Was the Indus Valley civilization a peaceful communist utopia?

I just found my new favorite YouTuber. I'm not alone out here in the history communistposting corner.

I suppose it makes sense. I used to see a lot of my fellow libertarians (yes, there once was a time) into history. But the type of person who was that trope is increasingly becoming communists these days as capitalism gets discredited. So hopefully my historical vanguardism... really is a vanguard.

As to the subject at hand, I've got a couple hunches from the available evidence. I don't think the Harappan civlization was completely equal, but I think the reverse of Stefan's "the craftspeople lived in the cities" hypothesis. I think it's likeliest that the merchants lived in the cities, and were part of... merchant collectives, basically, and the collective nature of their enterprises as well as the fairly regular proceeds from mercantile activities allowed them a relatively equal lifestyle. They may have been vertically integrated, directly employing the labor crafting their trade goods, and therefore giving both them and the merchants equal wages. Seventeen of these organizations as represented by the seals could be explained by the difficulty in establishing market dominance through fully voluntary means, and then alliances and cartels between some of them to bolster their ability to compete against the others. All of these would have evened out to a relatively egalitarian existence for those who lived in the cities, with the peasants in the countryside living lives less archaeologically visible to us. Those lives could have been the same minus some of the infrastructural amenities (no flushing toilets), but those infrastructural amenities are most of the wealth visible today so that one change would make them invisible to the spade.

I would guess that they were a merchant confederacy because that would explain both their non-religious material culture, their long-livedness as a culture, and their seemingly quick collapse in the face of the proto-Indo-European invaders. As I explained in Class Analysis and Revolution, the liberal bourgeoisie is the weakest of the ideologies. But the money of the rich allows them to buy their way out of almost any problem so the physical weakness of the ideology is usually made irrelevant with cash. Only when this is no longer possible do the bourgeois liberals resort to becoming bourgeois nazbols.

So the shoddiness of Harappan weapons could be explained by this liberal merchant confederacy theory, as could the architectural invisibility of their farms. Indian culture is highly unequal, and there is a huge economic divide today and throughout recorded history between rural and urban India. The urban Indians staff call centers and software firms and live lives comparable to ours once you factor in purchasing power parity. The rural Indians get plastered over schmaltzy famine relief ads where for only the cost of a cup of coffee everyday, you too can feel like a hero in the fight against capitalism's inevitable side effects. This is because there was a vicious caste system implemented by the Aryan invaders. But that caste system couldn't have been possible to implement in full against a completely egalitarian society; there would have been guerrilla warfare, even desperate guerrilla warfare, by doomed people refusing to cease being free. The Aryans would have been implementing a harsher version of something that already existed. On some level, the caste system has to represent a survival and elaboration in some way of some pattern that existed as early as the Harappan. It was almost certainly more egalitarian than the caste system, because conquerors utilize the most extractive version possible of the preexisting institution for their own benefit - look at the Spanish with the mit'a labor system in the former Incan Empire. But there would have had to be a fundamental disconnect, a fundamental inequality, between the cities and the rural areas even in Harappan times.

There's additional evidence today in the historical record regarding moneylending to peasants. This role was mostly assumed until modern times by the brahmins, the priestly caste that looks for all the world like an Aryan bourgeoisie. The terms of these loans were often exploitative, and a great motivator for the peasants to convert to Islam when that became a viable option. This is what the Aryan brahmins did to them. Perhaps the pre-Aryan equivalent did too? We don't see a whole lot of religion in the Harappan; that doesn't mean it wasn't there, just that it wasn't architecturally visible. But whatever the controlling cultural power was in the Harappan civilization, it probably made exploitative loans to the peasants in the same way that the brahmins did, or else the brahmins wouldn't be able to get away with such nakedly exploitative behavior. The bans on usury in Islam and Christianity and within Judaism make more sense now when the behavior of the brahmins is taken into account; as all of these are descendant faiths of the proto-Indo-European pantheon somehow, similar institutions to brahmin-led debt peonage were probably snuffed out of those religions due to practical experience, probably during the time of these faiths' Zoroastrian forebear, for the Zoroastrians forbid usury too.

None of this is conclusive, of course, and it all relies on applying class analysis as revealed through the triangle compass to the historical record at hand. But by doing so, we begin to have the ability to make plausible hypotheses, and to find relationships that may not have been obvious to reactionary historians.