The Asiatic Mode of Production in China

Timothy Brook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315491912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Brook (history, U. of Toronto) surveys the history of the concept of the AMP (a concept formulated by Karl Marx in the 1850s) in China in relation to debates elsewhere, and examines the particular issues raised in recent Chinese discussions. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

TIMOTHY BROOK

1 Introduction

The Asiatic mode of production (AMP) is a concept that Karl Marx formulated late in the 1850s in the course of his research into the history of private property and the emergence of capitalism. Marx never provided a definition of the concept, and most of his dispersed comments on Asia deal with the social, political, and juridical aspects of particular Asian states rather than the logic of their historical development. The ambiguity of this sketchy concept, which a deepening awareness of Asia since Marx’s time has only intensified, spawned a controversy in the late 1920s and early 1930s among Marxist intellectuals in the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. The controversy was revived early in the 1960s in the Soviet Union and Europe, and since 1978 it has received considerable attention in China. Indeed, by forcing a full rethinking of the conventional Marxist model of history used in China, it has been the most important debate within the realm of historical theory there in the 1980s.

The Chinese voices in the debate on the AMP have largely gone unheard in the West, although some of the writings of their Soviet and European counterparts have been made available in English.¹ Since China is one of the candidates for “Asiatic” society, it behooves us to bring Chinese perspectives on the AMP into the debate.² The present volume includes translations of eleven essays published in Chinese about the AMP between 1980 and 1987, plus a bibliography. This introduction is intended to provide a historical framework for the debate, as well as a context for evaluating its contribution to the revision of social theory currently underway in China.

East and West

The division of the world into East and West has been a convention of European thought since the time of the Greeks. For Hippocrates and Aristotle, the world divided at the Dardanelles: civilization lay to the west, and barbarism, a world of despotic potentates and servile subjects languishing in tropical lassitude, lay to the east. This halving of the known world, while it reflected in some measure the mantle of ignorance and prejudice that lay over Greek society, was foremost a product of the tense international environment in the eastern Mediterranean during the formative epoch of Greek civilization. The Turkic peoples of Asia Minor were a palpable threat. Filtered through a complex consciousness of ethnic cultural superiority, this threat and the anxiety it provoked were sublimated by the Greeks into a model of polar political opposites of mythic force. It lent form and meaning to the intellectual discoveries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it lingers as “Orientalism” in the popular mind down to the present. It also continues to haunt most attempts by Western theorists to conceptualize sociopolitical orders different from their own.

Once the sailors of fifteenth-century Europe cracked the secrets of ocean navigation and opened the world to exploration, Europeans came into contact with a far broader range of peoples than they had previously known, peoples whose very existence surprised them and whose customs and cultures baffled their notions of civilized order. Their success at colonization confirmed their conviction that the West was the East’s superior. What they found there tended only to strengthen their conceptual partition of the world into East and West, reinforcing what the English romantic Thomas de Quincy in 1818 dramatized as “the barrier of utter abhorrence between myself and them . . . deeper than I can analyze.”³ In contrast, China’s inability to block Western penetration caused the Chinese geometry of world division—a set of concentric circles, with Chinese civilization in the middle—to weaken toward the end of the nineteenth century in favor of an East-West dichotomy. That dichotomy placed China at a disadvantage, favoring the industrializing West and denigrating the agrarian East.

Back in Europe, successive generations of thinkers from the sixteenth century forward attempted to incorporate the new and expanding knowledge of hitherto unknown parts of the globe by building models of historical change on this dichotomy.⁴ The earliest drew on Biblical myths about the Flood and the Dispersion after the fall of the Tower of Babel to explain who peopled what areas of the earth and with what consequences. The reinterpretation of such myths to these ends contributed in part to the decline of Christian historiography in the seventeenth century, as expanding knowledge could no longer tolerate the limits of strict adherence to Biblical myth. In its place grew new models that, like Christianity, conceived of history teleologically, though they usually replaced God and salvation with secular concepts of necessity and progress.

Standing in the wake of these views, Marx was powerfully influenced by the scheme of universal history laid out by G.W.F. Hegel in The Philosophy of History (1830–31). Hegel plotted progress—the progressive realization of a World Spirit and the development of freedom—along a linear sequence beginning with Asia, advancing through Greece and Rome, and reaching its apogee and end in Germany. Asia was a static place for Hegel, a place “without history” at the very beginning of the process of civilization, stranded without the possibility of being transcended by the next stage of civilization, Greece. Placing Asia at the beginning point of a Eurocentric theory of history, immune to the forces that had impelled European history forward, typifies, as Donald Lowe has observed, “the unresolved tension between European preoccupation and universal process.”⁵

Karl Marx’s conception of Asia drew directly from the intellectual traditions to which he as a nineteenth-century German was heir. Although fiercely critical of many aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s world historical conceptions. Just as Hegel had divided the world into three separate macroregions of Asia, Greece and Rome, and Germany, so Marx in the Grundrisse regionalized world civilizations into Asia, the classical Mediterranean world, and Germanic Europe (though he occasionally distinguished the Slavic area as a fourth). Marx did this in relation to his materialist analysis of property, defining distinctive forms of property for each of these regions: the Asiatic form in Asia, the ancient in the classical world, the Germanic in Northern Europe prior to the collapse of the Roman empire, and the feudal thereafter. Marx also conceived of some if not all of these forms of property as defining distinct modes of production, a concept that typologizes societies in terms of property relations and the technical environment in which production is carried out.

Hegel’s arrangement of Asia, the classical world, and Germany in a linear chronological order was based on the development not of their economic structures but of their political institutions. In this respect, the content of the Hegelian sequence is completely different from Marx’s economic analysis, as the fourth essay in this volume insists.⁶ The parallelism between their logical structures is inescapable, however, and must be recognized if one is to understand Marx historically.

The importance of Marx’s analysis of Asia is not that it derived from Hegel but that it functioned as an integral part of the process through which he constructed his theory of capitalism. To understand the genesis of the capitalist mode of production, Marx read widely on the various civilizations that existed before the eruption of capitalism. These included the social formations of Asia. The teleological imperative in nineteenth-century European thought impelled him toward the convention of portraying these noncapitalist societies, which preceded capitalism chronologically, as logically precapitalist, in the sense that they were seen to lead inexorably toward the emergence of capitalism. Marx felt that he could establish the full meaning of capitalism only by placing it in relation to its past.

In 1859 Marx summarized his conclusions on this sequence in the oft-quoted Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.”⁷ The exegesis of this formula has been at the heart of the controversy over the AMP that began six decades ago. The conventional model of the chronological sequence of modes of production, established by Soviet scholars and blessed by Stalin in 1938,⁸ allows for five modes through which all societies are deemed to have passed in some form or another. The first stage is the primitive communal mode, characterized by the absence of individual private property. It is followed by the ancient or slave mode, represented by the classical world of Greece and Rome. It is replaced by feudalism, in which serfdom is the most common economic relationship. Out of feudalism arises capitalism, and out of capitalism, socialism. All five modes of production have been the subjects of much dispute.⁹ Most problematic from the present perspective, however, is the absence of an Asiatic mode from this model.

The Asiatic Mode of Production

The Asiatic mode stands out in several ways from the other modes Marx names in the Preface to the Critique. First, it is the only mode bearing a specifically geographic identity (though it could fairly be argued that “ancient,” “feudal,” and “bourgeois” are all terms highly specific to the history of European society). The second, fourth, and ninth essays in this volume tackle the question of why Marx chose a geographic term that embraces an extraordinarily diverse range of societies rather than a more general expression. By extension, “Asiatic” implies a dichotomy of East-West historical development that would seem to run counter to the universal intention of the formula.

Second, the Asiatic mode stands out because it occupies first place in the sequence in the Preface. This position suggests that it preceded the others at least historically, if not logically. The AMP therefore has to be seen not only on its own terms but in relation to modes of production that Marx observed elsewhere in the world. At one level, Marx has continued the eighteenth-century tradition of incorporating Asian societies in a teleological scheme that places them closer to the origin of human society than European societies were. Whether this relationship expresses a universal pattern of historical development that transcends the particular histories of Asia and Europe, Marx does not explicitly say.

Third, the term “Asiatic,” unlike the others, is a highly colored word, freighted, at least in the twentieth century, with pejorative meanings rooted in the centuries of condescension of the West toward the East. It conveys all the negative images that the early-modern European mind associated with Asia, what de Quincy called the “awful images and associations” of “Asiatic things”: “ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate.”¹⁰ These pejorative resonances have now been securely attached to the word “Asiatic” by virtue of the distinction made between it and the more neutral adjective “Asian.” Even though this separation of nuances occurred after Marx’s time, it influences how twentieth-century intellectuals respond to the idea of an Asiatic mode.¹¹

The negative connotations of “Asiatic” are much weaker in Chinese. The noun from which the adjective “Asiatic” is derived, Yaxiya, first appears on the map of the world that the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) drew for his Chinese acquaintances in 1584. A contemporary, Zhang Huang, obtained a copy of this map for his encyclopedia, Tushu bian (The illustrated compendium), where it has been preserved in the twenty-ninth chapter. The transliteration is thus of Jesuit origin. In the twentieth century, Yaxiya has become archaic: in Chinese usage today the word is reserved as a technical term for the AMP; in all other contexts the nineteenth-century expression Yazhou is used for Asia.

The ambiguities surrounding the AMP and its status within the modes of production named in the Preface to the Critique have driven several generations of Marxist historians to comb through the writings of Marx and Engels to better understand what the economic relationships specific to the AMP might be and what place, if any, the AMP had in the process of the development of society toward the capitalist domination of the world. This has proven difficult in part because, as one Western commentator has noted, “Marx’s writings on Asia do not bulk large in the corpus of work he published in his lifetime.”¹² Marx’s richest writings on Asia have only come out piecemeal in this century.¹³ Some of what Marx and Engels wrote about Asia, particularly in their letters, has yet to appear in English translation.

The greater problem facing those who wish to analyze Marx’s concept of the AMP is that most of what he and Engels wrote deals with concrete social formations in Asia covering a wide range of place and time rather than a theoretical model designed to explicate the economic logic of a mode of production. Given their reliance on particularistic and cliché-ridden descriptions of various Asian societies, Lowe has argued that the AMP is “an unsystematized combination of a European process of history and the conventional idea of a static East” that does violence to historical materialism’s “linear process of universal history.”¹⁴ Recognizing this threat, many Marxists have sought to dismiss the AMP by disputing the peculiarities of particular Asian societies rather than evaluate the internal coherence or validity of the concept. For the latter form of analysis, it is necessary to focus on Marx’s discussion of property in the Grundrisse.

The Asiatic Form of Property

The Grundrisse is a set of voluminous notebooks Marx kept over the years 1857–58. A portion dealing wi...