The Incan Empire

The term Indian when applied to the inhabitants of the New World is in some ways a much too inclusive term, since it can mask some fundamental differences. North America was home to egalitarian societies based on hunting, fishing and horticulture. On the other hand, Inca civilization was much more like that of the Spanish invaders. It had a ruling class, a state, and an army. The capital city was in Cuzco, Peru. The borderlines of the empire included territory as far to the north as Ecuador, and Chile to the south.

World systems theorists have adopted the term "tributary" to describe the mode of production in Inca civilization and others like it. It refers to the need to pay "tribute" to the ruling classes. The use of this word is a bid for a more general way of describing such societies instead of feudalism, which has European connotations. Jim Blaut argues in "Colonizer's Model of the World" that the terminology is unnecessary. "My view is that Eurocentric historians do not have a copyright on the term 'feudalism' and so it is not only valid but also in a sense just to use this term for the mode of production wherever we observe it, in any continent and any social formation." The terminology should interest us less than the underlying historical reality. That reality was that the Incan empire had more in common socially and economically with European or Asian advanced societies of the 1400s than it did with, for example, the Indians of the Great Plains.

Anthropologist John Murra's article in the Peru Reader titled "Cloth, Textile, and the Inca Empire" sets down the exact nature of the tributary glue that held this civilization together. Subjects of the Incas had to spend a portion of their year weaving fine cloth out of cotton. The imperial army wore the clothing and when it conquered a new tribe, they presented the victims with a new wardrobe! This helped to cement them socially and soften the blow of defeat.

Other tributary forms of labor included farming, soldiering, and mining, but it was spinning and weaving that occupied a central place. Clothing was functional, since the Andean climate was bitterly cold for much of the year. It also had esthetic and religious value. Puberty rites were the occasion for presenting a young boy or girl with new clothes. Feathers were an important part of clothing and one Spaniard reported on a warehouse that contained 100,000 dried birds just for this purpose. The sacredness attached to clothing persisted long after the fall of the Inca state. It was common to strip Europeans of their clothing after a skirmish took place. Most of all, clothing was a sign of status:

"Any commodity so highly valued is bound to acquire rank and class connotations. The king had certain fabrics reserved for his use alone and his shirts are reported to have been very delicate, embroidered with gold and silver, ornamented with feathers, and sometimes made of such rare fibers as bat hair. Morfia claims to have handled a royal garment so delicately made that it fitted into the hollow of his hand.

"The main insignia of royalty was a red wool fringe which fell over the king's forehead and was sewn onto his headdress. Kings were quite fastidious and changed their clothing frequently. Morfia and Garcilaso tell us that royalty gave away their discarded apparel, but Pedro Pizarro claims to have seen hampers which contained all of Atawalpa's used clothing, along with the bones and corn cobs he had gnawed on. This is credible as we know from Pedro Sancho, another and independent witness of the invasion, that the mummies of deceased kings kept "everything"--not only vessels used for eating, but all hair, nail parings, and clothes."

The Inca state used coercion to draft spinners, weavers, shepherds, soldiers and farmers into its vast productive machine. It also made extensive use of census takers, tax collectors, messengers and clerks. These skilled workers kept track of what was being produced, who was producing it and how much was owed in terms of the payee and the payer. Most importantly, there was a professional army that kept everybody in line.

Thomas C. Patterson's "The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration of a Pre-Capitalist State" provides a Marxist analysis of how the Incas ruled:

"The state had available a series of institutions and practices to ensure the regular and systematic extraction of tribute from the peoples they subjugated. This exploitation was backed up by the army, diplomacy, coercion, and intimidation. The state used the up-to-date census information to levy labor taxes on the subject populations and the households that comprised them. It imposed two kinds of taxes. The first was the mit'a, which consisted of a specific number of days of labor in the army, in public works projects, or in personal service to the emperor or various officials and agencies of the state. The other form of labor taxation involved agricultural or pastoral work in fields appropriated by the royal corporations, the state, or the state cult or in caring for the herds of llamas and alpacas they pastured in the territory of their subjects. The tax burden was apparently not equally distributed across the various groups incorporated into the state. Greater demands were placed on some accounting units than others in the same province, and the demands for labor from frontier populations were less than those from groups in the core areas of the state."

Patterson is unstinting in his portrayal of the Inca ruling elite. The quest for power consumes them. They are either fighting with each other in wars of succession as characters in a Shakespeare play do, or with outlying tribes who resist assimilation. This unflattering portrait is a reaction, one must suppose, to the tendency of "indigenists" to view Inca civilization as enlightened and humane. It is one thing for an archaeologist to admire their artifacts, but Patterson's sympathies are with the people who were under the thumb. The odd thing about civilization is that it takes societies with strictly defined divisions of labor to produce museum quality artifacts. As Freud said, the purpose of civilization is repression. Such divisions are inevitably the result of having somebody pointing a gun or spear at you, either implicitly or explicitly.

The Inca empire came into existence not much earlier than the arrival of Columbus and it was beginning to unravel at the edges by the time that Pizarro's army arrived. Civil war and general resentment of Inca rule made it possible for the Spaniards to divide Indian against Indian. Cortez had done this successfully against the Aztecs in the beginning of the 15th century.

Pizarro's only goal was to find gold and silver and steal it for the Spanish crown. As Adam Smith put it, "The pious purpose of converting them to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project. But the hope of finding treasures there, was the sole motive which prompted them to undertake it. . . All the other enterprises of the Spaniards in the world subsequent to those of Columbus, seems to have been prompted by the same motive. It was the thirst for gold." (Cited in Andre Gunder Frank's "World Accumulation, 1492-1789)

After an initial period of wanton plunder, the Spanish conquerors made use of the existing forms of class oppression in Inca society. Pre-existing hierarchical structures could help to exploit the Andean riches on a more normal, rational and economic basis. They appropriated forms of the specific Andean tributary mode of production in order to extract silver from Peru's mines rather than weaving and spinning. Thus began a process of co-opting a layer of the Inca aristocracy into becoming willing servants of Spanish interests.

The Spaniards set up a system of "encomiendas," a system that attempted to wed features of Spanish feudalism with the local tributary system of the Incas. Encomiendas were estates that Pizarro awarded to his cronies, upon which all resident Indians had to provide labor services, especially mining, to the landlord. The Spanish rulers enticed and bribed local Indian chiefs into collaborating with this system. They murdered those who resisted.

The question of the differences between Inca and Spanish rule is important. If the Spaniards simply appropriated the existing tributary system and adapted it for their own needs, why would anybody view the change as retrograde? After all, Marxists oppose class oppression whether it has an internal or external origin.

The answer has to do with the particular role of Spanish colonialism in financing the initial take-off of the bourgeois revolution in Europe. True tributary societies revolve around the production of use values, while the Spanish colonial empire was responding to the demands of commercial-capitalist expansion in Europe. Silver extracted from the Andean mines helped to hasten the accumulation of capital in Europe. Therefore, the pressures on Indian miners were much greater than they had been in the past. Before the European invasion, silver became a bracelet. Now it financed European trade and manufacturing.

>From the mid-1500s on, the Spaniards began to replace the encomienda system with a new system. This was the mita, a tax levied on each province by the central colonial administration. This required the Indian chiefs to supply a Spanish juez repartidor (distributing judge) with a certain number of days of labor per month. These days were calculated in accordance with the varying needs of Spanish commerce. Thus the Spanish distributing judge became in effect a labor contractor who supplied wage labor to the mines. (Frank, p. 45)

Eric Wolf describes the flow from Peru to Spain in his "Europe and the People Without History." Each year fleets would depart for the Americas; one was destined for Mexico, the other for Peru. The second fleet arrived in the Isthmus of Panama and carried European goods across the Andes trails into Peru. On the return trip, mule trains carried silver from Peru's mines that skilled Indian labor had extracted. The two fleets often converged in Cuba, another Spanish colony. Between 1503 and 1660 "more than seven million pounds of silver reached Seville from America, tripling the European supply of the metal." I do not intend to get into the controversy over whether European capitalism required the plunder of the New World for its birth. What if the cash equivalent of 7 millions of pounds of silver had been invested in a bank in 1503 in an interest- bearing account for "the people of Peru"? It is safe to say that Peru would not be nearly the economic basket case it is today.

The colonial administration ruled without much native resistance until the 1700s, when armed movements broke out over a fifty year span. What is remarkable about these movements is that they had no use for the "enlightenment" values that were inspiring revolt in Europe or even in Haiti. These peasant rebellions called for a return to the old ways of the Inca empire, which now seemed like a golden age.

José Gabriel Condorcanqui led the most important rebel movement. He was a trader and Indian noble who took the name Túpac Amaru II, after the last Inca executed by the Spaniards. He claimed to be a descendant of this chief. Túpac Amaru's rebellion covered the entire Southern Andes, roughly 200,000 square miles. Alberto Flores Galindo's article "The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru," also contained in the Peru Reader, details the scope of this powerful movement, which at its height drew support from 100,000 Indians.

Túpac Amaru was also known as "the Inca." The rebellion, according to Galindo, was a product of sharp economic contradictions brought on by a recovery in the southern Andes, when new supplies of silver were discovered. Stepped up production and commerce flooded the local economies with new cash goods that the Indians could not afford. They also had to pay onerous taxes, while lacking access to the labor market and its cash wages.

After the Spaniards captured and executed, Túpac Amaru, they decided to wage a campaign against Inca culture. They prohibited Inca nobility from using titles, destroyed their paintings, and forced the Indians to dress in European clothing. They hoped to assimilate the Indians in this manner, but it had the opposite effect. The hatred of the European deepened.

Túpac Amaru has been a symbol of 20th century anti-imperialist struggles. Armed groups in Uruguay in the 1960s, and Peru in the 1980s and 90s, appropriated his name. It is certainly odd to see Marxist organizations use a figure of Inca nostalgia for their own struggle, which is supposedly about modernization and progress. What could be more backward-looking than to yearn for Inca past, that by any standards was not egalitarian or democratic?

These contradictions are at the heart of the Peruvian class struggle, which has always defied schematic answers.

Starting with the interaction between Spanish colonial-feudalism and Inca tributary modes of production, you encounter a clash between two systems that really do not fit neatly into a Marxist textbook. While Inca society might have been tributary, at the local kinship level of the ayllu, the tribe owned the property communally and made decisions collectively. As long as the local unit could satisfy the requirements of the imperial state, the social organization of the village could adhere to its own standards. The Inca state, while imperial, was not totalitarian.

The Spanish colonial administration was not a pure case of feudalism either. Its purpose was to organize and regulate wage labor for the needs of commercial-capitalism in Europe. Hence, the relations between lord and serf were not as organic and traditional as those that had evolved in Europe over centuries. Alienation and hatred characterized the relationship between ruler and ruled. Racism and religious bigotry were the root causes. Centuries of meztiso attempts to wipe out Indian identity have not pacified them, as the recent Maoist rebellion proves.

In my next post, I want to examine the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui in some depth. In the 1920s, this great Peruvian Marxist developed a program for socialist revolution in Peru that drew heavily on Inca society and culture. He thought that Peru's ancient Indian civilization could not only be an inspiration for modern day struggles. He also thought that the ayllu could provide the basis for a revolutionary state in much the same manner that Marx considered the possibility for Russian peasant communes in the 1880s.

José Carlos Mariátegui believed that the key to the Peruvian Indian question in the 1920s was land ownership. In Peru, Chiapas or Wounded Knee, this issue is fundamental for indigenous peoples. Capitalism has driven them from ancestral lands in order to exploit minerals, soil and water for naked profit. Only socialism can redress this injustice.