Missed a few spots

[Aslan]

So here are a few holes in my understanding of Marxism

1. Scarcity, as in how does Marx talk about the eventual resource scarcity of capitalism,

2. Historical Determinism. The classic trope of Primitive Communism-Slave Society-Feudalism-Capitalism-Socialism-Communism. But this ideas seems a little flawed to me, as in historically it was a lot more complicated. With in between points in these societies. For example, feudal China participated in the silk road trade with Slave-society Rome.

Or another example is the Maoist interpretation of battle between 2 feudal Chinese lords. But its just two ancient lords squabbling over some land right?

3. Collectivism, as in a Marxist sense has been constantly attacked. But I'd like to hear something positive about it.

[khad]

Given what we now know through archaeology, much of what Marx assumed about primitive societies is suspect to say the least. I would take most of his speculation on what occurred before feudalism as arguments made on the basis of philosophical symmetry rather than anything rigorously based in fact.

Look, I've already said all I've needed to say on this matter, so I'll sum up a couple of points.

Marx's stagism basically assumes a gradual devolution over the control of labor from the few to the many, starting with centralized states devolving into feudal fiefdoms devolving into corporations and finally to the working class itself. The most ancient modes of production were supposed to have no private property whatsoever, and this led to some of his racialized assumptions about Asiatic indolence and stagnation - he actually believed that empire was needed to develop the institution of private land tenure in India, for example. One just needs to take a step back and realize how nutty those conclusions are.

Fact is we have laws for individual property liability dating back to the age of Hammurabi. And various bronze and early iron age civilizations seem to have gone through periods of expanding and contracting feudalism. History doesn't exactly flow neatly in stages.

What you need to focus on is the feudal-capitalist transition, as that's something that Marx had a better grasp - as he was seeing it happen in Europe before his eyes.

Now I know I'll be ripped to shreds by the circling sharks, but do keep in mind this is the learning forum, so keep it civil.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Now I know I'll be ripped to shreds by the circling sharks, but do keep in mind this is the learning forum, so keep it civil.

I don't see why ... what you said seems quite reasonable. I think it's pretty hard to defend the sweeping concept of "Asiatic Despotism" which lumps 3000 years of Chinese history in with not only the Ottoman Empire, but India, Japan, Southeast Asia and Persia knowing what we know today. For instance, how can one honestly, knowing what we know today, not see the feudal relationships between the Mughals and their various vassals? A Rajput is nothing but a feudal noble who prayed to a lingam instead of a cross. The British conquerors of India knew this after the Mughals were swept out as they made the Rajas into their own feudal vassals during and right after the Maratha wars.

I was actually thinking of this the other day - I think the relationship between "Despotism" and "Feudalism" needs to be revisited through less orientalist lenses (I'm sure it has).

On that point, I think Marx was reading too much of Hegel's history (and I say that as someone who loves Hegel) and not enough about the actually existing political and economic relations of ancient India. We can't fix the absurd notion that "Reason moves west" by making it a materialist thesis.

[khad]

I don't see why ... what you said seems quite reasonable. I think it's pretty hard to defend the sweeping concept of "Asiatic Despotism" which lumps 3000 years of Chinese history in with not only the Ottoman Empire, but India, Japan, Southeast Asia and Persia knowing what we know today. For instance, how can one honestly, knowing what we know today, not see the feudal relationships between the Mughals and their various vassals? A Rajput is nothing but a feudal noble who prayed to a lingam instead of a cross. The British conquerors of India knew this after the Mughals were swept out as they made the Rajas into their own feudal vassals during and right after the Maratha wars.

You have no idea... sigh. Some people of certain tendencies...

Anyway,

Feudalism and feudal-like states have dated back to nearly the beginning of recorded history. From the late bronze age Kassite period, we have what were called kudurru, or special tax-exempt land grants given to important officials and military leaders, which became hereditary over time. A similar process could be seen in classical Egypt where military elites accumulated fiefdoms that over time turned them into the dominant, hereditary landowning class. Europe was perhaps an ideal test case for feudalism with its incredible political fragmentation in much of its post-classical, premodern period, but one can observe similar processes operational in in a wide array of geographic and temporal settings.

I was actually thinking of this the other day - I think the relationship between "Despotism" and "Feudalism" needs to be revisited through less orientalist lenses (I'm sure it has).

It's hard to really revisit that topic since I'm of the opinion that the former really doesn't exist. Marx, when writing about totalizing asiatic states was describing a physical, literal impossibility.

Premodern states were puny compared to the states we're familiar with today. Puny to the point of absurdity, and so-called despotic states the puniest of all. There's one statistic which showed that 17th century England had about 1 government official for every 3-4 thousand people. And that's about 3-4 times greater than the per capita bureaucratic footprint of Qing China.

In the Code of Hammurabi, if an irrigation canal on your property failed (due to lack of maintenance) and ruined a neighbor's farm, you would have to compensate your neighbor using your own property. According to the orthodox Marxist theory, a so-called hydraulic state like the early river civilizations would have the state handle all matters of constructing and maintaining canals. So what's this about individual, private ownership, maintenance, and liability?

Despotism only exists as a matter of philosophical symmetry, of running a linear regression back into the past. Unfortunately, that's not how one does history.

I think that during the late Soviet Union, scholars there were trying to amalgamate feudalism, slave societies, etc into a general category of "primitive modes." Their work never got any purchase in the West, so leftists are still here debating matters that were settled decades ago.

On that point, I think Marx was reading too much of Hegel's history (and I say that as someone who loves Hegel) and not enough about the actually existing political and economic relations of ancient India. We can't fix the absurd notion that "Reason moves west" by making it a materialist thesis.

Agreed. Marx, like Hegel, was operating from a 19th century understanding of the world. When we read him today, we must keep that contextualization in mind. Ironically, when Marx was trying to argue for the lack of private property in India, he was unwittingly regurgitating the British Empire's legal sleight of hand by which they argued that they could seize Indian peasant land due to absence of formal ownership.

[Aslan]

So could someone address my other 2 points (Scarcity and Collectivism).

[Aslan]

pretty please, with a star of socialism on top ? I would love to read it!

[khad]

I'm guessing most people don't really see a clear entry point into that discussion because your wording is too vague.

Are you referring to how Marx thought that communism would be a kind of post-scarcity society, juxtaposed to the scarcity-driven economics of capitalism? Or are you saying that Marx doesn't talk about the matter of resource scarcity in capitalism?

It's not clear.

[Aslan]

I'm guessing most people don't really see a clear entry point into that discussion because your wording is too vague.

Are you referring to how Marx thought that communism would be a kind of post-scarcity society, juxtaposed to the scarcity-driven economics of capitalism? Or are you saying that Marx doesn't talk about the matter of resource scarcity in capitalism?

It's not clear.

Yes I'm wondering how a scarcity driven society will turn into a post-scarcity society.

[Blake's Baby]

Scarcity in capitalism is in general 'artificial' scarcity. Food is destroyed because there are no buyers, while people go hungry. Marx talks about 'too much production' - the problem is not scarcity as such but production of the wrong things and the inability to make a profit on others.

[Alet]

1. Scarcity, as in how does Marx talk about the eventual resource scarcity of capitalism,

Resource scarcity, as it is recognized today, was not addressed by Marx because it wasn't even an observable phenomenon in the 19th century. This is, however, not a matter of communism but rather one of economic management in general. When even in a capitalist society technologies are developed as an answer to that, why wouldn't a post-capitalist society carry on those tasks? And what we can say for sure is for one that a planned economy will more likely be able to handle and even overcome resource scarcity - additionally, communism will not only crush consumerism, consumption and preferences as such will also change.

2. Historical Determinism. The classic trope of Primitive Communism-Slave Society-Feudalism-Capitalism-Socialism-Communism. But this ideas seems a little flawed to me, as in historically it was a lot more complicated.

History is not "determined" and Marx did not approve stagism. This is a bastardization of historical materialism. There have been threads about this, I recommend using the search function for this. Yes, history was indeed a lot more complicated but this is not the point. The point is to approach history scientifically, i.e. without idealist nonsense and metaphysical superstition. Engels wrote J. Bloch about this, it's worth reading:

"According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance [highlighted by Engels] the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercize an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection with one another is so remote, or so incapable of proof, that we may neglect it, regarding it as nonexistent) the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. Were this not the case, the application of the history to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We ourselves make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these are the economic, which are finally decisive. But there are also the political, etc. Yes, even the ghostly traditions, which haunt the minds of men play a role albeit not a decisive one. The Prussian state arose and developed also through historical, in the last instance, economic causes. One could hardly, however, assert without pedantry that among the many petty principalities of North Germany, just Brandenburg was determined by economic necessity and not by other factors also (before all, its involvement in virtue of its Prussian possessions, with Poland and therewith international political relations – which were also decisive factors in the creation of the Austrian sovereign power) to become the great power in which was to be embodied the economic, linguistic and, since the Reformation, also the religious differences of North and South. It would be very hard to attempt to explain by economic causes, without making ourselves ridiculous, the existence of every petty German state of the past or present, or the origin of the shifting of consonants in High-German, which reinforced the differences that existed already in virtue of the geographical separating wall formed by the mountains from Sudeten to Taunus."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar.../90_09_21a.htm

In sum, one cannot reduce history to economic activity, that's true. But one has to consider production as the fundamental condition for the reproduction of human lives, on a physical and on a social level (and this is essentially history).

3. Collectivism, as in a Marxist sense has been constantly attacked. But I'd like to hear something positive about it.

I'm not sure what you mean. Who criticized collectivism and in opposition to what? Generally, it's not wrong to associate socialism with collectivism. This does not need to be justified ethically.

[Rafiq]

1. Scarcity, as in how does Marx talk about the eventual resource scarcity of capitalism,

He does not. This is most likely a misattribution on the part of actual ideologues who are incapable of scientifically grounding the basis of capitalist society - they understand it in such - almost metaphysical terms - because their approach to the basis of capitalist society is ideological.

Marx doesn't speak of an 'eventual resource scarcity' in capitalism. You see, Marx recognizes that natural factors remain unchanged in the course of historical development. So for example, if we deplete oil reserves - it is not because we failed to produce enough oil, but that there is not enough actual physical oil existing. But this doesn't work in actually explaining the course of capitalist production, because such natural factors are always going to have as much as they do. That is why capitalism creates value, and the processes that which value is produced, that which commodities are exchanged, etc. is irreducible to any kind of pseudo-ecology, any kind of natural factors.

What is inherent to capitalist production, is artificial scarcity. This has nothing to do with resource scarcity, but to the artificial creation of scarcities, of goods that are produced, for reasons that relate to market processes.

2. Historical Determinism. The classic trope of Primitive Communism-Slave Society-Feudalism-Capitalism-Socialism-Communism. But this ideas seems a little flawed to me

This is a rather tasteless ossification of what Marx and Engels were describing as the historical development of society up until then to some eternal law about how societies under every circumstance will develop. This is not true - nor is it true that Marx and Engels, could not have made empirical mistakes in their characterization of society. The point is - historical materialism remains, because historical materialism is not some law of stages, it simply refers to the process that which societies are qualified scientifically. The act of doing so, scientifically, isn't just about having facts right - it also relates to having the inclination to know them scientifically, without superstition. In fact Engels was very insistent on this - that every society, before any pre-conceived qualification, must be understood by merit of its specific inner-logic, not the degree that which it conforms to some neatly crafted, pre-conceived notion of stages. As I said before:

It completely anti-Marxist and unscientific. The notion of stageism, essentially, ossifies and formalizes retrospective analysis of the development of societies up until then, turns them into a framework that is deemed to represent the universal trajectory path of every single human society, independent of scientifically assessing the concrete circumstances of that particular society. It is wholly and completely superstitious, because it substitutes concrete analysis with some kind of panacea formula of:

"Well this is what is going to happen, cuz no matter the particular concrete social/historic circumstances of a society, it must fit this magical panacea formula drawn out over the course of hundreds of years - society just 'naturally' evolves towards this, that's what god wills of humans"

The fact of the matter is that, just as it was in China the Russian big bourgeoisie had absolutely no predisposition toward the necessary bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is because, just as the more powerful bourgeoisie of absolutist England, their success, basis of power an existence was built around adjusting to the conditions of combined and uneven development (in England's case, conditions of absolutism). It is not even inevitable that European history had to play out the exact way it did - in this historical development, sometimes you find world-changing outcomes, from how battles are fought, from very arbitrary factors that could have led to an entirely different scenario. The reason why that is irrelevant, is because historical materialism is retrospective- we are looking at WHAT HAPPENED (and why), not what HAD to happen in every circumstance because divine will, or 'history' is some force that marches on at the expense o the real humans constituting it.

The idea that courses of development that specifically pertain to one's strategic, and then tactical imperatives should be dictated by specific historical trajectory paths drawn out over the course of centuries, immersed in chaos and totally meaningless, arbitrary zigzags, should be a model for a revolutionary is ridiculous. The whole point of Marxism, in fact, was to traverse and 'manipulate' social processes, not sit back and watch them 'organically' be drawn out. There is no such thing as the 'organic' development of society, as Lenin understood, this is undialectical, and anti-materialist. The point is quite simple: when one becomes conscious of historic processes (Marxism) one acts upon that knowledge, you do not superstitiously sit back and "wait" for society to develop in the exact way that France did for centuries (especially when there is no reason to think it will develop in this way). Stageism has nothing to do with historical materialism - the trajectory path of slave society, then feudalism, then capitalism, etc. was telling us how European society, which was absolutely at that point the vehicle of world-historical development, was shaped, not how every human society will inevitably be shaped by merit of god's divine plan. There are no empirical dogmas in Marxism, there are no ossified, formal 'rules' about what a society WILL do. The necessity of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, was owed to Russia's immersion already in the world-totality, it was owed to the necessity of politically bringing it up to the standards in place that were world-historical. Russia is a beautiful example of what is happening today, capitalism developing on 'different' lines, alternate modernity, and so on, in other countries.

The whole notion of stageism is superstitious because it abstracts the subject from the historical domain, speaks of what "society" needs to do while you sit and watch. This is ridiculous, because as a Marxist, as a revolutionary, one BECOMES a (potential) real historical, material force themselves already, because of scientific knowledge of social processes. It's not like in France during the July revolution for example, there were a bunch of Marxists who held back practical knowledge so that society can develop 'organically'. That would be the epitome of ridiculousness. That is like saying disease and viruses throughout history must 'organically' spread, that plagues must 'organically' cause so much ill upon people before you, who has knowledge of how to make a vaccine already, should deploy your vaccine. If you have knowledge of how to cure a virus, then it is nonsense to speak of how this 'virus' must spread and kill many beforehand, just because other vaccines were developed because of that specific trajectory path of how plagues are stopped.

3. Collectivism, as in a Marxist sense has been constantly attacked. But I'd like to hear something positive about it.

This is simply confused. Collectivism is a word. When it is said "Collectivism, as in the Marxist sense", it assumes that Marxism respects the dichotomy between 'individualism' and 'collectivism'. But these are ideological phrases, not scientific ones.

That petty bourgeois ideologue attack Marxism on the basis of 'collectivism' is no different than attacking it on the basis of 'not-believing-in-the-Lizards'. It is true that Marxism is incompatible with lizard-men superstitions, but that does not mean that this differentiation is what qualifies the essential basis of Marxism.

But just to answer the question - the notion that Marxists state that the 'individual' should be subjected to the 'collective' is something only the petty bourgeois, the bloodsuckers, the scum of scum say. There are no 'individuals', every single individual is the totality of his social relations. In fact the only reason we differentiate individuals from collectives, is because an individual is simply just a particular person.

Fucking rats- snakes - speak of 'individualism'. They are guising real, actual social relations with such words. Who has the privilege to be an individaul? Only those who are truly capable of abstracting their 'individuality' and projecting it upon their property. Those without property have no 'individuality' in the sense they are using the word. So to answer your question, we Marxists say:

The 'positive aspect' of our 'collectivism' is that we are going to line the petty bourgeois bloodsuckers collectively against the wall and bring about the collective annihilation of the bourgeoisie. Picking off the motherfuckers one by one, after all, would be an arduous and tiring task.

That is how you use words properly. Fucking scum - we don't want to 'subject' them to the collective. They will have no place in the society of the future. They'll be served to the fucking maggots and flies is what they will get.

[Rafiq]

Marx's stagism basically assumes a gradual devolution over the control of labor from the few to the many, starting with centralized states devolving into feudal fiefdoms devolving into corporations and finally to the working class itself.

Which seems like an incidental observation - not some pathological driving force in Marx's assessment of historical development. In fact this is a rather simplistic over-generalization of what they have written regarding the course of historical development. Such notions of 'control', for example, are here arbitrarily defined.

The degree that which relations to production are more specialized, then actually the opposite will remain true - the degree that which labor is 'controlled' for Marx and Engels actually increases with historical development, it does not decrease. The point is that the totality of society actually becomes expressed through more particular means - meaning, the degree of 'control' over labor in congruence with the reproduction of society, actually becomes greater.

This has little to do with relations of direct control and direct domination - or more pertinently, 'control' in the scientific sense cannot be measured in this way if we are referring to essential, and not incidental qualities.

The most ancient modes of production were supposed to have no private property whatsoever

In fact this is not what Marx stated. Marx stated that institutions of private property were not as developed in some previous societies.

The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.

One needs to pay attention to the context in which Marx talked about the absence of private property. When he said there was no private property, the contextual significance of this statement was that he was juxtaposing its development to that present in - say - Europe (etc.). He may have been correct or not correct in this assertion - but one must understand its context first before critiquing it.

Fact is we have laws for individual property liability dating back to the age of Hammurabi.

But khad - you said it yourself. Individual property was conceived insofar as it was a liability - what separates this from being a form of administration (with whatever privileges that entails), rather than ownership in the sense that this word was used by Marx and Engels?

Furthermore, how was the ownership of land accrued? What was the nature of such a grant? For example in feudalism, even though land could be given to this or that lord - the essential basis of society was in the particular system of manoralism, not in its collective administration. The unit of society's reproduction was through this - which is why kings can come and go, and lords can remain lords. The social formation of the feudal lord, is not an extension of the good grace of the king - or the collective administration of society - even if lords can be brought into existence as individuals through such good grace.

Any rudimentary examination of how feudalism emerged following late antiquity can see this - lords were the essential social formation, not kings, not the other way around. This social formation, constituted the basis of society. In ancient societies, administrative control over irrigation systems (etc.) was the basis of society, and this control - could allow one to give people, through supernaturally articulated contracts special privileges in overseeing a certain piece of land. An important detail, i.e. that violating them would incur supernatural repercussion - curses, because the contingent nature of these contracts is quite clear.

But the god-like kings, the system of administration they represented is what made these special privileges, not something that constituted the essential basis, the causal basis of society's reproduction.

That privileges were allotted for the 'ownership' of land, does not constitute such a relation as feudal anymore than the mercantilism in antiquity is some kind of embryonic capitalism. You cannot abstract a certain quality of this or that society, with no consideration of its essential context, and call it 'feudal' or 'capitalist'. In that case every society before capitalism was a mix and match of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slave society. It is nonsense. And again, to speak of hereditary relations doesn't refer to anything essential - that is incidental, it doesn't make or break whether something is feudal.

So what's this about individual, private ownership, maintenance, and liability?

You claim that the state did not in fact handle all matters of maintenance and construction of canals. But what constitutes the exercise of state power, here, proper? Sending specialized technicians to fix the problems of those overseeing canals and their use? Sending the military? What purported organs of state power, proper, would have oversaw and maintained the canals - that in fact did not out of respect for the individual's right to property (rather than the impractical nature of doing this, etc.)?

And various bronze and early iron age civilizations seem to have gone through periods of expanding and contracting feudalism. History doesn't exactly flow neatly in stages.

It doesn't flow into pre-conceived stages, which is precisely why speaking of 'expanding and contracting feudalism' is ridiculous. There is no 'expanding and contracting' feudalism. That there were relations to production that may or may not be similar to those that existed in European feudalism towards one aspect, does not qualify those societies as being essentially feudal - anymore than the slave trade constitutes a regression to classical antiquity.

One must not look at the social relations of previous societies and with wisdom say "Ah, it's good old feudalism'. That is wrong. Perhaps we can debate about whether this or that characterization of the society is wrong on empirical grounds - but that doesn't mean they are 'feudal' or 'capitalist' (as some qualify certain premodern societies, i.e. like relations of property that existed during the "islamic golden age') - it simply means that they are something else - something qualitatively distinct.

Feudalism doesn't have a history - it's a word which is used to describe a qualitatively distinct stage in history. It's not like a human society is determined like a lottery - it will be 'slave-based, feudal, capitalist or socialist' - these are not ontological categories, they're just words used to describe historically distinct social formations. And those that existed in the first civilizations, were absolutely distinct from that which existed in Europe during feudalism, that's simply all there is to it.

You speak of a landowning class - but more details are required - how did they own it (what defined the conditions of this 'ownership'), who worked the land, what did they do with their yield, to what degree did the basis of feeding this society come from such land, and so on. These are complex questions, ones which will demonstrate that qualifying these societies as feudal is simply wrong.

[Homo Songun]

he actually believed that empire was needed to develop the institution of private land tenure in India

Who, Marx? Are you saying Marx or Engels were pro-British Empire? Citation Needed...

I'm not sure it is fair to continue to hold the "Asiatic Mode of Production" thing against Marx and Engels. I thought they did a self-criticism of sorts?

Before 1857, Marx and Engels occasionally used this term to refer to a distinct social formation lying between Tribal Society and Antiquity. Marx and Engels had believed that the great Asian nations were the first we could speak of as civilization (an understanding partly based on Hegel, see: The Oriental Realm). The last time they used this word was in the Grundisse, having dropped the idea of a distinct Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms of societal evolution: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.

Engels explained their learning curve in a second footnote to the Communist Manifesto in 1888:

In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, [was] all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.

[khad]

Who, Marx? Are you saying Marx or Engels were pro-British Empire? Citation Needed...

I'm not sure it is fair to continue to hold the "Asiatic Mode of Production" thing against Marx and Engels. I thought they did a self-criticism of sorts?

To be fair to Marx, he did abandon theorizing on it in his later years, which suggests he was moving away from it. And to further clarify, the younger Marx supported the negation of the negation - anti-imperialist war against imperialism, but the preconditions of that necessitated the widespread, genocidal conditions created by imperialism in the first place. The British Empire was the first social revolution in Asia, as he wrote in 1853.

https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/...1853/06/25.htm

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Ironically, that "murderous religious rite" Marx was referring to, sati, or widow burning, basically exploded in frequency when the British Empire formally legalized the practice (the Mughal ban had limited though better-than-nothing effectiveness). Just one of the many things he couldn't have known back then.