Karl Wittfogel

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Many thanks for this, will forwarded home and read it.  Wonder if
those conversations are the ones he had with Martin Jay in the
early 70s.

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)
>