RE: Karl Wittfogel

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's nonsense to claim that Stalin was actually a closet-Nazi. The same
people who do so are often also arguing that poor Hitler had no choice in
attacking Russia in June 1941, because Stalin was about to attack him. The
contradictoriness of these rival claims seems to elude them (incidentally
there is a valuable article in the July 2001 issue of History Today by John
Erickson, charting the course of some of these red-brown hysterias during
the past decade, and comprehensively debunking the most well-known ones).

But the story of Wittfogel in the USSR is interesting.

I posted to Lou's Marxism list about this on 15.02.99:

Wittfogel, who began life as a revolutionary marxist, later popularised
the notion of the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' (AMP) and nailed Marx to
it. Yet the idea was more Wittfogel's than Marx's. And to begin with
anyway, Wittfogel promoted the idea not because he thought it was
the historical truth but in order to fight a political battle against
Stalin and the whole direction which the Bolshevik experiment
was taking Russia. These facts are now mostly forgotten.

Wittfogel had travelled to Moscow in 1931 to address a symposium
marking the centenary of Hegel's death. In his extempore address,
Wittfogel criticised the then-current tendency to exalt dialectical
materialism as a philosophy rather than a historiographical
methodology. This was the opening shot in his campaign.

Wittfogel said the Diamat was a form of philosophical idealism.
This was brave if not very original. It permitted Wittfogel to
mount an attack on what he saw as the insidious danger of Stalin's
emerging despotism. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat had turned
into the dictatorship of Stalin and his cronies. Trotsky was in exile.
The party history had been turned into patristics and the Marxian
historical-materialist method transmogrified into a new liturgy --
the Diamat. This liturgy proclaimed in the crudest terms that History
consisted of Stages of which the Soviet Russia of 1931 was the Highest.

Wittfogel utterly repudiated what he saw as ghastly, manipulative and
ill-born triumphalism. He particularly objected to the new-fangled
Five-Year Plan, seeing in it not the Constructivist technofuture of
Bolshevik film and poster but an _Asiatshchina_ -- ie, the restoration
in Russia of the 'old Asiatic system' the possibility of which even
Lenin had spoken fearfully about, in his famous Stockholm debate with
Plekhanov twenty years before, when he addressed the terrible likelihood
that a failure of revolution in Germany might lead to a degeneration
of the revolution in isolated Russia and the inevitable recreation
of a bureaucratic/panoptic society.

Now, Wittfogel might look very prescient to us, but this was a
peculiar time in Russia. The moral atmosphere of the Five-Year Plan
is well captured in such works as Stephen Kotkin's _Magnetic Mountain_,
which is the story of Magnitogorsk. Stalin had just declared that a
new world war was inevitable and 'we have ten years [to prepare]
or they will bury us'.

Nevertheless, Wittfogel receievd a fair hearing. And the proceedings
of the Moscow conference show that he just lost the argument:
not merely was there no _Asiatshchina_, there wasn't even such a thing
as the Asiatic Mode of Production in the first place. There was no
real evidence that Marx believed in the AMP. A few chance remarks do
not a theory make. And the historical facts were against Wittfogel
anyway.
According to him, stereotypical AMP cities were ossified tentacles
of autocracy, lacking vitality, autonomy or independent economic
life, ie the presumed requirements for the emergence of industrial
capitalism.

But it was clear to Soviet Central Asia scholars, who reached this
conclusion half a century before anyone else -- that this view
had no basis in Asian protocapitalism -- let alone contemporary
Soviet Russia, which in 1931 was hardly a somnolent backwater
or rampant bureaucracy either (there are more bureaucrats per
'000 population in Yeltsin's Russia).

Later in 1931 another conference, this time of Leningrad scholars,
also discussed the Asiatic Mode of Production, and Wittfogel again
appeared, to defend his just-published, sensational book. The
Leningrad conference like the Moscow one held earlier, also rejected
both idea and book.

The proceedings were published as *Diskussia ob aziatskom sposobe
proizvodstva* ('Discussion on the Asian Mode of Production'). This
established what became the Soviet conventional view that the AMP was a
historical non sequitur: the premedieval world-system organised around
the Silk Road (Gunder Frank's centrality of Central Asia) and Indian
Ocean trade, formed a viable, vibrant protocapitalism.

Indeed the most hydraulic cities of all: the great C13 medieval
Persian, Afghan and Turkestan cities, were heaving with anarchic,
semi- piratical trade based on complex systems of commodity production
(often, especially in the case of the silk trade, owned and controlled
by WOMEN) in which large factories produced metalware, ceramics,
carpets etc, with the mosque providing money and the functions
of a stock market and credit system.

Nishapur, Hervat, Samarkand, Bukhara, etc., were sited in deserts and
dependent on irrigation systems which had taken a millennia to evolve;
but these systems did *not* require a massive stagnant bureaucracy or
mindless peonry to operate, as Wittfogel claimed: the top-heavy,
militarised Abbasid and Khutbeddin dynasty-makers were more trouble
than they were ever worth and when Genghis Khan despatched
them most Persian traders were only too pleased.

The C13 nexus between China and the Islamic world was the core of
the world system and the heart of world science and culture. The
level of learning was in diffusion terms 3-5 centuries ahead Europe.
By the mid-19th century things looked different and ignorant
western travellers and graphomanes like Wittfogel could certainly
see in the decrepit, rundown cities of the Orient an 'Asiatic
mode' which had never existed in fact.

What matters most is bearing this debate has on the concept of
'Mode of Production'. Here, too, Wittfogel got it wrong. He had
always misunderstood Marx, assimilating him to an almost physiocratic
productivism. His infatuation with Weber made it easy for
Wittfogel to construct his fables of bureaucracies
managing masses of trench-digging peons.

But Marx was not a productivist. As Wittfogel himself recalled,
Marx famously said 'We know only one science, the science of
history'. Wittfogel the weberian literalist thought Marx meant by
this the writing of technical *histories of production*.

Astonishingly, some people still adhere to this crass dumbing-down
of Marx's epistemological-critical narrative appropriation of the
natural sciences, carried thru by observing the mystificatory effects
of the social relations within which sciences occur.

Ironically, this was pretty much Stalin's own view of the matter and
here we come upon a paradox. Karl August Wittfogel shared the
contemporary
Bolshevik Weltanschauung of which Stalin himself was the greatest living

exponent. This is a spirit which is foreign to Lenin and absent in
Marx. Wittfogel took it one step further, stripping away the
metaphysical
shell of Stalin's Diamat to reveal what was inevitably a weberian
rationalist kernel. He thus endeavoured to show Stalin the error of his
ways by exposing the normative truth behind Stalinist dogma.
However, Stalin had other plans.

Disappointed, Wittfogel returned to the West and soon abandoned
revolutionary marxism and ended up a callow social reformer. He
believed it is practically self evident that 'modes of production'
are carried along by a sort of inertial momentum which disallows
real revolutions. Thus even the Russian Revolution was just a
putsch, an act of the will with no popular resonance. It was
no different from any of the palace coups which form the
political history of Asia. One oligarch replaces another in
an elite game of musical chairs.

Wittfogel's environmentally-determinist reasoning was that
irrigating land raises productivity, but also creates the
tedium of settlement, bureacracy, public works schemes
and so forth. The fact that perhaps the greatest wave of canal-
construction had occurred in C18 capitalist England escaped
his notice. Nor did he see that C19 Birmingham and Manchester's
great water management schemes produced anything more sinisterly
totalitarian than Bernard Shaw's tracts on municipal socialism.
No hydraulic state emerged in England.

Wittfogel made a Grand Guignol of Marx-Engels' insights about
aridity, irrigation, despotism, and stagnation. Yet Wittfogel
is still reckoned important. Cobbled up with a dose of Weberian
technicism this is still apparently enough to back up the the
eurocentric 'miracle' theorists like Eric Jones, Michael Mann
and David Landes.

As Jim Blaut says, these confabulists 'contrast two civilizations,
the "irrigating" ones of the Middle East and the iron-plow-using,
rainwater-farming peoples of the north ... The centerpiece of the
model is the ... individual peasant-farming family which ... gets
its water from the skies, not from a despotically managed irrigation
system.'

But this version of a superior, non-irrigating, God-fearing,
iron-working yeomany is a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm.
Its obscurantist emotional appeal springs from some very old
and dark blut-und-boden fantasies, which funnily enough Weber
also shared.

Mark Jones