Re: Karl Wittfogel

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re: Wittfogel, see Telos #43 in 1980, "Conversations With Wittfogel, "
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/telospress/contents43.html
and the book by G.L. Ulmen. And this from the Bulletin of Concerned Asia
Scholars, Ulrich Vogel - K. A. Wittfogel's Marxist Studies on China
1926-1939 [11:4]
http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/main/backreg.htm

  http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/1713.html
Europe-Asia Studies; July 1998


          'THE PEOPLE NEED A TSAR': THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL
              BOLSHEVISM AS STALINIST IDEOLOGY, 1931-1941
              ------------------------------------- >...Moscow also
attempted to court allies within the German-national and
national-revolutionary intelligence communities. Thus, in January 1932,
prominent figures such as Otto Hoetzsch, Klaus Mehnert, Ernst Junger, Carl
Schmitt, Adolf Grabowsky, Friedrich Lenz, and Ernst Niekisch could be
recruited for an "Association for the Study of the Planned Economy in the
USSR" (Arbplan), founded by party members Georg Lukacs, Arvid von Hamack,
Karl A. Wittfogel and Paul Massing. In August 1932, an Arbplan delegation
traveled to Soviet Russia. In a 1941 party report, Lukacs characterized the
twenty-five participants as people from the Right, "with sometimes fascist
ideas, who were, however, for various reasons, supporters of a pro-Soviet
orientation of German politics." Even if this undertaking remained a mere
episode, it sheds light on Soviet foreign policy toward Germany before 1933.

Michael Pugliese, who y'all ignore it seems...


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 8:35 AM
>Subject: [PEN-L:14211] Karl Wittfogel


> Some weeks ago I mentioned Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism
> as a work worth consulting to counter the growing hegemony of
> neoclassical economics and its festive re-evaluation of Imperial
> China as a society of relatively unrestricted  markets. Before we
> talk about those markets,  one ought to think about the massive
> use of  collective manpower  for hydraulic maintenance and
> expansion. This, without fear of Wittfogel's later associations with
> the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years. I concur with
> various  criticisms directed primarily  at Wittfogel's argument that
> strong states  which by their nature were incapable of allowing or
> promoting trade and private property emerged  in Asian societies in
> response to the functional need to undertake massive hydraulic
> works. But I think scholars have the bad habit of rejecting in toto
> too many classic interpretations the moment they discover a  flaw
> or two. Not only are big theories out, but specialists cannot help
> distorting them by reshaping  them into grids called "models". Take
> it all or leave it.
>
> But I rather follow in the footsteps of  Ernest Mandel (1971) who,
> even as he recognizes  Wittfogel's flaws, appreciates his
> contribution to the advancement of the concept Asiatic Mode of
> Production. Not the anti-Eurocentrics but Stalin prohited any
> discussion of this concept  on the supreme grounds  it could not
> be fitted into the traditional four stages. Thanks to Wittfogel the
> discussion was revived, allowing Mandel later to clarify much of the
> issues, by realizing that the "fundamental characteristics" of the
> Asiatic Mode need not all be accepted (a mode which today  I
> would prefer to call  "hydraulic" even more than the current Marxist
> terms of "Tributary or "State"), characteristics which Marx had
> already listed in his Grundrisse before Wittfogel's research.
>
> Let me list these traits below and state which are still valid.
>
> 1. There is an absence of private property in land. (Incorrect for
> Imperial China, Mogul India.)
>
> 2. Tribal village communities retain an essential cohesive force,
> through their close union with agriculture and craft industry, despite
> conquest and consolidation of states above them. (Mandel has # 2
> here as two separate traits, 2 and 3, so that the following # 3 below
> is his #4): (Does not apply to the advanced societies of Asia which
> Marx had in mind).
>
> 3. "For geographical and climatic reasons, however, the prosperity
> of agriculture in these regions requires impressive hydraulic works:
> 'Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture'. This
> irrigation requires nearly everywhere a central authority to regulate
> it and to undertake large-scale works" (Still a very valuable idea
> worth further research)
>
> 4. Therefore, these are societies in which a powerful state
> manages to concentrate most of the surplus product, and in which
> stratification depends on access to this suplus, the 'internal logic'
> of which favors stability in the relations of production as the best
> way to gain control over this surplus. (True, but I would say the
> 'internal logic' was affected by point #3).
>
> 5. The consequence of this concentration of the wealth and power
> of society in the hands of state officials is that the accumulation of
> capital is "retarded" (Mandel's term). Hence, while it is "undeniable
> that under the Ming dynasty China experienced - like India at the
> height of the Mogul period - an expansion of luxury production and
> private trade that brought the country to the threshold of
> manufacturing and commercial capitalism...this treshold was not
> crossed" (Mandel, 124). (This #5 is not listed as a trait by Mandel
> but is an argument he soon makes after his list, as a historical
> feature distinguishing Asia from Europe). (True, but we need to
> avoid idea the state was anti-capitalist.)
>
> Now, I think Mandel is to the point when he criticizes people like
> Godelier for using just trait #2 as the key defining one,  allowing
> themselves the application of this concept to a whole range of
> societies, specifically societies in transition from classless (where
> village community production prevailed) to class society (as
> conquerors placed themselves above the villages). Marx never
> intended this concept to apply to such societies; he was instead
> thinking of "Indian and Chinese society as they were when
> European industrial capital encountered them in the eighteenth
> century" (Mandel, 127).
>
> If you sum up Mandel's analysis, the message is clear: we don't
> even have to accept point #1 re the absence of property and how
> this may have curtailed capitalist accumulation. No, Mandel, and
> many others, as I keep finding, were aware China could have, in
> the long run, cultivated industrial capitalism; it is just that Europe
> took-off  first. Mandel, however, puts more emphasis than I would
> on those traits relating to the class character and the functional
> role of the hydraulic state. My interest is more on the hydraulic
> nature of this state, the eco-environmental aspects affecting
> China's hydraulic state, how they conditioned the internal logic of
> this society. To close with Plekhanov, "If these two types [classical
> and the Oriental] differed considerably from each other, their chief
> distinctive features were evolved under the influence of the
> geographical environment" (cited by Mandel, 122)
>