How would/could early collectivist societies function?

How would a "communist" or "socialist" society function under pre-classical a modern era . How would a society overcome the difficulties of transportation, distribution and the many other challenges such a society would face without modern technology.
 
At a village level relatively collectivist societies did function but function but above that level it's impossible, the nature of mankind and the technological hurdles means it would collapse pretty much instantly or become collectivist in name only.
 
A kind of semi-collectivism might conceivably occur.

If it really is the case that otherwise hunter-gathering societies did meet at central religious sites you could have a kind of "grand sorting" of offerings to distribute any surplus among the wider groups as part of a religious motivation.
 
In my coursework I learned that the Incans had a pseudo-Socialist/Communist society.
Though they basically made all the villages self-sufficient and the surplus was redistributed where needed.

Sadly the course was very generic with the native peoples of America being the background info for European conquest.
It was more like, "learn about how the people your ancestors massacred functioned!".

I'm not entirely sure if that fits, however.
 
The standard answer here is to point at hypothesised Gini coefficients and the definite and known inheritance structures of southern slavs. Collective equity was maintained in pre-modern (in this case, broadly, "feudal" societies) for long periods of time.

I'd suggest Kropotkin for some of the competitive pressures that encourage mutual aid as a central part of social life.

None of this is "early socialism" or "early communism"—rather it is feudal society with the peasantry as the strongest class.

yours,
Sam R.
 
In my coursework I learned that the Incans had a pseudo-Socialist/Communist society.
Though they basically made all the villages self-sufficient and the surplus was redistributed where needed.

Sadly the course was very generic with the native peoples of America being the background info for European conquest.
It was more like, "learn about how the people your ancestors massacred functioned!".

I'm not entirely sure if that fits, however.
1491 covers this more. What was interesting was that by the time the Spanish came the Incas had so much abundance they basically had huge warehouses of clothes and such and were forced to make their levies to "busywork" since IIRC they believed that idle hands really were the devil's play things. What would have happened to that kind of society I wonder?
 
It really could function in a myriad ways. The first thing I envision would be something like the medieval European village society, but without private ownership of shares of the fields. I think I read about something broadly similar in Russia, with regular redistributrion of plots according to the number of adult men in a family. A system like that could work. You would, of course, have village communities that were relatively self-sufficient, with producers of the few needed outside items organised differently. Perhaps you would have village-based craftsmen (cities are not required for even relatively sophisticated premodern societies, though they make things easier). Alternatively, you could have a system where you could choose to move into the city and become part of a different society owning different means of production. The cities would need to come by a population somehow, and they aren't going to be self-sustaining.

What you couldn't have was central planning. That's a feature of most modern Communist regimes, but it owes more to its enormous popularity around the first half of the twentieth century than any inherent collectivist virtue. But you could easily see a society where autonomous, self-organising groups of producers - guilds, villages, miner knappschaften, fishing flotillas - own the means of production and produce a surpolus for trade with other such communities. Of course, for a society to maintain that status quo,, you will either need to posit a strong central authority with a vested interest in it - religious, perhaps - or a strong taboo against individual ownership of means of production. There is also no need to assume such a society would be egalitarian, democratic, enlightened, or nice.
 
Top