Changes

With the emergence of towns and cities, it has been commonly seen that classes begin to emerge more clearly and this type of lifestyle spreads in many regions of the world. However, there were still societies that were relatively egalitarian. Nevertheless, all of these relatively equal societies were often small, often hunter-gatherer groups such as some Native American societies or those in Africa and South America. Examples of agriculturally-based egalitarian or something more similar to socialist societies, that is societies with a collective form of rule and ownership of resources, are very rare.

There are cases where agricultural societies, within states, did form a type of socialist or even relatively equal societies, although often they were more similar to vertical egalitarian societies that displayed familial or kinship variation in their access to resources and power. In Middle East, so-called agricultural cooperatives, which shared land, did form in the Medieval and early modern periods from the 19th century and lasted even until today in places. These were villages that collectively owned land, where annually families who shuffle to different plots of land, so that no family could have sole access to the most productive areas. Similar collective agriculture existed in the Lake Huron region among Aztecs, where at the Iroquois village level farming and Aztecsresources was shared. However, these societies were never fully equal. Among the Aztecs, power difference were evident among the elites. <ref>for examples of collective farming societies, see: Turner, B.S. (1984) <i>Capitalism and class in the Middle East: theories of social change and economic development</i>. London, Heinemann [u.a.].</ref>  For the Iroquois, matrilineal decent sometimes meant that women yielded more power in society, where wealth could be transferred through the female line. Nevertheless, the Iroquois, relative to colonists they encountered in the 17th-18th centuries, often displayed relatively more limited wealth disparities and showed evidence of equality towards the sexes. However, even Iroquois did keep slaves and wealth differences among leading families and chiefs were evident.The Iroquois, unlike some of the other societies, were relatively larger and, in fact, formed a federation of tribes. In effect, they may have been one of the larger societies we know where, at least on the surface, there was a developed economy revolved around collectivism.<ref>For more on the Iroquois economic system, see: Michael K. Foster, Jack Campisi, & Marianne Mithun (eds.) (1984) <i> Extending the rafters: interdisciplinary approaches to Iroquoian studies </i>. Albany, State University of New York Press.</ref>