods supplied by other work crews. Conscripts built dams, terraces, and irrigation canals; they grew crops on state land and raised herds on state pastures and made pots in state factories and stocked hundreds of state warehouses; they paved the highways and supplied the runners and llamas carrying messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extending Andean verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice. Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders—much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy—vertical socialism, it has been called—should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted.
> Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions that characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, villagers had spent part of their time working in teams on community projects. Alternately bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti expanded the service obligation unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land and property belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons, artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home. While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them—all from goods supplied by other work crews. Conscripts built dams, terraces, and irrigation canals; they grew crops on state land and raised herds on state pastures and made pots in state factories and stocked hundreds of state warehouses; they paved the highways and supplied the runners and llamas carrying messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extending Andean verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice. Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders—much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy—vertical socialism, it has been called—should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted.