L'empire des Incas (Igor Chafarevitch, The socialist phenomenon)

 

La boucle est bouclée. Les Incas ont inspiré le socialisme et aujourd'hui ceux qui se réclament d'eux se servent du socialisme ou disons de la "gauche" pour gouverner le Pérou.

La présence à la tête de l'Etat péruvien d'un membre (Ollanta Humala Tasso) d'une famille soit-disant descendante, du côté paternel*, d'une dynastie de curacas aymaras établis dans la partie méridionale du Pérou et alliés par le sang aux souverains incas sous Mayta Capac (ou, selon d'autres, d'immigrants finlandais, le patronyme Humala étant relativement répandu en Finlande et en Estonie); famille inspirée par Platon, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Lénine et l'américano-centrisme d'Ameghino** et occasionnellement George Soros, liée politiquement et électoralement à la gauche, donne un relief particulier à ce texte du grand mathématicien et penseur russe Igor Chafarévitch, extrait de son livre introuvable: Le phénomène socialiste (The socialist phenomenon). 

On peut ajouter que les Incas n'ont fait que légiférer et diffuser le riche héritage qu'ils avaient reçu des civilisations précédentes et de leurs ancêtres asiatiques et océaniens. En se lançant à la découverte de l'Île de Pâques et de la Polynésie orientale (1465), le grand souverain Inca Tupac Yupanki "Le Resplendissant" ne savait pas qu'il allait à la rencontre de ses origines. Vaste et passionnant sujet, qui nous éloigne définitivement du "nationalisme" et de l'indigénisme comme de toute politique d'intégration mondialiste d'ailleurs.

P.O.C.

* Et du côté maternel, de l'illustre famille des Tasso, par Termilio Tasso arrivé au Pérou au XIXe siècle avec son ami Antonio Raimondi, le grand géographe et explorateur du Pérou, qui a donné son nom à la fameuse Puya raimondii, la Broméliacée géante de la puna.

** Paléontologue argentin qui a voulu démontrer que l'homme était originaire des pampas d'Argentine, d'où il se serait répandu ensuite sur les autres continents (Cf.: Paul Rivet: Les origines de l'homme américain, pp. 47-54.)

Interview de Don Isaac Humala, patriarche et "idéologue" de la famille Humala Tasso, par Juan Cruz Castiñeiras (La Razon, Lima, 12 novembre 2011): link . On remarquera l'apologie pro-domo du sionisme et la langue de bois sur le communisme.

Igor Charevitch: The socialist phenomenon

[The following is a transcription of Igor Shafarevich's The Socialist Phenomenon. This work was originally published in Russian in France under the title Sotsializm kak iavlenie mirovoi istorii in 1975, by YMCA Press. An English translation was subsequently published in 1980 by Harper & Row. This work is now out of print and difficult to find. L'ouvrage a été traduit en français et publié en 1977 aux Editions du Seuil sous le titre: Le phénomène socialiste.

IV.

South America

1. The Inca Empire

In the first part of this study, we have seen how the stable set of social ideas that we have called chiliastic socialism was expressed in various periods of human history, over the course of at least two and a half millennia. We shall now try to trace the attempts to implement these ideas in particular social structures. Our primary goal is to show that here, just as in the case of chiliastic socialism, we are dealing with a universal phenomenon, one by no means limited to our century. We shall review several examples of states whose life was built, in great part, on socialist principles.

We encounter here a far more difficult task than the one that occupied us in Part I of this study. After all, an author of a work in which socialist principles are propounded must proceed from the notion that these ideas are novel and unusual to his reader. He is therefore compelled to explain them. But in the scant economic and political documentation that has been preserved from remote epochs (and sometimes cultures without written languages are involved), the meanings of the terms used are not elucidated for the reader of the future. Such documents were intended for people to whom the terminology would have been understandable. To reconstruct from scattered hints the way of life, to comprehend the legal and economic relations of the members of a society far removed in time, is therefore a task of extreme difficulty, much more difficult than to reconstruct the appearance and behavior of a prehistoric creature from the fossil remains. In most cases, we see the historians offering a series of opinions rather than any definitive formulation.

If the present epoch is excluded, it was only once that Europeans were able to observe at first hand a state of this type. Many intelligent and observant travelers left accounts of this state, and certain of its natives acquired European culture and left narratives about the way of life of their fathers. This phenomenon, which is far more important for the historian of socialism than descriptions of the appearance and behavior of a dinosaur would be for a paleontologist, is Tawantinsuyu--the Inca empire conquered by Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century.

The Spaniards discovered the Inca state in 1531. At that time, it had existed for some two hundred years and had achieved its peak, encompassing the territory of contemporary Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, the northern half of Chile and the northwestern part of Argentina. According to several sources, its population was twelve million.

The empire, as the Spaniards found it, was as well organized as it was huge. According to their accounts, the capital, Cuzco, rivaled the biggest European cities of that time. It had a population of about 200,000. The Spaniards were struck by the magnificent palaces and temples, with façades as much as two hundred meters long, the aqueducts and the paved streets. The houses were built of large stones so finely polished and fitted together that they seemed to be of one piece. Outside, Cuzco, there was a fortress that was built of stones weighing twelve tons each; it so amazed the Spaniards that they refused to believe it could have been made by men, without the help of demons. (56: p. 114, 57: pp. 72-82)

The capital city was joined to the outlying parts of the empire by excellent roadways, in no way inferior to Roman roads and far better than the ones in Spain at the time. The roads ran along dikes in swampy terrain, cut through rock and crossed gorges by means of suspension bridges. (56: pp. 106, 113,57: pp. 93-96) An efficiently organized service of foot messengers guaranteed communications between the capital and the rest of the country. Around the capital and other towns, as well as along the roads, there were state storehouses full of produce, clothing, utensils and military equipment. (56: pp. 61-67,57: pp. 100-101, 58: pp. 61-67)

In stark contrast to the superb organization of the Inca state, its level of technical knowledge was astonishingly primitive. Most tools and weapons were made of wood and stone. Iron was unknown, as was the plow, and land was tilled with a wooden hoe. The only domestic animal was the llama [NDLR: Chafarevitch se trompe ici: il y avait aussi le chien, le cochon d'Inde, le canard de Barbarie, la poule (cf. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales sobre el Peru de los Incas), deux espèces d'abeilles (cf. Paul Rivet), sans parler de la multitude des plantes domestiquées parmi lesquelles la pomme de terre, le maïs, la quinua et la kiwicha, la coca, l'ulluco, la mashwa, le llacon, l'arracacha, le tumbo, le coton, la patate douce, etc.] , from which meat and wool were obtained but which was not used for farming or transportation [NDLR: autre erreur: le lama était employé comme animal de bât (et l'alpaga pour la laine et la viande)]. All farm work was performed manually, and travel was either by foot or by palanquin. Finally, the Incas had no writing system, although they could transmit great amounts of information by means of quipu, a complex system of knotted strings.*

Hence the low level of technology had to be compensated for by perfect organization of huge masses of the population. As a natural result, private interests were to a considerable extent subordinated to those of the state. And so, as we might expect, we encounter certain socialist features in Inca society.

What follows is a brief sketch of its structure. Fortunately, much information is available. The conquistadors proved to be more than mindless military men; they grasped much of what they saw and some of their accounts have survived. In their wake came Catholic priests, who also left detailed descriptions. Finally, the conquistadors married girls from the Inca ruling circles, and the children of these unions, who belonged to the Spanish aristocracy, at the same time retained close ties with the local population. To them belong the most valuable descriptions of life in the Inca state prior to the Spanish conquest.

The population of the Inca state was divided into three strata:

1. Incas--the ruling class, descendants of a tribe that in the past had conquered an ancient state near Lake Titicaca. Various authors refer to them as aristocracy, the elite, the bureaucracy. From this class came the administrators, the army officer corps, priests and scholars--and of course, the absolute ruler of the country, the Inca. This class was hereditary, but chiefs of conquered tribes and even soldiers distinguished in war might occasionally enter it.

2. The bulk of the population--peasants, herdsmen, artisans. They had two types of obligation to the state: military and labor. Both of these will be described below. Sometimes they were utilized in other ways by the state, for instance to settle a newly conquered territory, or to provide material (women) for human sacrifices.

3. The state slaves--yanacuna. According to legend, they descended from a tribe that had once rebelled against the state, had

* Cf. 58: p. 358. According to legend, writing had been prohibited by the founder of the Inca empire.

been crushed, and had been sentenced to extermination. But in response to a plea by his wife, the Inca changed the sentence to perpetual slavery. Thereafter the members of this group occupied the lowest position in the country. They worked the state lands, herded the llamas belonging to the state and served as servants in the houses of the Incas. (57: pp. 124-125)

The basic form of property in the Inca empire was land. Theoretically, all land belonged to the Inca and was distributed by him to the Incas and peasants for their use. The lands received by the Incas were hereditary, but they were apparently managed by administrators, while the Incas themselves merely made use of the produce. These lands were worked by peasants in a manner described below. Peasants also received land for use from the state. The basic unit was the tupu--a plot large enough to sustain one person. Every Indian received one tupu at marriage, another for each son and half a tupu for each daughter. After the death of a tenant, the land reverted to the state. (56: pp. 68-69, 57: pp. 126-127, 58: p. 274) Land not divided into tupu was treated as belonging to the Sun God and served to support the temples and the priests. The remaining land belonged to the Inca class or directly to the state. All these lands were worked by peasants according to a detailed schedule. Control over all farm work was exercised by clerks. For example, they gave the daily signal for the peasants to begin work by sounding a conch from a specially constructed tower. (56: pp. 70-71, 58: p. 247)

The peasants were liable to military service and to obligatory labor--tilling the land of the temples and the Incas, building new temples and palaces for the Inca or the Incas, mending roads, building bridges, working in the gold and silver mines owned by the state, and so on. Some of these duties required moving the peasants to distant areas of the empire, in which case the state undertook to feed them. (56: p. 88-89)

The raw materials for crafts were provided by the state; finished products were delivered to it. For example, llamas were shorn by state slaves, the wool distributed by officials to peasants for spinning and the finished material subsequently collected by other officials.

The law divided the life of a male peasant into ten periods and prescribed the obligations of each age group. Thus, from age nine to sixteen, the peasant was to be a herdsman, from sixteen to twenty, a messenger or a servant in the house of an Inca, etc. Even duties of the last age group (over sixty) were specified: spinning rope, feeding ducks, and so on. Cripples formed a special group, but they too, as Guamán Poma de Ayala reports, were designated for certain work. Similar prescriptions existed for women. The law required constant activity from the peasants. A woman on her way to another house was to take wool with her and to spin on the way. (56: p. 80, 57: pp. 129-131) According to the chronicle of Cieza de León, peasants were sometimes made to perform completely useless work simply so as not to be idle--for example, they were forced to move a hill of dirt from one place to another. (56: p. 81, 57: p. 132) Garcilaso de la Vega informs us that work was found for cripples. (58: p. 300) He also cites a law against idlers--a man who tilled his field badly was hit several times with a stone in the shoulders or flogged with a rod. (56: p. 276) The completely incapacitated and the aged were maintained by the state or the rural community.

For work, the peasants were joined into groups of ten families, five such groups into a larger group, etc., up to ten thousand families. There was an official head for each group. The lower members of this hierarchy were appointed from the peasantry; higher posts were occupied by Incas. (57: pp. 96-97, 59: p. 77)

Not only work but the whole life of the citizenry was controlled by officials. Special inspectors continuously traveled about the country observing the inhabitants. To facilitate supervision, peasants, for instance, were obliged to keep their doors open during meals (the law prescribed the time of meals and restricted the menu). (56: p. 96, 57: p. 132) Other aspects of life were also strictly regimented. Officials issued every Indian two cloaks from the state stores--one for work and the other for festivals. Within each individual province, the cloaks were indistinguishable in style and color and differed only according to the sex of their bearers. The cloak was to be used until it was worn out. Changes in cut and color were forbidden. There were laws against other extravagances: it was forbidden to have chairs in the house (only benches were allowed), to build houses of a larger size than authorized, etc. Each province had a special obligatory hair style. (55: p. 91, 57: p. 132) Such prescriptions extended to other classes, for instance, the quantity and size of gold and silver vessels that an official of lower rank could possess were strictly limited according to his station. (56: pp. 91-92)

The inhabitants of newly conquered areas were under especial severe control. Residents from central provinces were dispatched to new regions, where they were entitled to enter the houses of the subjugated people at any time of day or night and were obliged to report on any sign of discontent.

Peasants were not allowed to leave their villages without special permission. Control was made easier by the differences in the color of clothing and the varied hair styles. Special officials supervised traffic on bridges and at gates. The state itself, however, carried on compulsory resettlement on a large scale. Resettlement sometimes was occasioned by economic factors--people were moved to a province devastated by an epidemic or transferred to a more fertile area. Occasionally, the reason was political, as with the resettlement of inhabitants from the original provinces of the empire to newly conquered lands or, on the contrary, the dispersion of a newly conquered tribe throughout the more loyal population of the empire. (56: pp. 99-100, 59: p. 58)

Family life was also under the control of the state. All men were obliged to enter into marriage upon reaching a certain age. Once each year, every village was visited by a special official who conducted a public marriage ceremony, in which everyone who had come of age the previous year took part. Spaniards who described the customs of the Inca state often asserted that the preference of the person being married was not asked for. And Santillan, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, reports that objections were punishable by death. On the other hand, Father Morúa reports that a man could indicate that he had already promised to marry another girl, and the official would then review the matter. It is clear, however, that the opinion of the bride was never solicited. (57: pp. 158, 160)

Members of the top social group--the Incas--had the right to several wives, or more precisely, concubines, since the first wife had a special position while the others were relegated to the role of servants. Marriage with the first wife was indissoluble; concubines could be driven out and would thereafter not be allowed to marry again. (57: p. 156) The number of concubines permitted by law depended on the social status of the man; it could be twenty, thirty, fifty, etc. (57: p. 134) For the Inca and his immediate family, there was no limitation whatever. The multitude of wives and the consequently large number of offspring resulted in an ever increasing proportion of Incas in the general population.

There was a special category of women--the so-called elect. Each year, officials were sent to all sections of the country to select girls eight or nine years old. These were called the "elect." They were brought up in special houses (called "convents" in some Spanish accounts). Every year during a special celebration, those who had reached thirteen years of age were sent to the capital, where the Inca himself divided them into three categories. Some, called Solar Maidens, were returned to the "convent," where they were to engage in activities associated with the worship of the gods of sun, moon and stars. They had to observe chastity, although the Inca could give them to his circle as concubines or take them for himself. Girls from the second group were distributed by the Inca as wives or concubines. A gift of this kind from the Inca was regarded as a high distinction. Finally, a third group was intended for the human sacrifices that took place regularly, but on a particularly large scale at the coronation of a new Inca. The law provided for the punishment of parents who showed their grief when their daughters were chosen for the "elect." (57: pp. 161-162)

Apart from the "elect," all unmarried women were also at the disposal of the Incas, but not as private property; rather, they were allotted to them by government officials for use as concubines and servants. The oppressed status of women in the Inca state is particularly notable against the background of the neighboring Indian tribes, where women enjoyed much independence and authority. (57: p. 159)

It is clear that such total regulation of life and the omnipresent state control would have been impossible without a multifaceted bureaucratic apparatus. The bureaucracy was built on a purely hierarchical principle. Every official had contact only with his superior and his subordinates; officials of the same rank could communicate only through their common chief. (56: p. 96) The main function of this bureaucracy was the keeping of accounts by means of the sophisticated and as yet undeciphered system of knotted strings.

The idea of the quipu was a curiously accurate reflection of the hierarchical structure of the state machinery. A hierarchy was introduced into the material area as well; for instance, all types of arms were arranged by "seniority." The lance was considered to be senior to other weapons; next came the arrow, then the bow, and so on. According to the seniority of these objects, they were denoted by knots tied higher or lower on a string. Learning the art of quipu began with learning the principles of "seniority" by rote.

Information encoded in this way was passed up the bureaucratic ladder to the capital, where it was examined and preserved by types: military, population, provisions, etc. In the Spanish chronicles it is asserted that even the number of stones for slings, the number of animals killed in hunting and other such data were kept. Guamán Poma de Ayala writes: "They keep an account of everything that occurs in their state, and in every village there are secretaries and treasurers for that. ...The state is governed with the help of quipu." (56: pp. 94-95)

There are accounts of truly remarkable administrative achievements, such as the creation of armies of workers numbering 20,000 men or an operation in which 100,000 bushels of maize are distributed among a population of a large region according to strictly fixed norms. (56: p. 102)

The workers in the bureaucracy were trained in schools that only children of the Incas were permitted to attend. (The law forbade education for the lower levels of the population.) Teaching was performed by the amautas or "scholars." Their duties included the writing of history in two versions: one, objective records in the form of quipu, which were preserved in the capital and intended only for special authorized officials, and the other in the form of hymns to be narrated to the people at festivals. If a dignitary was deemed unworthy, his name was removed from the "festival" history. (56: pp. 75-76, 78)

The laws regulating life in the Inca state relied on a sophisticated system of punishment. Penalties were severe--almost always death or torture. This is to be expected: when all life is regulated by the state, any infringement of the law is a crime against the state and, in turn, affects the very foundation of the social system. Thus a man guilty of cutting down a tree or stealing fruit in a state plantation was subject to the death penalty. Abortion was punished by death for the woman and for anyone who may have assisted her. (59: p. 173)

The system provided for an extraordinary variety of capital punishments: the victim could be hanged by the feet or stoned or thrown into a gorge or hanged by the hair over a cliff or thrown into a pit with jaguars and poisonous snakes. (57: p. 42) For the most serious offenses, there were provisions for the execution of all relatives of the accused. Guamán Poma de Ayala's manuscript contains a drawing of the slaughter of a whole family whose chief member had been determined to be a sorcerer. Burying the bodies of executed criminals could be prohibited as a further punishment. Burial of the bodies of mutineers was forbidden, for example. Their flesh was thrown to wild beasts, and drums were made of their skin, bowls of the skulls and flutes of the arm and leg bones. Finally, a victim could be put to torture before execution. "He who kills another to rob him will be punished by death. Before the execution he will be tortured in jail so that the penalty should be harder. Then he will be executed." (57: p. 143)

Many forms of punishment differed little from execution. For instance, Cieza de León, Cobo, Morúa and Guamán Poma de Ayala describe jails in underground caves in which jaguars, bears, venomous snakes and scorpions were kept. Incarceration in this type of prison was used as a test of guilt. Generally, this form of trial was used in the case of people suspected of plotting rebellion. Persons sentenced to life imprisonment were kept in other underground jails. (57: p. 142) A penalty of five hundred lashes (provided by law as a punishment for theft) probably was the equivalent of a death sentence. There was a punishment called the "stone execution," where a huge stone was tossed onto the victim's shoulders. According to Guamán Poma de Ayala, this killed many and crippled others for life.

Other punishments consisted of forced labor in state gold and silver mines or on coca plantations in difficult tropical climates. Forced labor could be either for life or for a fixed term. Finally, minor offenders were subject to various corporal punishments. (57: p. 144)

It goes without saying that equality before the law did not exist. For one and the same crime a peasant might be executed, while an Inca would get off with a public reprimand. As Cobo reports: "The premise here was that for an Inca of royal blood (all Incas were theoretically related), a public reprimand was a heavier penalty than death for a pleebeian." (56: p. 79, 57: p. 143)

Seduction of another's wife was accorded corporal punishment. But if a peasant seduced an Inca woman, both were executed; as Guamán Poma de Ayala recounts, both were hanged naked by the hair over a cliff until they died. (57: p. 146)

A crime against property was also punished differently depending on whether the interests of the state or a private party were involved. Someone guilty of picking fruit on a private estate could avoid punishment, if he could prove that he had done so out of hunger. But if the owner was an Inca, the guilty party was subject to death. (57: p. 145)

The complete subjugation of life to the prescriptions of the law and to officialdom led to extraordinary standardization: identical clothing, identical houses, identical roads. Repetition of the same descriptive details is characteristic of the old Spanish accounts. The capital city, built of identical houses made of identical block stone and divided into identical blocks, undoubtedly created the impression of a prison town. (56: p. 117)

As a result of this spirit of standardization, anything the least bit different was looked upon as dangerous and hostile, whether it was the birth of twins or the discovery of a strangely shaped rock. Such things were believed to be a manifestation of evil forces hostile to society. Events were to show that the fear of unplanned phenomena was quite justified: the huge empire proved powerless against less than two hundred Spaniards. Neither their firearms nor their horses (animals unknown to the Indians) can explain this extraordinary turn of events. The same difference in armaments was after all involved in the subjugation of the Zulus, but they were able to mount a long and successful resistance to large detachments of English forces. The reason for the collapse of the Inca empire must apparently be sought elsewhere--in the complete atrophy of individual initiative, in the ingrained habit of acting only at the direction of officials, in the spirit of stagnation and apathy.

Ondegardo, a Spanish judge who served in Peru in the sixteenth century, noted a similar phenomenon. In his books, he constantly laments the complete regimentation of life and the removal of all personal stimuli which led to a weakening of and, sometimes, the complete destruction of family relationships. Grown children, for instance, often refused to take care of their parents. (56: p. 127) Baudin, a French student of Latin American history, sees in many traits of the contemporary Indians the aftermath of Inca rule--indifference to the fate of the state, lack of initiative, apathy. (56: pp. 124-125)

To what extent is it possible to call the Inca state socialist? Without any doubt, it is much more entitled to this designation than any of the contemporary states that regard themselves as belonging to this category. Socialist principles were clearly expressed in the structure of the Inca state: the almost complete absence of private property, in particular of private land; absence of money and trade; the complete elimination of private initiative from all economic activities; detailed regulation of private life; marriage by official decree; state distribution of wives and concubines. On the other hand, we do not encounter either communal wives or communal upbringing of children. A wife, though given by the state to the peasant, was his alone, and children grew up in the family (if the special class of girls chosen to be "elect" is excluded). Nevertheless, the Inca state seems to have been one of the fullest incarnations of socialist ideals in human history.

This is indicated by the striking similarity between the Inca way of life and numerous socialist utopias, sometimes down to the smallest detail. In his work The Incas of Peru, Baudin tells that during a report on the Inca state at the Paris Academy of Sciences, a member asked whether it would not be possible to show an influence of the Incas on Thomas More's Utopia. (56: p. 165) This would have been quite impossible, of course: More's Utopia was written in 1516, while Peru was discovered by the Spaniards in 1531. The similarities are, therefore, all the more striking and show how socialist principles inevitably led to the same conclusions in the centuries-long practice of the Inca administrators and in the mind of the English philosopher.

 

Drapeau du Collasuyu (Bolivie actuelle), l'un des quatre côtés (suyu) de l'Empire des Incas (Tawantinsuyu, l'Empire des Quatre côtés). Il se distingue par la bande blanche au milieu.