[Marxism] Asiatic Mode of Production

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think Fred Feldman hits the key historical materialist uniqueness of
Europe. It is that incipient capitalist Europe, unlike China or India or
West Africa, are culturally and historically in the Greek and Roman
tradition of slavery and conquest. The countries with socalled Asiatic modes
lack these literally _imperial_ traditions.

In other words, the conquering inclination of early capitalism did not
derive from class struggles in the English countryside ( and towns or other
countries in Europe) in the 1400's or so, but from European's
self-identification as descendants of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This is
the _historical_ aspect of an historical materialist analysis of this
question. It was the combination of the classical tradition as ideology with
the material developments in production.

The fact that the capitalists _brought back_ a modern slave mode and
embedded it in the new capitalist mode is very telling in this regard. The
bourgeoisie "backward-bypassed" the feudal mode and reintroduced the ancient
slave mode as a sub-aspect of the new capitalist mode. Marx terms conquest
and slavery the "chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism
". The critical role of slavery and imperialism in capitalism demonstrate
the direct impact of the Greek and Roman "historio-ethnicities" on the
modern Europeans.

Put another way, the question is why didn't China develop capitalism ?
Because they didn't have the Greek-Roman classical,imperial and slave
tradition. Capitalism is the a reintroduction of the Greek-Roman mode, its
sublation, at a higher twist of a dialectical spiral.


Charles

^^^^

Fred Feldman

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But I don't see any violation of anti-discrimination rules in portraying
China  as more unified and self-reliant economically even than parts of
feudal Europe.  No need to "discover" Europe and seek trade with it a la
Marco Polo, even though THEY KNEW Europe existed.  They knew, but they
didn't see much reason to care and, from the standpoint of their
interests, there wasn't much. The attitude of parts of feudal Europe was
quite different.  Recognizing the existence of a high civilization in
China, some hungrily felt the need to get a piece of that action.  And
of the Indian trade.

No need to conquer large parts of South America, as  feudal Spain did.
You can attribute it to white racism or whatever, but sections of
European FEUDAL society developed a need to expand their trade and
plunder, including where possible trade as a form of plunder,  far more
widely and in a different way than Chinese
bureaucracy-aristocracy-landlords who exploited the peasant communities.

So far the discussion really  misses the points that ought to be
actually controversial. In contrast to Louis, I suggested that the
Asiatic mode of production, in Marx's view as assessed with careful
quotation (as is characteristic of Hal Draper), was basically the
Chinese version of the communal or tribal ownership of land.

In China the tribal or local commune was not broken up by invasions and
the establishment of a mode of production based in growing part on mass
slavery, a la Greece and Rome, slavery being an expansionist order by
the way, in a quite different sense than the Chinese aristocracy (and
private owners) resting on control of the rural commune. The "stage"
that was skipped over was not feudalism but slavery.  But feudal-type
exploitation arising not from the collapse of a slave mode of
production, but on the basis of the "tribal" communal possession of
land.

The invasions and the divisions within the commune generated a social
order that retained the commune and topped it with an imperial political
state and aristocratic structure that, in terms of how it extracted
surplus, basically resembled feudalism.  But feudalism is not just a
term for a mode of production, and the political characteristics were
not identical.  The whole history was different because of the absence
of slavery, the Greek and Roman empires and their collapse.



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