The Asiatic Mode of Production?

[Palingenisis]

Can some please explain to me just how it differs from feudalism?

Is the concept still widely held by Marxists today?

[Victus Mortuum]

As the contemporary understandings of pre-history developed, Marx changed his ideas to fit the data. Early on, he mentions the 'asiatic' mode of production. Later, he dropped the idea of a distinct Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.

It was in a lot of ways a state-ancient system, if that makes sense.

[Gustav HK]

It differs from feudalism in that that the AMP has a strong central state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production

[Devrim]

Can some please explain to me just how it differs from feudalism?

Is the concept still widely held by Marxists today?

I think in a way Marx just lumped a large number of systems he didn't know that much about into one bag.

If you look at what he wrote though, I think the prime differences are about land holding (which in the AMP was communal as opposeed to the modal in feudal Europe), and state power (which was much more centralised in the AMP than in feudal Europe).

Devrim

[penguinfoot]

Marx's journalistic writings on India are good for this. I think it's important to remember though that the "Asiatic mode of production" was a concept that was being used in intellectual circles whilst Marx was writing and so the fact that he might have used it in some of his writings doesn't mean that it needs to be seen as a central part of his theory of history, if anything its significance lies in the fact that it shows how Marx didn't believe that it was necessary for all societies to go through the same set of historical stages and accepted that it was possible for there to be conservative and stagnant modes of production existing alongside those with a greater tendency to promote the growth of the productive forces.

[Alf]

Later, he dropped the idea of a distinct Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.

Where did Marx do this? I don't think that Marx dropped it, although the concept does disappear from Engels' Origins of the Family; and the idea that slavery-feudalism-capitalism were the only forms of class society was enthusiastically taken up by the Stalinists, who were uncomfortable with the idea embedded in the concept of asiatic depotism - namely, that exploitation can still take place even where there is no separate class of private property owners and the ruling class is identified entirely with the state.

This is an extract from an article in our current series on the decadence of capitalism, dealing with this question of the Asiatic mode ( http://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/135/ascent-and-decline-of-societies


The ‘Asiatic' mode of production

The term ‘Asiatic mode of production' is controversial. Engels unfortunately omits to include the concept in his seminal work on the rise of class society, Origins of the Family, even though Marx's work already contained numerous references to it. Later on, Engels' error was compounded by the Stalinists who virtually outlawed the concept altogether, advancing a very mechanistic and linear view of history as everywhere moving through phases of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. This schema had distinct advantages for the Stalinist bureaucracy: on the one hand, long after the bourgeois revolution had passed from the agenda of world history, it enabled them to discern the rise of a progressive bourgeoisie in countries like India and China once they had been baptised ‘feudal'; and on the other, it allowed them to avoid embarrassing criticisms of their own form of state despotism, since in the concept of Asiatic despotism, the state, and not a class of individual property owners, directly ensures the exploitation of labour power: the parallels with Stalinist state capitalism are evident.

However, more serious researchers, such as Perry Anderson in an appendix to his book Lineages of the Absolutist State argues that Marx's characterisation of Indian and other contemporary societies as forms of a definite ‘Asiatic mode' was based on faulty information and that the concept has in any case been made so general as to lack any precise meaning.

Certainly, the epithet ‘Asiatic' is confusing in itself. To a greater or lesser extent, all the first forms of class society took on the forms analysed by Marx under this heading, whether in Sumeria, Egypt, India, China, or in more remote regions such as Central and South America, Africa and the Pacific. It is founded on the village community inherited from the epoch prior to the emergence of the state. The state power, often personified by a priestly caste, is based on the surplus product drawn from the village communities in the form of tribute, or, in the case of major construction projects (irrigation, temples, etc) of obligatory labour dues (the ‘corvee'). Slavery may exist but it is not the dominant form of labour. We would argue that while these societies displayed many significant differences, they are united at the level which is most crucial in the classification of an "antagonistic" mode of production: the social relations through which surplus labour is extracted from the exploited class

When we turn to examining the phenomenon of decadence in these social forms, there are, as with ‘primitive' societies, a number of specific characteristics, in that these societies seem to display an extraordinary stability and rarely if ever ‘evolved' into a new mode of production without being battered from the outside. It would however be a mistake to see Asiatic society as lacking in history. There is a vast difference between the first despotic forms that emerged in Hawaii or South America, which are much closer to their original tribal roots, and the gigantic empires that developed in India or China, which gave rise to extremely sophisticated cultural forms.

Nevertheless the underlying characteristic - the centrality of the village community - remains, and provides the key to the ‘unchanging' nature of these societies.

"Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity; and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind.... The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name-this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economical elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky". Capital, 1, Part IV, Chapter XIV

In this mode of production, the barriers to the development of commodity production were far stronger than in ancient Rome or feudalism, and this is certainly the reason why in regions where it dominated, capitalism appears not as an outgrowth of the old system but as a foreign invader. It is equally noticeable that the only ‘eastern' society which to some extent developed its own independent capitalism was Japan, where a feudal system was already in place.

Thus in this social form, the conflict between the relations of production and the evolution of the productive forces often appears as stagnation rather than decline, since while dynasties rose and fell, consuming themselves in incessant internal conflicts, and crushing society under the weight of vast, unproductive, ‘Pharaonic' state projects, still the fundamental social structure remained; and if new relations of production did not emerge, then strictly speaking periods of decline in this mode of production do not actually constitute epochs of social revolution. This is quite consistent with Marx's overall method, which does not posit a unilinear or predetermined path of evolution for all forms of society, and certainly envisages the possibility of societies reaching a dead-end from which no further evolution is possible. We should also recall that some of the more isolated expressions of this mode of production collapsed completely, often because they reached the limits to growth in a particular ecological milieu. This seems to have been the case with the Mayan culture, which destroyed its own agricultural base through excessive deforestation. In this case, there was even a deliberate ‘regression' on the part of a large part of the population, who abandoned the cities and returned to hunting and gathering, even though a memory of the old Mayan calendars and traditions was still assiduously preserved. Other cultures, such as the one on Easter Island, seem to have disappeared entirely, in all probability through irresolvable class conflict, violence and starvation.

[RED DAVE]

The classic modern work:

Wittfogel and Oriental Despotism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_August_Wittfogel)

RED DAVE

[Victus Mortuum]

After the Grundrisse, I don't believe Marx ever mentioned the Asiatic mode of production. What he thought after that is up for debate, but it is excluded from his following works. Frankly, though, what he thought isn't as important as what modern history has uncovered as the actual material circumstances. I don't particularly hold to the reductionist view of economic development (tribal, ancient, feudal, capital, social) that is typically advocated by Orthodox Marxists (at least, not in its pure form). However, I would say that AMP is typically used as a description of relations between the state and the economy rather than expressing the relations with the MoP. Modern history, particularly of ancient Egypt and China, I would argue, reveals that the -dominant- mode of economic production was something similar to a system of state centralized slave work or feudal service. But obviously not exclusively. Every dominant economic system has pieces of others alongside it, just not dominantly or as productive.

[Queercommie Girl]

I think the prime differences are about land holding (which in the AMP was communal as opposeed to the modal in feudal Europe),


Chinese landlordism however was very private. Private land ownership began in ancient China in the 6th century BCE with the emergence of the "land tax laws" in the State of Lu in 594 BCE (Lu was the homeland of Confucius and the first explicit form of landlordism in human history).

Ancient India on the other hand did possess a significant number of communally owned lands right into colonial times.



and state power (which was much more centralised in the AMP than in feudal Europe).


However, "feudalism" and "capitalism" by definition are terms that are determined by the economic basis, not the political superstructure. This is the difference between the Marxist definition of "feudalism" and the general definition. According to Marxism, any socio-economic system that is primarily based on private landlordism is a feudal one, regardless of whether the political superstructure is aristocratic and de-centralised like in Europe and Japan or bureaucratic and centralised like in China.

You could have capitalism (private ownership of capital) with very different types of political superstructures, such as "democratic capitalism" with universal suffrage and "state-capitalism" without any explicit voting rights. Just like one does not have to be a Western democracy to be capitalist, one does not need to be "feudal" in the traditional European sense to be a feudal society in the Marxist sense.

[Queercommie Girl]

It differs from feudalism in that that the AMP has a strong central state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production

Feudalism is a definition based on the economic base (private landlordism), not on the political superstructure. See my post above.

[Queercommie Girl]

Later, he dropped the idea of a distinct Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.

Where did Marx do this? I don't think that Marx dropped it, although the concept does disappear from Engels' Origins of the Family; and the idea that slavery-feudalism-capitalism were the only forms of class society was enthusiastically taken up by the Stalinists, who were uncomfortable with the idea embedded in the concept of asiatic depotism - namely, that exploitation can still take place even where there is no separate class of private property owners and the ruling class is identified entirely with the state.

This is an extract from an article in our current series on the decadence of capitalism, dealing with this question of the Asiatic mode ( http://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/135/ascent-and-decline-of-societies


The ‘Asiatic' mode of production

The term ‘Asiatic mode of production' is controversial. Engels unfortunately omits to include the concept in his seminal work on the rise of class society, Origins of the Family, even though Marx's work already contained numerous references to it. Later on, Engels' error was compounded by the Stalinists who virtually outlawed the concept altogether, advancing a very mechanistic and linear view of history as everywhere moving through phases of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. This schema had distinct advantages for the Stalinist bureaucracy: on the one hand, long after the bourgeois revolution had passed from the agenda of world history, it enabled them to discern the rise of a progressive bourgeoisie in countries like India and China once they had been baptised ‘feudal'; and on the other, it allowed them to avoid embarrassing criticisms of their own form of state despotism, since in the concept of Asiatic despotism, the state, and not a class of individual property owners, directly ensures the exploitation of labour power: the parallels with Stalinist state capitalism are evident.

However, more serious researchers, such as Perry Anderson in an appendix to his book Lineages of the Absolutist State argues that Marx's characterisation of Indian and other contemporary societies as forms of a definite ‘Asiatic mode' was based on faulty information and that the concept has in any case been made so general as to lack any precise meaning.

Certainly, the epithet ‘Asiatic' is confusing in itself. To a greater or lesser extent, all the first forms of class society took on the forms analysed by Marx under this heading, whether in Sumeria, Egypt, India, China, or in more remote regions such as Central and South America, Africa and the Pacific. It is founded on the village community inherited from the epoch prior to the emergence of the state. The state power, often personified by a priestly caste, is based on the surplus product drawn from the village communities in the form of tribute, or, in the case of major construction projects (irrigation, temples, etc) of obligatory labour dues (the ‘corvee'). Slavery may exist but it is not the dominant form of labour. We would argue that while these societies displayed many significant differences, they are united at the level which is most crucial in the classification of an "antagonistic" mode of production: the social relations through which surplus labour is extracted from the exploited class

When we turn to examining the phenomenon of decadence in these social forms, there are, as with ‘primitive' societies, a number of specific characteristics, in that these societies seem to display an extraordinary stability and rarely if ever ‘evolved' into a new mode of production without being battered from the outside. It would however be a mistake to see Asiatic society as lacking in history. There is a vast difference between the first despotic forms that emerged in Hawaii or South America, which are much closer to their original tribal roots, and the gigantic empires that developed in India or China, which gave rise to extremely sophisticated cultural forms.

Nevertheless the underlying characteristic - the centrality of the village community - remains, and provides the key to the ‘unchanging' nature of these societies.

"Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity; and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind.... The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name-this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economical elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky". Capital, 1, Part IV, Chapter XIV

In this mode of production, the barriers to the development of commodity production were far stronger than in ancient Rome or feudalism, and this is certainly the reason why in regions where it dominated, capitalism appears not as an outgrowth of the old system but as a foreign invader. It is equally noticeable that the only ‘eastern' society which to some extent developed its own independent capitalism was Japan, where a feudal system was already in place.

Thus in this social form, the conflict between the relations of production and the evolution of the productive forces often appears as stagnation rather than decline, since while dynasties rose and fell, consuming themselves in incessant internal conflicts, and crushing society under the weight of vast, unproductive, ‘Pharaonic' state projects, still the fundamental social structure remained; and if new relations of production did not emerge, then strictly speaking periods of decline in this mode of production do not actually constitute epochs of social revolution. This is quite consistent with Marx's overall method, which does not posit a unilinear or predetermined path of evolution for all forms of society, and certainly envisages the possibility of societies reaching a dead-end from which no further evolution is possible. We should also recall that some of the more isolated expressions of this mode of production collapsed completely, often because they reached the limits to growth in a particular ecological milieu. This seems to have been the case with the Mayan culture, which destroyed its own agricultural base through excessive deforestation. In this case, there was even a deliberate ‘regression' on the part of a large part of the population, who abandoned the cities and returned to hunting and gathering, even though a memory of the old Mayan calendars and traditions was still assiduously preserved. Other cultures, such as the one on Easter Island, seem to have disappeared entirely, in all probability through irresolvable class conflict, violence and starvation.

The whole idea of lumping together fundamentally different societies such as India and China is ridiculously flawed.

Ancient China was in many ways more different to Ancient India than it was to Feudal Europe. The idea of "China" and "India" existing in a single "Asiatic civilisation" is something that only exists in the Western Orientalist fantasy.

While the "Asiatic Mode of Production" applies to Ancient India to some extent, it does not apply to ancient China at all. In China there was a strong centralised state, sure, but the bureaucracy of this state was clearly rooted in private landlordism in the economic sense. The ancient Chinese produced some of the most brilliant historians in human history. The amount of historical evidence we have for feudal China far exceeds the evidence we have for either India or Europe. It's a shame that Eurocentric socialists in the West don't bother to seriously study Chinese history.

Commodity production and circulation in ancient China often exceeded that of ancient Europe by a large margin. For instance, there was a significant proto-capitalist merchantile economy in China during the Song and Ming dynasties. Even though this never developed into real capitalism, the amount of commodity production and circulation during these periods far exceeded that of pre-capitalist Europe. European feudalism was less advanced than Chinese feudalism. No wonder feudal China created all the key technological inventions of the ancient world: paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder.

Marx only studied India directly, and he based his theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production on that. But he never studied China directly. It is a fundamental mistake to assume that China was just like India. They were very different societies.

Also, to say that only "Stalinists" reject the AMP hypothesis is ridiculous, since most modern Trotskyists reject it also.

[Devrim]

The whole idea of lumping together fundamentally different societies such as India and China is ridiculously flawed.

Which I think I already pointed out:


I think in a way Marx just lumped a large number of systems he didn't know that much about into one bag.


Chinese landlordism however was very private. Private land ownership began in ancient China in the 6th century BCE with the emergence of the "land tax laws" in the State of Lu in 594 BCE (Lu was the homeland of Confucius and the first explicit form of landlordism in human history).

Ancient India on the other hand did possess a significant number of communally owned lands right into colonial times.

Yes, I think his ideas were much more based on India and China just got included in the same job lot.


However, "feudalism" and "capitalism" by definition are terms that are determined by the economic basis, not the political superstructure. This is the difference between the Marxist definition of "feudalism" and the general definition. According to Marxism, any socio-economic system that is primarily based on private landlordism is a feudal one, regardless of whether the political superstructure is aristocratic and de-centralised like in Europe and Japan or bureaucratic and centralised like in China.

You could have capitalism (private ownership of capital) with very different types of political superstructures, such as "democratic capitalism" with universal suffrage and "state-capitalism" without any explicit voting rights. Just like one does not have to be a Western democracy to be capitalist, one does not need to be "feudal" in the traditional European sense to be a feudal society in the Marxist sense.

This is a good point although I think that feudal Japan was not as centralised as you seem to imply. The natural tendency of feudalism is to produce a 'decentralised' political system in that it gives the feudal laws a power base to build up on.

Devrim

[Dimentio]

In a short term, these societies were unchanging, while they in a long term went through extensive changes. Egypt very much began with a centralised planned economy and redistribution of goods, but at the end of the Egyptian civilisation, it had more traits of a market economy and an export economy.

[ZeroNowhere]

After the Grundrisse, I don't believe Marx ever mentioned the Asiatic mode of production.
I wouldn't be too sure about that:

In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow.
-Capital, Vol. 1.

[Queercommie Girl]

In a short term, these societies were unchanging,

That's also a mistake as far as ancient China was concerned. Technology progressed much more in ancient China than it ever did in pre-capitalist Europe. Prior to the capitalist era, it was Europe that was relatively stagnant and unchanging, not China.

Even the mode of production changed a lot as feudal China progressed, from a serfdom-based kind of feudalism in the earlier dynasties to a more developed leasehold-based kind of feudalism in the later dynasties.

[Queercommie Girl]

This is a good point although I think that feudal Japan was not as centralised as you seem to imply. The natural tendency of feudalism is to produce a 'decentralised' political system in that it gives the feudal laws a power base to build up on.


Actually I said Japan was de-centralised like Europe, not centralised.

It's true that classical feudalism based primarily on serfdom tends to produce a de-centralised political superstructure. But then this is also true for feudal China. Don't think that feudal China had always been strongly centralised, that's not true. The political superstructure of feudal China was centralised when the economic base mainly rested on semi-free small peasants, but when serfdom was the main economic base, China also had a relatively de-centralised feudal structure, for example during the 3 and half centuries between the fall of the Eastern Han to the rise of the Sui and Tang dynasties, from late 2nd century CE to late 6th century CE.

[Devrim]

Actually I said Japan was de-centralised like Europe, not centralised.

Sorry, my mistake. I have just reread that.


It's true that classical feudalism based primarily on serfdom tends to produce a de-centralised political superstructure. But then this is also true for feudal China. Don't think that feudal China had always been strongly centralised, that's not true. The political superstructure of feudal China was centralised when the economic base mainly rested on semi-free small peasants, but when serfdom was the main economic base, China also had a relatively de-centralised feudal structure, for example during the 3 and half centuries between the fall of the Eastern Han to the rise of the Sui and Tang dynasties, from late 2nd century CE to late 6th century CE.

It is not something that I know anything at all about, but what you say sounds logical.

Are you suggesting that China fluctuated between a feudal type system and a 'Asiatic' type system*?

Devrim

*Acknowledging as we have already said that it is a bit of a catch all term.

[Queercommie Girl]

on the one hand, long after the bourgeois revolution had passed from the agenda of world history, it enabled them to discern the rise of a progressive bourgeoisie in countries like India and China once they had been baptised ‘feudal';


Whether or not the bourgeois in developing countries is progressive in any way is a separate issue, but in different countries the bourgeois becomes progressive and revolutionary at different times in their history. There isn't a singular "global revolutionary epoch" for the bourgeois.

But objectively pre-modern China was indeed feudal since its economy was based on private landlordism, that's a fact that cannot be denied by anyone who studies history.



and on the other, it allowed them to avoid embarrassing criticisms of their own form of state despotism, since in the concept of Asiatic despotism, the state, and not a class of individual property owners, directly ensures the exploitation of labour power: the parallels with Stalinist state capitalism are evident.
The parallels are superficial. In Stalinism, the bureaucracy is not an independent class in its own right but an outgrowth of the working class, it is the bureaucracy of the working class that holds power. In Asiatic feudalism, it is the bureaucracy of the landlord class that holds power. Bureaucrats don't all belong to the same economic class.



However, more serious researchers, such as Perry Anderson in an appendix to his book Lineages of the Absolutist State argues that Marx's characterisation of Indian and other contemporary societies as forms of a definite ‘Asiatic mode' was based on faulty information and that the concept has in any case been made so general as to lack any precise meaning.
The AMP is just based on Marx's study of India. Marx never really studied any other non-Western society.



We would argue that while these societies displayed many significant differences, they are united at the level which is most crucial in the classification of an "antagonistic" mode of production: the social relations through which surplus labour is extracted from the exploited class
So? This is the same as not saying anything. The existence of antagonistic classes is a feature that is universal in every type of class society that has ever existed, including modern capitalism. It's certainly not limited to the "Asiatic Mode of Production".



When we turn to examining the phenomenon of decadence in these social forms, there are, as with ‘primitive' societies, a number of specific characteristics, in that these societies seem to display an extraordinary stability and rarely if ever ‘evolved' into a new mode of production without being battered from the outside. It would however be a mistake to see Asiatic society as lacking in history. There is a vast difference between the first despotic forms that emerged in Hawaii or South America, which are much closer to their original tribal roots, and the gigantic empires that developed in India or China, which gave rise to extremely sophisticated cultural forms.
Actually relatively speaking, it was feudal Europe that lacked history compared with feudal China, which produced significantly more technological innovations. In addition, there were fundamental changes in the actual structures of Chinese feudal society, from a serfdom-based one in earlier dynasties to a leasehold landlordism-based one in later dynasties. Proto-capitalist relations emerged in China centuries before they did in Europe, but due to the relative power and stability of the bureaucratic state it never developed into its full form.

And how do you think China emerged from an Aztec-like society to the later more sophisticated form if it wasn't through revolutionary social change? Do you know about the revolutionary changes that occurred in Chinese society during the Zhou dynasty 2500 years ago?

See: http://www.revleft.com/vb/rise-atheism-ancient-t141770/index.html



Nevertheless the underlying characteristic - the centrality of the village community - remains, and provides the key to the ‘unchanging' nature of these societies.

"Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity; and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind.... The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name-this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economical elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky". Capital, 1, Part IV, Chapter XIV
As I said, this applies to India, but not to China. In China communal land ownership disappeared 2000 years ago and did not re-emerge until the 1949 Revolution.



In this mode of production, the barriers to the development of commodity production were far stronger than in ancient Rome or feudalism, and this is certainly the reason why in regions where it dominated, capitalism appears not as an outgrowth of the old system but as a foreign invader. It is equally noticeable that the only ‘eastern' society which to some extent developed its own independent capitalism was Japan, where a feudal system was already in place.
That's ridiculous, since as I said, objectively there was more of a commodity circulation in feudal China than there was in feudal Europe.

And where did Japan learn about the feudal system? It was certainly not from Europe, but from feudal China. Japanese feudalism was more de-centralised than Chinese feudalism since there was no need for the maintenance of an irrigation system in Japan which requires the existence of a bureaucratic state. But since Japanese feudalism originally came from China, it is fundamentally illogical to put China and Japan into two intrinsically different categories in terms of their modes of production.



Thus in this social form, the conflict between the relations of production and the evolution of the productive forces often appears as stagnation rather than decline, since while dynasties rose and fell, consuming themselves in incessant internal conflicts, and crushing society under the weight of vast, unproductive, ‘Pharaonic' state projects, still the fundamental social structure remained; and if new relations of production did not emerge, then strictly speaking periods of decline in this mode of production do not actually constitute epochs of social revolution. This is quite consistent with Marx's overall method, which does not posit a unilinear or predetermined path of evolution for all forms of society, and certainly envisages the possibility of societies reaching a dead-end from which no further evolution is possible. We should also recall that some of the more isolated expressions of this mode of production collapsed completely, often because they reached the limits to growth in a particular ecological milieu. This seems to have been the case with the Mayan culture, which destroyed its own agricultural base through excessive deforestation. In this case, there was even a deliberate ‘regression' on the part of a large part of the population, who abandoned the cities and returned to hunting and gathering, even though a memory of the old Mayan calendars and traditions was still assiduously preserved. Other cultures, such as the one on Easter Island, seem to have disappeared entirely, in all probability through irresolvable class conflict, violence and starvation.This might be true for Ancient Egypt and the Mayans (which were slavery societies), but not for ancient China, which was actually more dynamic than pre-capitalist Europe.

To call non-Western socio-economic forms "dead-ends" sounds very Eurocentric. Are you suggesting that non-Western societies can never progress unless they totally absorb Western culture?

Also, have you considered the possibility that perhaps the entire human mode of production is actually a dead-end and that we would become extinct before we rise to a higher level of socio-economic development?

To label societies everywhere as "slavery, feudal, capitalist" is not "mechanical" or "linear". I consider ancient China to be feudal because fundamentally the economy was based on private landlordism, but I also recognise the major differences between Chinese Feudalism and European Feudalism (which are like two different kinds of feudal modes of production), for instance the fact that Chinese Feudalism had a strong centralised bureaucratic state while European Feudalism was based on the aristocracy.

[Queercommie Girl]

Are you suggesting that China fluctuated between a feudal type system and a 'Asiatic' type system*?

Devrim

*Acknowledging as we have already said that it is a bit of a catch all term.

Both systems are fundamentally feudal. You don't have to be de-centralised to be feudal, just like you don't have to be a Western-style democracy to be capitalist. Feudalism refers to the economic base not the political superstructure. If a system is based on private landlordism, then it is feudal, whether or not it is centralised.

Chinese Feudalism evolved from a more de-centralised aristocratic form based on serfdom to a more centralised bureaucratic form based on semi-free small peasants. The transition point was during the Tang dynasty.

Actually the first feudal dynasties in China (after feudalism replaced slavery during the Zhou dynasty), the Qin and Western Han, were based on semi-free small peasants that directly paid taxes to the state rather than on serfdom. But serfdom began to emerge during the Eastern Han dynasty 2000 years ago and became the dominant economic form. This persisted until the Tang dynasty. Between the fall of the Eastern Han dyansty around 200 CE to the emergence of the Sui and Tang dynasties just before 600 CE, called the Era of Dis-unity, China had a de-centralised political superstructure and the country was not united. At this time, the power of the bureaucratic state declined, major public works like the Great Wall, canals and the irrigation systems were no longer properly maintained, and peasants became serfs that were directly dependent on regional feudal warlords rather than paying their taxes and labour duty directly to the state. China during this period was in many ways similar to later Japanese feudalism. Indeed, since much of Japanese culture originated from China, Japanese feudalism is like a more developed copy of the system China had during the Era of Dis-unity.

[Victus Mortuum]

I wouldn't be too sure about that:


In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow.

-Capital, Vol. 1.

Fair enough. I still stand by my claim that it is far too generalizing.

[Armchair War Criminal]

Isuel (or others), do you know of any good sources on Chinese economic/social history? I'm finishing up Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, but obviously that gives a very abbreviated treatment.

[Queercommie Girl]

Isuel (or others), do you know of any good sources on Chinese economic/social history? I'm finishing up Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, but obviously that gives a very abbreviated treatment.


http://www.revleft.com/vb/good-histories-philosophy-t143300/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/rise-atheism-ancient-t141770/index.html

[milk]

On this theme of the AMP, then here's (http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/58sovietmarxism/Wittfogelcite60.pdf) an article by Karl August Wittfogel (of Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power fame, but not without controversy and criticism), on pre-1917 Marxist views of Russian society's devlopment and its potential (or not) for socialism.

[StockholmSyndrome]

Didn't see this thread before I posted this article today:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/asiatic-mode-production-t146352/index.html