The Inca used forced labor to build temples and roads and provide food and other goods to the military. Cooperative farming can certainly become more efficient with additional infrastructure like irrigation and food storage, but I find it hard to believe that the tradeoff here is starvation vs massive cleptocratic absolute monarchy. It went way beyond the need to grow food cooperatively. And in fact, the only way that you would end up with all of this labor available for armies and temples and so on is by generating large food surpluses, so it's clear they weren't on the boundary of starvation. How did I work, I wonder, before there was an emperor?
That said, we currently use money to build roads and provide food and other goods to the military, which we fund through taxes. Taxes are just a more nuanced, easier-to-administer form of "provide x% of your labor to the central authority". The evil part here is the absolute monarchy that makes self-interested decisions about what to do with that labor, but the Inca were hardly alone in that respect.