Kiev Communard
23rd December 2010, 19:04
Here I present to you certain recollections from one of the modern Marxist scholars working on agrarian history and pre-capitalist social formations in general - Jairus Banaji. In his book, "Theory and History", the link to which I've posted here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1966592&postcount=14), he tries to reconstruct the social history of pre-capitalist modes of production, introducing new concepts and offering the critique of some conventional ideas on those societies. In that abstract he is dealing with the notion of "Asiatic mode of production" and its derivatives. If somebody is interested in it, I'll post the remainder of the chapter later. Until then, good read!
A Marxist characterisation of ‘Asiatic’ régimes
It goes without saying that ‘Asiatic’ is a misleading description on several counts, not least for its Orientalist baggage. It is retained here to project continuity with Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic mode and to expand on a central theme in Oriental despotism, namely, the peculiar absence of a ruling class that emerges organically from the depths of society and achieves sufficient stature to control and dominate the state.
The tradition that influenced Marx in the 1850s (long before he read Kovalevsky) maintained that ‘Asiatic despotism’ lacked ‘intermediate and independent classes’ between the sovereign and the mass of the subject population,[65] or, more realistically, that the aristocracy, such as it was, was a creature of the sovereign and completely unlike any equivalent group in Europe.[66] What the ‘unbroken despotism of the Eastern world’[67] had ‘lost respect for’ (!) was of course the ‘right of property, which is the basis of all that is good and useful in the world’, as Bernier exclaimed in a hugely influential description of Aurangzeb’s empire.[68] ‘Bernier correctly discovers the basic form of all phenomena in the East – he refers to Turkey, Persia, Hindostan – to be the absence of private property in land. This is the real key even to the Oriental heaven’, Marx famously told Engels in a letter dated June 1853.[69]
Bernier was, of course, aware of the existence of a nobility in the Mughal state. ‘It should be borne in mind, that the Great Mogol constitutes himself heir of all the Omrahs, or lords, and likewise of the Mansebdars, or inferior lords, who are in his pay’, he wrote, adding, ‘and, what is of the utmost importance, that he is proprietor of every acre of land in the kingdom, excepting, perhaps, some houses and gardens which he sometimes permits his subjects to buy, sell, and otherwise dispose of, among themselves’.[70]
‘The King being proprietor of all the lands in the empire, there can exist neither Dukedoms nor Marquisates; nor can any family be found possessed of wealth arising from a domain, and living upon its own patrimony ;no family can long maintain its distinction, but, after the Omrah’s death, is soon extinguished’.[71] In other words, the amirs, or Omrahs as he called them, lacked any significance because, unlike the nobility in France, they lacked the stability of a hereditary class. Yet Bernier was willing to acknowledge that the jagirdars enjoyed ‘an authority almost absolute over the peasantry’,[72] a nuance Marx ignored in reducing Asiatic régimes to the bipolar simplicity of a mass of village-communities on one side and an all-powerful sovereign on the other.
From the Asiatic to the tributary mode: Marx, Haldon and beyond
This bipolar model of isolated village-communities and an all-powerful state fails as a description of ‘Asiatic’ régimes for at least three substantial reasons. To take the least interesting of these first, Marx’s characterisation of isolated and self-sufficient village-communities was drawn from English accounts of the early nineteenth century that were both embroiled in actual controversies regarding the best kind of revenue-system to introduce in various parts of India and far removed from the reality of most Indian villages, which were scarcely the ‘little republics’ Sir Charles Metcalfe imagined them to be.[73]
Certainly, the self-sufficiency of the Indian village was a myth. ‘There was nothing more remarkably autarkic about the Indian by comparison with the European village.’[74] Indeed, the ‘scale, range and penetration of exchange relations in urban and rural Mughal India were so extensive’ that they are simply incompatible with Marx’s description of the Asiatic mode of production. And Athar Ali makes the point that Marx’s village-community model ‘could hardly apply to the Ottoman Empire and Iran which has no caste system to supply a hereditary, fixed division of labour’.[75]
A second, more substantial reason for rejecting the way Marx construes the Asiatic mode is that it is simply not true, as Richard Jones claimed and Marx himself implied, that ‘the Asiatic sovereign [had] no body of powerful privileged landed proprietors to contend with’,[76] and that the régimes of ‘Asiatic despotism’ lacked any significant types of class-formation. In fact, it should be possible to argue that a comparative political economy of Asiatic régimes, or of the tributary mode of production on which they were founded, is best constructed along the kinds of ruling class that the sovereign had to contend with and the historically distinct ways in which the relationship between ruler and ruling class was configured. This is something I shall attempt, briefly, below.
Third, and finally, Marx’s handling of the claim that (in Jones’s words) ‘Throughout Asia, the sovereigns have ever been in the possession of an exclusive title to the soil of their dominions’,[77] or, as he himself put it, the claim about the ‘absence of private property in land’ (a notion which made its way into the draft pages of Capital, Volume III),[78] was thoroughly uncharacteristic for the uncritical way in which he simply repeated the core doctrine of the Orientalist tradition with no further penetration of the issue.
The point here is not that Asiatic régimes (Muscovy included) were not typically defined by their own doctrines to the effect that the entire territory of a sovereign was in some sense his or her property but that this claim took very different forms in different régimes, was asserted to unequal degrees and, most crucially from a Marxist perspective, was largely a legal or political fiction or at least is best construed as such.
Thus in China, Twitchett states that ‘Traditionally, all the lands of the empire were considered theoretically as belonging to the emperor, but by the beginning of the T’ang dynasty there was a strong and ever-increasing movement towards the recognition of the right of private possession of landed property’.[79] The T’ang ‘seem simply to have accepted the growth of such great holdings and recognised the principle of private ownership of land. …But in law the the rules of the chün-t’ien [land allotment] system remained in force and the doctrine of the emperor’s ownership of all land remained unquestioned’.[80] There could scarcely be a better expression of the largely doctrinal nature of the ruler’s claims.[81]
Roughly analogous to this was the position under the Ṣafavids, when, as Lambton argues, ‘the theory of the ruler as the sole landowner did not receive in practice complete and unqualified acceptance ;in practice private persons enjoyed full rights of ownership over land’.[82] Again, in the Mughal case, Athar Ali suggests that ‘The doctrine of state property could seldom be distinctly enunciated, in view of the lack of its reconcilability with Islamic law’.[83]
In Byzantium, as Oikonomidès points out, ‘The state was the largest landowner of all. To it belonged all the land that was not owned by private individuals or institutions’.[84] Thus, here the principle existed in a much less absolute form, and Aleksandr Kazhdan was always in a minority among Byzantinists in his view that ownership of all land vested in the emperor. The one ‘Asiatic’ régime where the doctrine was asserted in its purity was the Ottoman Empire, the primordial instance of Oriental despotism and the closest ‘Eastern’ parallel to the autocracy of the Muscovite state.[85] Needless to say, the actual arrangements under which land was held were more complex and subject to variation, and what really impressed travellers to the East, both in Turkey and in Russia, was the peculiar servility of the ruling class, a theme I shall come to in a moment.
Yet even these broadly comparable autocracies reflected so-called ‘state-property’ in radically different ways. As Richard Pipes says, ‘The Great Princes of Vladimir . . . regarded their realm as their votchina, that is outright property’.[86]
Muscovy was the purest example, historically, of a patrimonial régime, one in which there was no notion of a public order distinct from the rights and claims of the sovereign, so that the kingdom was literally the ‘personal patrimony of the prince’.[87] The Islamic model was a very different one, by contrast. Conquered territories were retained in the public ownership of the Muslim community,[88] and the underlying principle was that ‘public revenues should be spent in the interests of all [Muslims], not of rulers or privileged groups’.[89] This was a legal fiction, of course, and one that allowed for developed notions of private property in land.[90]
Having said this, there is in Marx’s fascination with the absence of private property in land an important clue to a different mode of production from that which came to define a small if dynamic sector of Europe in the middle ages. Marx himself was clearly reluctant to accept ‘feudalism’ as a sensible or historically accurate characterisation of large parts of the world where class relations and production were structured so differently. It was the peculiar dominance of the state that set these régimes apart from Western Europe, and, of course, Marx expressed his aversion to the idea of an all-encompassing feudalism in the excerpts from Kovalevsky’s book which he made in 1879.91 There is no dearth of reference to these famous passages.
It is clear that by the 1870s, when he read Kovalevsky he had abandoned his earlier view about the government as the original owner of all the land, denouncing its doctrinal character and the role it played in legitimating the dispossession of indigenous communities by the French (in Algeria) and the British (in northern India).[92] ‘The lousy “Orientalists” etc., have recourse in vain to the passages in the Koran where it is said of the earth that it belongs “to the property of God”’, he comments acerbically, after noting, ‘[There is] no trace of conversion of the entire conquered land into “domanial property”’ in the Multequa-ul-Ubhur of Ibrahim Halebi (d. 1549), the massive legal compilation that formed the basis of Ottoman law.[93] This was a major shift of perspective but one which Marx never theorised in the sense that he seems never to have returned to the Asiatic mode of production and may just have quietly buried it.
The crucial difference between the abstraction of an Oriental despotism founded on the possession by the sovereign of an ‘exclusive title’ to the soil (Marx’s Asiatic mode of production) and the more densely textured and complex picture that emerges in the notes from Kovalevsky is the completely fictitious idea, in the orientalist model, that ‘Asiatic despotism’ was marked by an absence of classes between the sovereign and the mass of village-communities. In reading Kovalevsky, but also some of the sources he used, Marx would have realised how distant his formulation of the Asiatic mode was from the actual history of countries such as India where, in Kovalevky’s description, much of the conflict centred on the aspirations of the muqṭa‛s (Kovalevsky’s iktadars) to make their assignments of revenue or iqṭā‛s ‘hereditary and independent of the sultan’. (The reference here is to the thirteenth-century Delhi Sultanate.)
…Kovalevsky described a form of class-struggle that pitted ruler against ruling class and (in his pages on the Mughals) the gradual consolidation of a subversive rural aristocracy, the zamindars, whose relation to the state had always been fraught with tension. This, for Marx,was not feudalism of any variety but nor could it have seemed even remotely comparable to the way he and Engels had construed the Asiatic mode of production in the 1850s.
Lenin’s characterisation of Russia as an ‘Asiatic state’ [95[ and Trotsky’s repeated insistence on the ‘peculiarities’ of Russia’s historical development[96] are, I suggest, best understood, in materialist terms, as the expression of a historical dynamic and of class-relations founded on a mode of production that was neither some exotic variant of feudalism nor, certainly, an inert replica of the Asiatic mode. But ‘If not feudalism, or the Asiatic mode, then what?’, as Terry Byres asked, with evident bafflement, when summarising a collection of papers on the theme in 1985.[97] The tributary mode of production now looks to me like the best contender for a Marxist characterisation of ‘Asiatic’ régimes and has both attracted support from leading currents in the Spanish historiography of al-Andalus and been discussed at length by John Haldon.[98]
The strength of Haldon’s analysis is the focus on imperial states, late Rome and Byzantium included (these, strangely, were never discussed by Marx, who showed little interest in late antiquity), and the perception that ‘tributary’ is a much better characterisation of these states and their economic régimes than the description of them as ‘feudal’. But Haldon jeopardises this insight by suggesting that the distinction between ‘tax’ and ‘rent’ is purely formal since they are both charges on peasant-labour, or ‘modes of surplus appropriation’ as he calls them, so that feudal and tributary economic régimes are ultimately simply variants of a common (and, indeed, universal precapitalist) mode of production.
This makes little sense to me historically (as to Marx as well) and differentiates Haldon’s understanding of the tributary mode sharply from that of his Spanish colleagues, for whom the whole point of a different characterization is to retain the historical peculiarities of (in their case) Islamic economic régimes (the economic régimes bound up with the military expansion of Islam) in contrast to developments in most of Western Europe.[99]
Unlike Haldon, and with Pierre Guichard and Manuel Acién, I believe it is crucial not to minimise the historical difference between European feudalism and Asiatic-style economic régimes (this vindicates Marx) but unlike Acién and his use of the expression ‘Islamic social formation’, the historical complexity of the tributary mode is, I feel, best restored to it by abandoning the positivist distinction between ‘modes of production’ and ‘social formations’ (in fact, in Acién the distinction is residual, since he speaks of ‘social formations’ tout court)[100] and speaking instead of the possible ways in which a mode of production can be configured historically. Capitalism is a good example of this sort of historical complexity, as I suggested earlier, but so, in fact, is the tributary mode, as I shall now try and show.
Ruler and ruling class: configurations of the tributary mode
The tributary mode of production may be defined as a mode of production where the state controls both the means of production and the ruling class, and has ‘unlimited disposal over the total surplus labour of the population’.[101] This is bound to strike many Marxists as an anomalous formulation, but that is because the theoretical issue here is one that has hardly ever been discussed in historical materialism, chiefly because Marxist debates on the nature of the state have focused very largely on the capitalist state, framing the issue in terms of the state’s autonomy and thus starting from the presupposition that state-power and class-interests are analytically distinct.[102]
But formulations like Miliband’s ‘partnership of state and capital’[103] will simply not work for tributary régimes, where, as Trotsky understood in his brilliant pages on the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development, the Muscovite state shaped the evolution of the possessing classes in a fundamental way and quite unlike anything seen in the West.[104] Trotsky himself preferred to speak of the ‘incompleteness of Russian feudalism, its formlessness’.[105] This, like the recurrent image of Russia standing ‘between Europe and Asia’,[106] left the issue of theory open.
The ‘profound differences between the whole of Russia’s development and that of other European countries’[107] was a challenge for historical materialism that might well have been met had the circumstances of the revolutionary movement been less fraught with tragedy. But to round off the point I want to make here, even Theda Skocpol when dealing with imperial states such as Russia and China automatically assumes that we can sensibly posit a dominant class that is distinct from the state. To describe the Russian nobility as ‘politically dependent vis-à-vis the Imperial authorities’ is a bizarre understatement for anyone with a sense of the history of the Muscovite absolutism! [108]
In the Grundrisse, Marx treats ‘oriental despotism’ as a form of communal property whose real foundation is the inert multiplicity of stable agrarian communities that ‘vegetate independently alongside one another’.[109] This ‘communal’ mediation of production – of the community as a ‘presupposition of labour’[110] – undermines the separability of the economic from other levels of social reality in any characterisation of precapitalist modes of production, and certainly of the Asiatic mode.[111]
Paul Frölich’s image of a ruling bureaucratic caste superimposed on a peasant economic base (this about China)[112] is not a sufficiently integrated image of the relations of production of the tributary mode, which involved both the control of peasant-labour by the state (the state-apparatus as the chief instrument of exploitation) and the drive to forge a unified imperial service based on the subordination of the ruling class to the will of the ruler. The leitmotif of much of the historical writing on tributary régimes is the paramount importance for the ruler of a disciplined ruling class. The bond between the ruler and the ruling élite within the wider circles of the ruling class was the basis on which new states were constructed[113] and the state itself bureaucratised to create an efficient tool of administration.
The autocratic centralism of the tributary mode and its backbone in the recruitment of a pliant nobility were not just ‘political superstructures’ to some self-contained economic base, they were essential moments of the structuring and organisation of the economy (of the relations of production). Moreover, tributary economies had considerably more vitality than Marx ever attributed to the Asiatic mode. Late Rome in the fourth century, the eastern empire under Justinian, China in the expansive phase of the Southern Sung and Mughal India in the seventeenth century were prosperous powerful states with a vast financial capacity.[114] They were scarcely exemplars of a ‘stagnant Asiatic despotism’. On the contrary, the financial drive was always paramount.
‘The entire government apparatus was built, and constantly rebuilt, in the interests of the treasury’, as Trotsky said about Russia’s state-economy.[115] The late Sasanian, late Roman and Mughal states had staggering levels of monetary circulation which were bound up with the assessment and collection of the land-tax in cash. In some ways, that was even more true of the Umayyads and ‛Abbasids. As for China, ‘the achievements of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century England….were in many respects even exceeded by the impressive expansion of mining and manufacturing in eleventh-century China’.[116]
To Be Continued...
A Marxist characterisation of ‘Asiatic’ régimes
It goes without saying that ‘Asiatic’ is a misleading description on several counts, not least for its Orientalist baggage. It is retained here to project continuity with Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic mode and to expand on a central theme in Oriental despotism, namely, the peculiar absence of a ruling class that emerges organically from the depths of society and achieves sufficient stature to control and dominate the state.
The tradition that influenced Marx in the 1850s (long before he read Kovalevsky) maintained that ‘Asiatic despotism’ lacked ‘intermediate and independent classes’ between the sovereign and the mass of the subject population,[65] or, more realistically, that the aristocracy, such as it was, was a creature of the sovereign and completely unlike any equivalent group in Europe.[66] What the ‘unbroken despotism of the Eastern world’[67] had ‘lost respect for’ (!) was of course the ‘right of property, which is the basis of all that is good and useful in the world’, as Bernier exclaimed in a hugely influential description of Aurangzeb’s empire.[68] ‘Bernier correctly discovers the basic form of all phenomena in the East – he refers to Turkey, Persia, Hindostan – to be the absence of private property in land. This is the real key even to the Oriental heaven’, Marx famously told Engels in a letter dated June 1853.[69]
Bernier was, of course, aware of the existence of a nobility in the Mughal state. ‘It should be borne in mind, that the Great Mogol constitutes himself heir of all the Omrahs, or lords, and likewise of the Mansebdars, or inferior lords, who are in his pay’, he wrote, adding, ‘and, what is of the utmost importance, that he is proprietor of every acre of land in the kingdom, excepting, perhaps, some houses and gardens which he sometimes permits his subjects to buy, sell, and otherwise dispose of, among themselves’.[70]
‘The King being proprietor of all the lands in the empire, there can exist neither Dukedoms nor Marquisates; nor can any family be found possessed of wealth arising from a domain, and living upon its own patrimony ;no family can long maintain its distinction, but, after the Omrah’s death, is soon extinguished’.[71] In other words, the amirs, or Omrahs as he called them, lacked any significance because, unlike the nobility in France, they lacked the stability of a hereditary class. Yet Bernier was willing to acknowledge that the jagirdars enjoyed ‘an authority almost absolute over the peasantry’,[72] a nuance Marx ignored in reducing Asiatic régimes to the bipolar simplicity of a mass of village-communities on one side and an all-powerful sovereign on the other.
From the Asiatic to the tributary mode: Marx, Haldon and beyond
This bipolar model of isolated village-communities and an all-powerful state fails as a description of ‘Asiatic’ régimes for at least three substantial reasons. To take the least interesting of these first, Marx’s characterisation of isolated and self-sufficient village-communities was drawn from English accounts of the early nineteenth century that were both embroiled in actual controversies regarding the best kind of revenue-system to introduce in various parts of India and far removed from the reality of most Indian villages, which were scarcely the ‘little republics’ Sir Charles Metcalfe imagined them to be.[73]
Certainly, the self-sufficiency of the Indian village was a myth. ‘There was nothing more remarkably autarkic about the Indian by comparison with the European village.’[74] Indeed, the ‘scale, range and penetration of exchange relations in urban and rural Mughal India were so extensive’ that they are simply incompatible with Marx’s description of the Asiatic mode of production. And Athar Ali makes the point that Marx’s village-community model ‘could hardly apply to the Ottoman Empire and Iran which has no caste system to supply a hereditary, fixed division of labour’.[75]
A second, more substantial reason for rejecting the way Marx construes the Asiatic mode is that it is simply not true, as Richard Jones claimed and Marx himself implied, that ‘the Asiatic sovereign [had] no body of powerful privileged landed proprietors to contend with’,[76] and that the régimes of ‘Asiatic despotism’ lacked any significant types of class-formation. In fact, it should be possible to argue that a comparative political economy of Asiatic régimes, or of the tributary mode of production on which they were founded, is best constructed along the kinds of ruling class that the sovereign had to contend with and the historically distinct ways in which the relationship between ruler and ruling class was configured. This is something I shall attempt, briefly, below.
Third, and finally, Marx’s handling of the claim that (in Jones’s words) ‘Throughout Asia, the sovereigns have ever been in the possession of an exclusive title to the soil of their dominions’,[77] or, as he himself put it, the claim about the ‘absence of private property in land’ (a notion which made its way into the draft pages of Capital, Volume III),[78] was thoroughly uncharacteristic for the uncritical way in which he simply repeated the core doctrine of the Orientalist tradition with no further penetration of the issue.
The point here is not that Asiatic régimes (Muscovy included) were not typically defined by their own doctrines to the effect that the entire territory of a sovereign was in some sense his or her property but that this claim took very different forms in different régimes, was asserted to unequal degrees and, most crucially from a Marxist perspective, was largely a legal or political fiction or at least is best construed as such.
Thus in China, Twitchett states that ‘Traditionally, all the lands of the empire were considered theoretically as belonging to the emperor, but by the beginning of the T’ang dynasty there was a strong and ever-increasing movement towards the recognition of the right of private possession of landed property’.[79] The T’ang ‘seem simply to have accepted the growth of such great holdings and recognised the principle of private ownership of land. …But in law the the rules of the chün-t’ien [land allotment] system remained in force and the doctrine of the emperor’s ownership of all land remained unquestioned’.[80] There could scarcely be a better expression of the largely doctrinal nature of the ruler’s claims.[81]
Roughly analogous to this was the position under the Ṣafavids, when, as Lambton argues, ‘the theory of the ruler as the sole landowner did not receive in practice complete and unqualified acceptance ;in practice private persons enjoyed full rights of ownership over land’.[82] Again, in the Mughal case, Athar Ali suggests that ‘The doctrine of state property could seldom be distinctly enunciated, in view of the lack of its reconcilability with Islamic law’.[83]
In Byzantium, as Oikonomidès points out, ‘The state was the largest landowner of all. To it belonged all the land that was not owned by private individuals or institutions’.[84] Thus, here the principle existed in a much less absolute form, and Aleksandr Kazhdan was always in a minority among Byzantinists in his view that ownership of all land vested in the emperor. The one ‘Asiatic’ régime where the doctrine was asserted in its purity was the Ottoman Empire, the primordial instance of Oriental despotism and the closest ‘Eastern’ parallel to the autocracy of the Muscovite state.[85] Needless to say, the actual arrangements under which land was held were more complex and subject to variation, and what really impressed travellers to the East, both in Turkey and in Russia, was the peculiar servility of the ruling class, a theme I shall come to in a moment.
Yet even these broadly comparable autocracies reflected so-called ‘state-property’ in radically different ways. As Richard Pipes says, ‘The Great Princes of Vladimir . . . regarded their realm as their votchina, that is outright property’.[86]
Muscovy was the purest example, historically, of a patrimonial régime, one in which there was no notion of a public order distinct from the rights and claims of the sovereign, so that the kingdom was literally the ‘personal patrimony of the prince’.[87] The Islamic model was a very different one, by contrast. Conquered territories were retained in the public ownership of the Muslim community,[88] and the underlying principle was that ‘public revenues should be spent in the interests of all [Muslims], not of rulers or privileged groups’.[89] This was a legal fiction, of course, and one that allowed for developed notions of private property in land.[90]
Having said this, there is in Marx’s fascination with the absence of private property in land an important clue to a different mode of production from that which came to define a small if dynamic sector of Europe in the middle ages. Marx himself was clearly reluctant to accept ‘feudalism’ as a sensible or historically accurate characterisation of large parts of the world where class relations and production were structured so differently. It was the peculiar dominance of the state that set these régimes apart from Western Europe, and, of course, Marx expressed his aversion to the idea of an all-encompassing feudalism in the excerpts from Kovalevsky’s book which he made in 1879.91 There is no dearth of reference to these famous passages.
It is clear that by the 1870s, when he read Kovalevsky he had abandoned his earlier view about the government as the original owner of all the land, denouncing its doctrinal character and the role it played in legitimating the dispossession of indigenous communities by the French (in Algeria) and the British (in northern India).[92] ‘The lousy “Orientalists” etc., have recourse in vain to the passages in the Koran where it is said of the earth that it belongs “to the property of God”’, he comments acerbically, after noting, ‘[There is] no trace of conversion of the entire conquered land into “domanial property”’ in the Multequa-ul-Ubhur of Ibrahim Halebi (d. 1549), the massive legal compilation that formed the basis of Ottoman law.[93] This was a major shift of perspective but one which Marx never theorised in the sense that he seems never to have returned to the Asiatic mode of production and may just have quietly buried it.
The crucial difference between the abstraction of an Oriental despotism founded on the possession by the sovereign of an ‘exclusive title’ to the soil (Marx’s Asiatic mode of production) and the more densely textured and complex picture that emerges in the notes from Kovalevsky is the completely fictitious idea, in the orientalist model, that ‘Asiatic despotism’ was marked by an absence of classes between the sovereign and the mass of village-communities. In reading Kovalevsky, but also some of the sources he used, Marx would have realised how distant his formulation of the Asiatic mode was from the actual history of countries such as India where, in Kovalevky’s description, much of the conflict centred on the aspirations of the muqṭa‛s (Kovalevsky’s iktadars) to make their assignments of revenue or iqṭā‛s ‘hereditary and independent of the sultan’. (The reference here is to the thirteenth-century Delhi Sultanate.)
…Kovalevsky described a form of class-struggle that pitted ruler against ruling class and (in his pages on the Mughals) the gradual consolidation of a subversive rural aristocracy, the zamindars, whose relation to the state had always been fraught with tension. This, for Marx,was not feudalism of any variety but nor could it have seemed even remotely comparable to the way he and Engels had construed the Asiatic mode of production in the 1850s.
Lenin’s characterisation of Russia as an ‘Asiatic state’ [95[ and Trotsky’s repeated insistence on the ‘peculiarities’ of Russia’s historical development[96] are, I suggest, best understood, in materialist terms, as the expression of a historical dynamic and of class-relations founded on a mode of production that was neither some exotic variant of feudalism nor, certainly, an inert replica of the Asiatic mode. But ‘If not feudalism, or the Asiatic mode, then what?’, as Terry Byres asked, with evident bafflement, when summarising a collection of papers on the theme in 1985.[97] The tributary mode of production now looks to me like the best contender for a Marxist characterisation of ‘Asiatic’ régimes and has both attracted support from leading currents in the Spanish historiography of al-Andalus and been discussed at length by John Haldon.[98]
The strength of Haldon’s analysis is the focus on imperial states, late Rome and Byzantium included (these, strangely, were never discussed by Marx, who showed little interest in late antiquity), and the perception that ‘tributary’ is a much better characterisation of these states and their economic régimes than the description of them as ‘feudal’. But Haldon jeopardises this insight by suggesting that the distinction between ‘tax’ and ‘rent’ is purely formal since they are both charges on peasant-labour, or ‘modes of surplus appropriation’ as he calls them, so that feudal and tributary economic régimes are ultimately simply variants of a common (and, indeed, universal precapitalist) mode of production.
This makes little sense to me historically (as to Marx as well) and differentiates Haldon’s understanding of the tributary mode sharply from that of his Spanish colleagues, for whom the whole point of a different characterization is to retain the historical peculiarities of (in their case) Islamic economic régimes (the economic régimes bound up with the military expansion of Islam) in contrast to developments in most of Western Europe.[99]
Unlike Haldon, and with Pierre Guichard and Manuel Acién, I believe it is crucial not to minimise the historical difference between European feudalism and Asiatic-style economic régimes (this vindicates Marx) but unlike Acién and his use of the expression ‘Islamic social formation’, the historical complexity of the tributary mode is, I feel, best restored to it by abandoning the positivist distinction between ‘modes of production’ and ‘social formations’ (in fact, in Acién the distinction is residual, since he speaks of ‘social formations’ tout court)[100] and speaking instead of the possible ways in which a mode of production can be configured historically. Capitalism is a good example of this sort of historical complexity, as I suggested earlier, but so, in fact, is the tributary mode, as I shall now try and show.
Ruler and ruling class: configurations of the tributary mode
The tributary mode of production may be defined as a mode of production where the state controls both the means of production and the ruling class, and has ‘unlimited disposal over the total surplus labour of the population’.[101] This is bound to strike many Marxists as an anomalous formulation, but that is because the theoretical issue here is one that has hardly ever been discussed in historical materialism, chiefly because Marxist debates on the nature of the state have focused very largely on the capitalist state, framing the issue in terms of the state’s autonomy and thus starting from the presupposition that state-power and class-interests are analytically distinct.[102]
But formulations like Miliband’s ‘partnership of state and capital’[103] will simply not work for tributary régimes, where, as Trotsky understood in his brilliant pages on the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development, the Muscovite state shaped the evolution of the possessing classes in a fundamental way and quite unlike anything seen in the West.[104] Trotsky himself preferred to speak of the ‘incompleteness of Russian feudalism, its formlessness’.[105] This, like the recurrent image of Russia standing ‘between Europe and Asia’,[106] left the issue of theory open.
The ‘profound differences between the whole of Russia’s development and that of other European countries’[107] was a challenge for historical materialism that might well have been met had the circumstances of the revolutionary movement been less fraught with tragedy. But to round off the point I want to make here, even Theda Skocpol when dealing with imperial states such as Russia and China automatically assumes that we can sensibly posit a dominant class that is distinct from the state. To describe the Russian nobility as ‘politically dependent vis-à-vis the Imperial authorities’ is a bizarre understatement for anyone with a sense of the history of the Muscovite absolutism! [108]
In the Grundrisse, Marx treats ‘oriental despotism’ as a form of communal property whose real foundation is the inert multiplicity of stable agrarian communities that ‘vegetate independently alongside one another’.[109] This ‘communal’ mediation of production – of the community as a ‘presupposition of labour’[110] – undermines the separability of the economic from other levels of social reality in any characterisation of precapitalist modes of production, and certainly of the Asiatic mode.[111]
Paul Frölich’s image of a ruling bureaucratic caste superimposed on a peasant economic base (this about China)[112] is not a sufficiently integrated image of the relations of production of the tributary mode, which involved both the control of peasant-labour by the state (the state-apparatus as the chief instrument of exploitation) and the drive to forge a unified imperial service based on the subordination of the ruling class to the will of the ruler. The leitmotif of much of the historical writing on tributary régimes is the paramount importance for the ruler of a disciplined ruling class. The bond between the ruler and the ruling élite within the wider circles of the ruling class was the basis on which new states were constructed[113] and the state itself bureaucratised to create an efficient tool of administration.
The autocratic centralism of the tributary mode and its backbone in the recruitment of a pliant nobility were not just ‘political superstructures’ to some self-contained economic base, they were essential moments of the structuring and organisation of the economy (of the relations of production). Moreover, tributary economies had considerably more vitality than Marx ever attributed to the Asiatic mode. Late Rome in the fourth century, the eastern empire under Justinian, China in the expansive phase of the Southern Sung and Mughal India in the seventeenth century were prosperous powerful states with a vast financial capacity.[114] They were scarcely exemplars of a ‘stagnant Asiatic despotism’. On the contrary, the financial drive was always paramount.
‘The entire government apparatus was built, and constantly rebuilt, in the interests of the treasury’, as Trotsky said about Russia’s state-economy.[115] The late Sasanian, late Roman and Mughal states had staggering levels of monetary circulation which were bound up with the assessment and collection of the land-tax in cash. In some ways, that was even more true of the Umayyads and ‛Abbasids. As for China, ‘the achievements of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century England….were in many respects even exceeded by the impressive expansion of mining and manufacturing in eleventh-century China’.[116]
To Be Continued...