Quote:
Originally Posted by axel77
First this in fact wrong. I think I mentioned it already even in this thread, if there is one essential thing that anthropology discovered / taught us, is that many """primitive""" societies (or native societies or how you call them politically correct), they don't know of the concept of property at all!
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When people live together in groups, there must be agreement on what constitutes acceptable behavior for the smooth functioning of the society. We call the agreement "customs", and the written down versions "laws".
Because it's generally not possible to be completely self sufficient as an individual, people band together in groups to have enough people to do the necessary work and to allow people to specialize in particular activities the group needs performed. An economic system is simply the methods a particular society has evolved to insure that goods are produced and distributed, and services are performed to keep the society functional. One of the challenges of any economy is motivating the members to work hard and achieve sufficient production.
They don't have to look anything like our system. In the south pacific, for example, there was the "big man" culture. Members of the society that practiced it competed to be the "big man", and the goal is not how much you could
accumulate, but how much you could
give away. Individuals drove family and friends to produce as much as possible, and then threw an enormous party where the fruits of the labor would be distributed to all. The one throwing the biggest party, and giving away the most gifts, became the Big Man for the year, the highest status possible in that society. But meanwhile, as a side effect, members of the society worked hard to produce, and the entire society benefited, which is why the custom evolved and was practiced.
I think they had a rather different idea of property than the one we use.
And property requires relative abundance to become important. Ursula Leguin's _The Dispossessed_ took place in part on the planet Arras, where the inhabitants practiced a form of anarchic communism. No surprise: Arres was a marginal environment, and there was just about enough to go around. It simply wasn't
possible to be significantly better off than your neighbor in material terms.
We encourage production by trying to insure the producer sees a personal benefit from producing, but that's not the only way it can be done.
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Dennis