Re: AUT: asiatic mode of production

["Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Wright"
Sent: 29. juli 2002 02.15
Subject: Re: AUT: asiatic mode of production


> In the 1940s, Karl Wittfogel characterised the USSR as a form of the
> asiatic mode ...

To make another, somewhat curious jump:

"The Japanese capitalism [is] so to say none-systemic [a reference
to Immanuel Wallerstein's" frivolous theory" of a capitalist world-
economy], seen from a global perspective. It is a defence for feudal
values forced into a capitalist form. But thereby this quasisystem is
not only the result of the protestantic capitalism that made a world
market out of capital-products possible: the system is perpetually
depended on the contiuned existence of this form."

                                 Joergen Sandemose (From a reply to a
critique
                                 in the newspaper "Klassekampen" 31. July,
2002)


Interestingly enough  he claims that the position of Japan today is as
vulnerable as was that of the U.S.S.R. prior to 1990. To me this seems
hard to believe but ... Underlying this perspective is however a
conviction of a less in-depth capitalist conquest of the world, and thus
also a more fractured capitalist existence than what todays discussion
around globalization would suggest.

To his use of the term "protestantic capitalism" he remarks "that
inbuilt  mystification of capitalist production has the precise same
structure as the core of the protestant belief form. This of course
contributes to sustaining the power of capitalist production over
the mind ["over sinnene"]. In societies where we find capitalism
without this safeguard, this mode of production will consequently
be much more prone to disintegrate, in particularly in a
reactionary direction."

The in many ways very orthodox Marxism (and Hegel studies)
underlying Sandemose's views brings out some interesting
questions, as what exactly do we mean when we, me included,
say that (for instance) Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia for that, is
a capitalist society?

The question could also be asked in regards to the late Soviet
Union.: What do we imply with the term "state capitalism" in the
period of 1918 to at least up to the the beginning the1930ies,
given that what kept the weels at all turning, apart from "the great
ocean" of semi-self-subsistence farming, was overwhelmingly
a petty-commodity form of craft production, combined with at
times strong doses of forced labour?

Harald




























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