The Socialist Dream Crumbles in Venezuela

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

Indigenous cultures don't even coerce their children in the way that we do in western culture. They are basically treated as autonomous adults and fend for themselves as soon as they are able to walk. Corporal punishment of children is very rare is these societies. They are not forced to learn the culture etc.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

Also Comrade, how can solidarity exist without consensus? It simply cannot.

[The Comrade]

democratic majority is not absolute majority. suggesting the iroquois worked on absolute majority is practically deifying them.

you don't understand consensus decision making either. it does not, never has, and never will, mean an absolute total majority of people agree. what it means, and if you want i'll dig up my class notes as told to me by a member of the mohawk nation, is that every group, or representative of a group, is allowed to air their disagreements and discuss possible solutions, in an open setting, among all other groups and representatives. everyone gets a say, and is allowed to try and change something, without hindrance.

very easily verifiable example of the iroquois not working on absolute majority was the decision of some of the nations to help the US, despite the declartion of neutrality, and some to help the british. absolute political divide.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Comrade]

and without some form of coercion, that consensus is meaningless, which is the entire point of this discussion. so without 100% agreement, coercion is required.

[The Dharma Bum]

Also in individual matters such as sexuality etc there was no real coercion, as we know it in our culture. If a male wasn't inclined to becoming a warrior there alternatives open for them, for example.

They simply didn't have coercive social structures such as schools, a military draft, patriarchy, prisons, media, police etc.

Was there peer pressure for warriors to be brave? Sure, probably even to an extreme with these people, but that's not really coercion because if someone showed cowardice they weren't thrown into prison and forced labor. They probably just made fun of them until they redeemed themselves with an act of bravery in battle.

For the purposes of this discussion it is not very useful to conflate interpersonal relations between equally autonomous individuals with the influence of a coercive social structure such as a prison or military draft. In Iroquois society dissenters can always relocate if they are unhappy with the arrangement, which happened often.

[The Comrade]

[The Dharma Bum]

Individuals switched homes, villages, even defected to related tribes etc all the time. But yes, living as an individual in the wilderness is a death sentence for all except the elite hunter and survivalist.

The point is it if there was a disagreement, their society went to great lengths to accommodate all views and reach consensus before acting. They didn't have a class society and they didn't have coercive social institutions to implement such.

There was no taxation, military draft, wage slavery, private property or any other coercive institution of that nature. If you were part of a dissenting faction the secret police wouldn't come pick you up in the middle of the night and disappear you. Instead they kept discussing the issue in council until consensus was reached and I'm pretty sure if a faction decided after all that that they didn't want to go to war or whatever ever there was no coercive apparatus in place to force participation or stop them from leaving if the situation became intolerable between the factions. The incidence of internal violence was very low and probably mainly honor based rather than a form of political coercion.

As you pointed out community solidarity was crucial to survival for these people, and that is why seeking consensus was so much of a part of their social pattern.