Re: [Marxism] Re: Asiatic mode of production

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brian:
> This concept can't yet be a dead dog if NYU's Department of East Asian
> Studies offers it as one of eight courses, even allowing for its
> possible fascination with the professor. Here is the short description
> of the course followed by a syllabus.

Look, Marx and Engels were not really scholars of Chinese and Indian
history. Most of what Marx wrote about India early on was based on
somebody's travel/memoir. The best way to look at this is from the angle of
what John Haldon has called the "tributary mode of production" which
subsumes European feudalism and its counterparts in Asia. This involves the
production of use values through forms of labor exploitation such as the
corvee, rent in kind, etc. There was little difference between how this
operated in China and in Great Britain. Here's a snippet from something I
wrote on Ethiopia a while back:

Samir Amin was the first Marxist thinker to systematically critique the
Asiatic Mode of Production theory and put forward the alternative of a
tributary mode. Feudalism, in Amin's view, is seen as one variant on this
mode. John Haldon, in The State and the Tributary Mode of Production,
suggests that the most logical definition of this mode is one that centers
on the extraction of surpluses from the direct producers either in the form
of tax or rent through extra-economic means. In other words, the state
itself is the appropriator. Haldon cites this passage from Vol. 3 of
Capital in order to establish the Marxist credentials of such an approach:

It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct laborer
remains the 'possessor' of the means of production and labor conditions
necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property
relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relationship of
lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of
freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labor TO A MERE
TRIBUTARY RELATIONSHIP. (Haldon's emphasis)

This certainly epitomizes the Ethiopian economy from the time of the advent
of the Solomonic dynasties to the modern era. Describing about the general
situation in 19th century Ethiopia, Harold Marcus writes:

"In the countryside, most individuals could claim but not own land, and
one's holdings depended on personal position, age, influence, soil
fertility, competing claims, and the political situation. If the guild
(fief) holder could contrive a genealogy adequate to acquire land on the
basis of descent, then some might lose part of their best plots. Moreover,
fief holders themselves had no security of office in the face of the
ever-changing politics of province and palace. Neither peasant nor
patrician was willing, therefore, to invest in or otherwise improve the
land. Indeed, during the age of princes, Ethiopian feudal lords were
unlikely to spark innovation, commission art and architecture, or build
with an eye to posterity."

full: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/33/050.html



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