"Asiatic mode of production"

[Os Cangaceiros]

I was reading a book on Marxist terminology and I was interested to read about this particular term and the history behind it. It has gone in and out of favor with Marxists over the course of the 20th century...it's mostly out of favor in today's era, it's always been somewhat controversial because of its heavily ideological connotations, and the article on it was somewhat critical (and convincing in its critique) But I'd be interested to hear what other people's opinions on it are.

Basically, the concept rendered down into the most simple terms:

Under the AMP, the state is highly advanced and "overdeveloped", while civil society is practically non-existent and "underdeveloped". This retards the progression towards the development of private property (esp. in regards to land, all of which is owned by the state under AMP) and ultimately capitalism.

There are other aspects of the concept as it was developed by Marx, including the role of irrigation and agriculture and village life in some Asian societies, but I think that summarizes it fairly well.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I would say the point of the Asiatic mode of production is not so much state control but an economy organised around urban centres (not necessarily the state capital), which expropriate the surplus of nearby rural settlements without formal ownership, and which direct the labour of the periodically displaced rural population for public work projects. I can't think of any specific work on the concept, though. I think it's not a bad term - certainly there seems to be some commonality between e.g. the palace economy of Crete and the economy of China during the Sui state. And there seems to be a discontinuity between Japan in the Heian period and during developed Japanese feudalism.

The problematic concept, I would say, is the notion that Asiatic societies are unchanging. Here Marx couldn't have been more wrong, although to be fair he was working from very partial accounts.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Karl Marx also used the term "Asiatic society" to refer to some non-Asian societies as well, like Spain and pre-Columbian America. Spain is an interesting case in particular because Rudolf Rocker brings it up specifically in one of his critiques of Marxist "stageism" (in "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice", I believe?)




The term also had some relevance in the early debates surrounding the early Russian communes of the late 19th/early 20th century, which were alternately considered to be feudal, some kind of AMP, or proto-revolutionary.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Karl Marx also used the term "Asiatic society" to refer to some non-Asian societies as well, like Spain and pre-Columbian America. Spain is an interesting case in particular because Rudolf Rocker brings it up specifically in one of his critiques of Marxist "stageism" (in "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice", I believe?)




The term also had some relevance in the early debates surrounding the early Russian communes of the late 19th/early 20th century, which were alternately considered to be feudal, some kind of AMP, or proto-revolutionary.

One ought to be careful here, I think. Marx claimed that Spain had regressed, not to an Asiatic mode of production, but to an "Asiatic government", explicitly comparing it to the obviously feudal Ottoman empire. And he did so, not on account of the strength of Spain's central government, but his weakness - the idea was that the Spanish state was in such a disarray, so internally disunited, it could be compared to states like the Ottoman empire or China of the period.

[swims with the fishes]

i think it is pretty much meaningless as a definition and see it as marx trying to fit his theory with hegels a bit too much. you can see a direct link between hegels analysis of india and china as non-historical peoples and marx's idea of an 'asiatic' mode of production