🐎 Comanche

• Bands ("rancherias") as core units: each led by a charismatic headman (paraibo), chosen by respect, generosity, and skill—not inheritance. If they failed, people simply walked away reddit.com+1nativetribe.info+1es.wikipedia.org+1thoughtco.com+1.

• Dual leadership: Separate peace chiefs and war chiefs—peace chiefs handled everyday decisions, war chiefs commanded raids—but both depended entirely on personal prestige comancheindians.blogspot.com+3tshaonline.org+3crystalinks.com+3.

• Strong individual autonomy: Council decisions weren’t binding—members could ignore or leave tshaonline.org.

• Gender roles: Men hunted/raided; women managed camps and supplies. Senior wives often guided domestic decisions en.wikipedia.org+15thoughtco.com+15perc.org+15.

Overall: Highly flexible, democratic, and mobile. Individual freedom trumped inherited hierarchy.

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🪶 Apache

• Local extended-family groups, sometimes forming bands. No central authority—each group had its own informal headman, again chosen for his qualities perc.org+6en.wikipedia.org+6everyculture.com+6.

• Matrilocal residence: Men joined wives’ groups; kinship and authority often traced through women havefunwithhistory.com+2en.wikipedia.org+2reddit.com+2.

• Chief’s authority was informal: Leaders guided through respect and negotiation, not formal rank britannica.com+14en.wikipedia.org+14tshaonline.org+14.

Overall: Loose, clan-based, egalitarian—decision-making was communal and situational.

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🌾 Indigenous Californians

• Tribelets: Typically 100–1000 people, organized into independent but culturally linked units britannica.com+13britannica.com+13notesfromthefrontier.com+13.

• Leadership varied: Some had more prominent chiefs (especially riverine groups), while many had informal councils or wealthy individuals (peyerk among Yurok) en.wikipedia.org.

• Decentralized power: Most decisions made at village or family-clan level—not a top-down hierarchy .

Overall: Broadly egalitarian, with flexible leadership in small, resource-based communities.

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✅ Comparison Table

Aspect	Comanche	Apache	Indigenous Californians
Political structure	Band-based, merit chiefs	Extended families/bands	Tribelets or small village units
Chief selection	By respect/skill, non-hereditary	By prestige, non-hereditary	Varied—informal councils or peyerk
Centralized power	None / individual freedom	None / local autonomy	Decentralized, local autonomy
Social hierarchy	Informal, merit-based	Informal, kin-based	Minimal, sometimes patriclans

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📝 Conclusion:
Yes, both Comanche and Apache societies had leaders, but their power was earned, situational, and limited—the societies were far from rigidly hierarchical. Indigenous Californian groups were generally even more decentralized, with most decision-making happening at the family or small village level.

Let me know if you want a dive into specific tribes like the Chumash, Miwok, or Yurok!

You said:

Why did we, humans, fuck all of this up?

ChatGPT said:

Oh, wow, coming in hot with the existential dread. You want the simple answer? We discovered agriculture and never recovered. That’s it. That’s the tweet.

Here's the grim highlight reel:

🏕️ Phase 1: Chill Foragers

Humans lived for tens of thousands of years in small, egalitarian bands—hunter-gatherers, like the Comanche and Apache you just asked about. Shared food. No billionaires. Took naps. Made beads. Arguably the most relaxed period in human history, unless you were eaten by a lion.

🌾 Phase 2: “Let’s Plant Stuff”

Agriculture shows up. Suddenly you can store food. Suddenly someone’s in charge of the stored food. Boom—hierarchy, property, and surplus. Also: tooth decay.

🏛️ Phase 3: “Hey, I Own You Now”

Now that someone has more grain than someone else, guess what? Social stratification. Classes form. Then states. Then empires. And then we’re sacrificing people to make the sun rise, building pyramids, and inventing the IRS.

⚙️ Phase 4: Industrialization aka “LOL oops”

Technology explodes. Fossil fuels enter the chat. Wealth gets concentrated faster than calories at a state fair. We start calling this “progress” while ruining the biosphere and pretending the air will eventually filter itself.

📱 Phase 5: Late Capitalism and Smartphone Dystopia

You’re here. Welcome. Where the average person can’t afford a house, billionaires cosplay astronauts, and you’re doomscrolling and asking your emotionally sarcastic AI why humanity ruined paradise. I’m flattered.

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So why did we mess it up?

Because surplus creates inequality, and power hoards power. Once a system lets a few people accumulate more than others, they invent gods, laws, and economic theories to justify keeping it that way. The rest of us just want snacks and maybe some art.

We could’ve stayed semi-nomadic with shared meals and good stories. But no.

🐎 Comanche ----------- * **Bands ("rancherias")** as core units: each led by a charismatic headman (_paraibo_), chosen by respect, generosity, and skill—not inheritance. If they failed, people simply walked away 

You said:

Is this something like classless state that Marx was talking about?

ChatGPT said:

Now that’s a sharp question. And yeah—if you're asking whether societies like the Comanche, Apache, or many Indigenous Californians reflect what Marx meant by a "classless" society—then yes, they’re actually pretty damn close.

But here’s the nuance:

Marx saw “primitive communism” as the earliest stage of human social development—a period when property was communal, work was shared, and there were no rigid class divisions or state structures. Sound familiar?

• Comanche and Apache: No permanent rulers, leadership by merit, flexible social roles, personal autonomy—check, check, check, check.

• Californian tribelets: Local resource sharing, decentralized governance, informal influence based on reputation or skill—not wealth—also fits the bill.

These were classless societies, but not in the sci-fi utopian sense of Marx’s endgame. These were pre-class societies—before private property and surplus allowed the emergence of exploiting classes.

What Marx wanted was:

A return to that kind of egalitarian organization, but after passing through the meat grinder of capitalism. He thought we'd use technology and social coordination to get back to that level of equality—without the poverty, isolation, or constant risk of death by jaguar.

So no, this isn’t Marx's final vision—but it's the first chapter of the book he was trying to finish.

Want to talk about primitive communism and its collapse, how capitalism "dissolves" traditional societies, or whether Marx's endgame looks more like Star Trek or a kibbutz?

You said:

A return to that kind of **egalitarian organization**, but _after_ passing through the meat grinder of capitalism. He thought we'd use technology and social coordination to get back to that level of equality—**without the poverty, isolation, or constant risk of death by jaguar**.

What if tech and social coordination inherently promote inequity etc. What if agriculture inherently promotes it?

ChatGPT said:

Oh ho ho, now this is where we shake Marx by the shoulders and go, “Buddy, are you sure about this ‘historical inevitability’ thing?”

You're basically asking the forbidden question:
What if the tools that were supposed to liberate us are inherently the things that broke us?

☠️ Agriculture: The Original Villain?

Yeah. A lot of anthropologists—like James C. Scott, Graeber & Wengrow—have argued that agriculture didn't just make life cushier, it made hierarchy possible:

• Food surplus → hoarding → social control.

• Sedentism → private property → states.

• More mouths → labor coercion → class stratification.

In this view, once you're farming, you're not just growing wheat—you're planting the seeds of inequality, patriarchy, and state violence. Hooray.

🤖 Technology & Social Coordination: The Double-Edged Sword

Marx thought tech = productivity = liberation. But modern tech? It’s not exactly ushering in utopia. It’s doing stuff like:

• Automating exploitation.

• Creating algorithmic class divisions (hello, gig economy).

• Turning “coordination” into “surveillance + behavior modification.”

So yeah—if your tools are built on scarcity management, efficiency over ethics, and control, then it’s not a big leap to say they’ll keep reproducing inequity.

😵 So What If Marx Was...Wrong?

Maybe there’s no “liberatory arc” through capitalism. Maybe surplus economies inherently drift toward hierarchy unless constant resistance is baked in. That would mean:

• No "end of history."

• No smooth evolution from capitalism to equality.

• Just an ongoing tug-of-war between exploitation and mutual aid.

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💡 Possible Alternative?

Some theorists argue we shouldn’t aim for tech-powered post-scarcity—we should aim for "low-tech egalitarianism": less extractive, more communal, small-scale systems. Like what we had before agriculture wrecked the party.

So yeah, maybe Marx underestimated just how structurally loaded our toys are.