Medieval Iceland

It's just libshits being ignorant and ahistorical.

mostly unrelated but any cool recommendations for video games set in iceland or made by icelandic developers

Typical medieval society where the role of gubmvement is more localized to a small community.

You do realise Iceland has only 300k people, right? It's smaller than the city I am living in. Which makes their achievements during the World Cup and European Championship even more impressive.

There is literally an entire genre of literature about how this "peaceful" society into blood feuds and warlordism, with the so-called private courts pretty much controlled by the strongest clans, never mind the fact that it was built on slavery. Anyone who thinks it was an ideal society does not know what they're talking about. The centralisation of power under the king was a progressive development.

Any sources on Dithmarschen being communist? Looking it up it seems to only be a joke and that its "soviet" was composed of mostly-appointed members, and only rich landowners could vote. Also and most importantly, there was no common ownership of the MoP.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithmarschen

I don't see the part about any shared ownership of the MoP though, just a bunch of feudal history.

Iceland has the highest number of nobel price winners per capita. He won it back in 1955.

There's only 300,000 people there, one winner would do it.

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That guy's just being retarded. Dithmarschen was an anomaly of feudalism, it's like saying that one hippie commune in the desert and Mondragon are proof that communism works on a large scale. Incas weren't communistic either, they were a slave society. Like many other slave societies (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome to a point etc) they had a command economy - which makes them a good case against "free trade has always existed so capitalism is human nature", but they weren't communist in the slightest.

I haven't seen this about Iceland, but I have seen it about Ireland under Brehon law before the English took over(from ancaps and real anarchists). I don't know anything about Iceland aside from it having the oldest parliament, but most Icelanders are descended from Irish slaves so I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar.

It wasn't anarchist, a huge chunk of the law is about social status and there were slaves for much of the time period (and certainly wasn't capitalist), but they had a lawful and orderly society with no central authority, no cops, no prisons, no torture,almost no capital punishment, etc. Its worth looking at and a good retort to people who think we'd go Mad Max without a government.

If you're into prison abolition you might want to read about it. The punishment for everything was a fine, even murder, and by all accounts murder was rare.

The law in the rest of Europe is based on Roman law, which was brutal and focused on Empire building. Its worth looking at other systems. Brehon law was in place for 1000 years and probably much longer and was heavily recorded because Ireland had an obsessive scholarly class (but Cromwell burned most of the books so we're missing a lot)

To these fuckmooks money and exchange is capitalism.

"Private Courts" didn't exist in most medieval countries. Whoever was the top lord had a court, like the Kings Bench in England. Pre-Napoleon every little duchy had it's own law but it was the Duke's law administered by the Duke's court.

Ireland and Gaelic Scotland had a private judge class but that's an exception. The rest of Europe had law descended from Roman law

They didn't even have money

What about the claim that they had common ownership of property and such? Was it only for rich landowners or what?

Egypt and Mesopotamia weren't command economies. Free men were able to do what they wanted economically, but were required to give gifts to the King/Pharaoh (who would give them bigger gifts in return). Temple building and shit was controlled by the monarch but they didn't decree that 1 million pots and 10,000 homes a year be made or anything like that.

I am not an expert on the Incas but it seems doubtful considering they had a noble class who owned estates. It sounds like a fanciful interpretation of a rather standard ancient command economy with conscripted labor.

Compared to the later feudal formations, they basically were. They had enormous bureaucracies which redistributed surplus grain and conscripted thousands of people to work on extensive public projects. Obviously I'm not saying it was anything like a socialist planned economy, but it wasn't le free market either.

They weren't free market at all, at least in the modern sense, but I've never seen the term "command economy" used for anything besides a Soviet style planned economy and they were nothing like that.

Feudal societies had extensive bureaucracies that redistributed grain and planned extensive public projects. They were limited by how much power the government had (a weak count under the HRE at its nadir could probably only do a few feasts), but late medieval cathedrals are taller than the pyramids, and much prettier and required much more labor.

Kinda lame tbh

"Command economy" is used quite often to describe ancient empires like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Read more.

Literally the opposite is basically the definition of feudalism, fragmented fiefdoms as opposed to unitary rule of priest-kings. Few if any medieval polities had the same level of "macro control" as the pharaohs or Mesopotamian priest-kings.

Lmfao

Marx praised the "genius communism of the Peruvians" in volume 3 of capital

The Incas literally had a planned economy and labour vouchers, Marx praised them as communism in Capital. But whatever dude.

what if you couldn't pay? slavery?

They were, the Lincoln Cathedral was built in 1311 and was taller than the Great Pyramid, and its more than a pile of stones with a tunnel in it.

I am somewhat informed on the history of criminal law and I advise you to not ideologise this kind of stuff. Medieval (Germanic and Nordic) law differentiated between capital crimes and "private" crimes, which aren't measured in severity (like homocide) but by relevance to society. Examples would be the insult of the king, or damaging a temple which were under the jurisdiction of society, e.g. the king or the Thing, whereas murder would be an issue that two families/clans had to solve internally by paying compensation ("Weregild") to the other family. This is was just more practical, but considering how these feuds were sometimes a bloody issue and damaging social cohesion, kings tried to be law-givers, having a codex named after them was basically how a ruler would be remembered after his death.

I've also read in this thread that Roman law was widely practiced in the Middle Ages, which is an oversimplification. "Common law" (not to be confused with the Anglo-Saxon common law of today), use commune was a mixture between mostly church law (as the church provided the most effective administration) and some Roman traditions which were received through so-called "Glossators" who would review the Pandects of Roman law, but a full review of Roman law was only happening in the 19th century, especially in Germany. Here the medival ius commune was abandoned in favor of Justinian's Codex Iuris Civilis, which is basically modern German civil law 1:1. Even the structure was copied.

In the Middle Ages, private judges existed but most cases were settled by travelling judges of the king or the high lord, or the church. The infamous Roman Inquisition was actually progressive here.

And in Volume 1 he classifies them the same as other primitive societies:

As primitive communism, sure.

Wow, only 4,000 years after the earliest Egyptian pyramids were constructed. There were no technological or logistical advancements that took place in that time, it was literally all the same shit. The Egyptians just didn't try enough.

(plane'd)

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Usually the solution was to give over one of your sons of the family which the deliquent belonged to to the other one as a ward. For killing unfree people the punishment was reduced to 1/8 of the fine which would be paid for killing a free man. The difference to modern law is here that the income of the criminal didn't matter, rather the "worth" of the person that was killed.

heh, guess I need to reread it, its been months

I don't recall Marx calling the Incas "primitive communism", we are clearly dealing with something different than fucking cave-dwellers. There was division of labour and agriculture, etc.

Not the user your talking to, but it should be noted that like any form primitive or primitive-esc communism, its not one Marxists should look at for emulation nor one Marx wanted people to emulate. The Incas did have a command economy, but they also went as far as to collectivize personal property and had only a specific set of people who could make decisions, with the Sapa Inca's being determined by noble hereditary lineage and justified by divine mandate and blood. It lacks both the conditions, structure, and MoP to obtain communism proper and can only exist temporarily like all primitive communist societies before, like tribal primitive communism, wealth becomes even more hereditary based and slaves are taken to accommodate for labour and expansion.

what a legitimate thread, not reported at all :)

What?
We cant discuss the economic organization of different societies through history, and evaluate claims other people make about them?

Fuck you.

you need to go back to reddit

Were Incas visited by posadist aliens to develop communism straight outta hunter-gatherer tribes without first having a non-agrarian economy, proletariat, commodity production, and so on?

If you couldn't pay your parents, brothers and sisters, and kids had to pay, if they couldn't pay then your cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews had to pay, if they couldn't pay your second cousins had to and so on. Needless to say this was a huge deterrent against murder.

If the fine was not be paid the murderer was taken into custody by the victims family, where they could await payment, sell him into slavery, or kill him. Killing was rare because you wouldn't get paid if you killed him, and Christians are supposed to forgive (there's some myth about St. Patrick forgiving a murderer), also it was usually illegal because typically murders happened between kinsmen and you weren't allowed to kill a kinsman.

Worst case scenario the murderer runs away without paying, then the victim's family was supposed to launch a blood feud. This was a last resort and seen as horrific, which gave even more reason to keep your family members from murdering, and to make sure any murderers go into custody. I'm sure it happened once in a while but I'm not aware of any.

All in all much less barbaric than putting people in a hole by themselves for 25 years.

He talks of it here
(e.g., primitive Indian communities, or the more ingeniously developed communism of the Peruvians), a distinction can always be made between that portion of labour whose product is directly consumed individually by the producers and their families and – aside from the part which is productively consumed – that portion of labour which is invariably surplus-labour, whose product serves constantly to satisfy the general social needs no matter how this surplus-product may be divided, and no matter who may function as representative of these social needs. Thus, the identity of the various modes of distribution amounts merely to this: they are identical if we abstract from their differences and specific forms and keep in mind only their unity as distinct from their dissimilarity.
He goes on a bit afterwords on how capitalism is a production of a special kind. To add, at best the Incas could be called some form of crude primitive barracks communism. Its important to remember the primitive part comes not from it not being well organized in any way, but because it lacks the conditions for communism proper and will eventually transition into a different mode of production as property is associated with people and people are taken as property.

You get what the quote is.

What technical advances helped? Stop learning history from Civilization games ffs.

Oh my god, you're so fucking retarded user. I bet you're the capitalist trees guy. Kill yourself.

Lol you literally can't name anything.

Your ignorance fucking stupefies me. You literally know nothing about anything. Everything you say contradicts basic logic and reality. Burgers, is your education actually this bad?

I dunno, how about the fucking WHEEL for starters? (The pyramids were built before Egyptians got wheel). Treadwheel crane? Architectural advancements like buttresses (the reason buildings could have more complex shapes than a stack of blocks)? Steel? You're literally saying that Ancient Egyptians could build the Notre Dame if they wanted to, and that doesn't sound retarded to you?

And despite lacking these key technologies, Egyptians managed to build the Pyramids in 2-3 decades or even a few years by moving millions of giant stone blocks over hundreds of kilometers without the wheel. While medieval cathedrals sometimes took centuries to build. Precisely because the pharaohs could mobilize tens of thousands of laborers to focus on building a pyramid while cathedrals were usually local affairs built by volunteers.

I'm not ideologizing it, parts of it were disgusting. But its an example of a society without prisons that was quite peaceful, and the laws were not administered by a central authority.

In Ireland there were no capital crimes, everything was an issue dealt with between families or clans. The punishment for insulting a king was paying him the "honor price" you took away form him, your family would have to pay his family (meanwhile low ranking people had very small honor prices so you could feel free to insult them).

Also in Ireland kings couldn't make laws, according to legend St. Patrick assembled the best judges in Ireland and asked them to recite the law, the law was written down with the un-Christian parts removed (there's probably a grain of truth to it, though it was probably a much larger group doing it over decades). The law was unchangeable (which has its upsides and downsides), except for reinterpretations which could be quite creative.

Ireland had canon law too but it wasn't very powerful. Polygamy wasn't allowed in canon law but the Irish still practiced it until the 1200s. The Irish not following God's law was the stated reason why the Pope told England it was OK to invade Ireland.

Not him, but no it wasn't. See

They'd have had to use rollers even if they had wheels though, wouldnt they? The blocks they used would be too heavy for a wheel and axel they could have built to support, so rollers would have been necessary regardless.

He was talking about Iceland, not Ireland.

I'm unaware of any literature about Irish warlordism and blood feuds, and the centralization of power under a king turned Ireland into a hell hole.

Ah, sorry about that. Thought you were talking about Iceland.

Wheels are a waste of time if you have lots of slaves. They also suck in sand (I know Egypt was more lush at the time, but I think the pyramids were still in the desert)

Are you calling Slay Queen Elizabeth a man? Sexism much?

The point was that those technologies were what made buildings like the medieval cathedrals possible, I think.

I mean if they only had the wheel and everything else was equal, yeah, although it still would've helped. But it's a combination of having wheels, better tools, better understanding of engineering that allowed medieval Europeans to break stone into bricks, move them somewhere else and build cathedrals of complex shapes. On the other hand if European kings just wanted to pile together millions of giant rocks they'd never get it done.

well, he said that
But wheeled carts wouldnt have actually been that helpful for building the pyramids, where they built them. At best it would have made it easier to transport other supplies, like food for workers.
It did make other things possible, like he says

But if they hadnt had rollers, wheels and axels wouldnt have made the pyramids as they were possible.
Technology doesnt progress forwards to get better and more useful, it expands outwards in various different directions to create new possibilities/make previously impractical things in one area more practical. But a technology invented later isn't necessarily more powerful than one from earlier, it doesn't necessarily enable more, it may just enable things that the previous one did not.

which I just realize upon reading his post again actually reinforces the point made in

Egyptian labourers weren't slaves, they actually got paid.

What I find interesting in this debate is that the Pharaos never again built pyramds later, after the Early Dynastic Period. Pryamids actually predated all the golden eras of Ancient Egypt. Do you guys know a reason for this? Did their religious beliefs change or was there a shift in their form of government and economy that made such projects completely unfeasable?

Spending all the time and effort so fat germans in hawaiian shirts can take pictures of your gravestone 3000 years later seems like a waste of time to me

I don't know a whole lot about this subject, so take it with a grain of salt, but after the Old Kingdom there was a religious shift so that you no longer had to be buried close to the Pharaoh to be secured a place in the afterlife, due to the cult of Osiris. This lessened the importance of the old burial sites, and burial traditions in general. The really big pyramids (and most of the 'actual' pyramids) were built during the fourth dynasty. The tombs from before that were far more modest.

Speaking of ancaps, does anyone know anything about this place?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
I've seen people use it as an example of anarcho-capitalism in practice

if they do it's the most dystopian one I've seen

High trust, the only way anything like that can work

This is literally like if I said "Did you know the Incans had a planned economy? Incan-Communism confirmed!"

Ancaps only cite it as an example of how a court system could work in ancapistan, not an ancap society as a whole. It was pre-capitlaist anyway so even if they did make such an argument it would be idiotic, and what they do look to medieval Iceland for is still idiotic.

Actually a lot of civilizations didn't properly develop a wheel because they weren't efficient. If you live in a sandy or roughly forested environment then wheels are more hassle than they're worth. The only reason why wheels are advantageous is because we build specialized roads for them, go try riding a bike over a sand dune or snowy mountain slope vs walking. There's a reason no one has ever climbed mount Everest with a car. Before modern metals, wheels had to be made out of wood because they were the only things light yet strong enough to be easily to build, transport, and fit onto vehicles, and north africa is notorious for it's lack of natural wood. Technology isn't as linear as people would like to think.

Remember that humans seem to spread pretty indiscriminately over long time periods, more dominate cultures will push other cultures into less favorable areas and humans can survive pretty much anywhere. If you're born in an area with less natural resources and less favorable terrain there's just nothing you can do. Pan-european alt-right talk is mainly fictitious, people living high up in the alps and those living in lower flatlands had differing levels of technology until pretty recently, of course people are going to take the prime examples of a small area (like massive cathedrals or aquaducts) and pretend that it extends to all of the made up borders. Even today there are farmers in bum-fuck America who are still using dial-up internet speeds, yet when people think of American technology they think silicon valley. The vast majority of Zig Forums's "muh ancestors" were redneck farmers using thousand year old technology, not church architects.

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The wheel's most useful uses aren't on carts. They are pulleys, gears, pottery wheels, water wills, mill stones, wind mills, water mills, rotary saws, flywheels and all sorts of other bits of machinery.

But when you have lots of cheap labor machinery is a waste of time

Wow didn't even think of them in that way. Well I guess I know I would have never been an inventor in [past year].

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If you stop playing video games and start reading books and spending time outdoor your creative thinking will improve. Guaranteed.

Fucking this, I mean for fucks' sakes, these are people who claim that wolves keeping track of prey living in their territory proves that private property is natural. Anyone who models their ideal society on wolves doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

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What about lobsters?

Did someone mention INCAMMUNISM?????

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Where is this from?