Asiatic Mode of Production

Formation of the concept

Marx and Engels showed no deep interest in the nature of Eastern societies until 1853. Preparing articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx examined the socio-economic character of Eastern societies, and his correspondence with Engels in May–June 1853 traced the idea of the uniqueness of Asiatic society. Marx cited Bernier's observation that the absence of private landed property underlies all phenomena in the East, while Engels attributed the absence of private land ownership chiefly to climate and soil, above all the great desert belt, which made artificial irrigation necessary, a task for communities, provinces or central government. Marx reproduced these ideas in "The British Rule in India" (dated 10 June 1853), adding that the need for irrigation alone does not produce despotism.

The India articles and Capital

In his articles on India written between 1852 and 1858, Marx outlined the basic characteristics of the mode of production prevailing in India: the absence of private ownership of land, self-sustaining communes, the unity of agriculture and manufacturing (the handloom and the spinning wheel), the weakness of commodity production and exchange, and the stabilizing role of Indian society and culture against invasions, conquests and famines. In Capital he wrote that the "simplicity" of the Asiatic productive organism supplied the key to the unchangeability of Asiatic societies amid constant dynastic change.

The Comintern and the Stalin-era ban

The Stalinist Third International (Comintern) rejected the Asiatic mode of production in 1921, when in colonial societies it chose to support alliances between the proletariat and nationalist bourgeoisies against imperialism and indigenous ruling classes. It defined those ruling classes as "feudal" and avoided the AMP concept, which was seen as too closely associated with political despotism and therefore liable to be turned against the Stalinist regime itself. The concept was finally expunged from orthodox Marxism after 1930, as Stalin codified a rigid, mechanical succession of modes of production. Brian Pearce records that the formula was cynically called "the set of five" (primitive communism, slave-owning society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism) in the former Soviet Union, and that both geography and demography were explicitly "ruled out" of historical materialism in Stalin's chapter of the Short Course.

In the late-1920s debate over the character of the Chinese Revolution, the Soviet revolutionaries Beso Lominadze and Lajos Magyar pointed to the absence of private property and of a feudal class in Asian countries. This line ran counter to the Comintern's emphasis on anti-feudal struggle, and AMP supporters were declared "Trotskyists" and pilloried in the official Soviet press. In 1931 the discussion was forcibly terminated. Soviet authors had already debated the term fiercely in the 1920s: some rejected it entirely, while China experts called "Aziatchiki" held that Chinese land-ownership structures had once resembled the AMP and were accused of Trotskyism. Discussion of the AMP was effectively banned in the USSR from 1931 until the Khrushchev period. The Russian Wikipedia account states that virtually all participants in the debate were, for various reasons, repressed and shot; this is that source's characterization, while this dictionary's own Lominadze entry documents his suicide in 1935 under threat of arrest. The execution of individual participants is therefore not presented here as verified fact.

Relations: Oriental despotism and Wittfogel

The traditional formula, following Marx, treated the form of society in Turkey, Persia, India and China (but apparently not Japan) as fundamentally different from Western Europe: no private property in land, all land ownership concentrated in the supreme ruler, taxes and rents indistinguishable, no hereditary aristocracy but only removable revenue collectors. This was the basis of "Oriental Despotism." The former Marxist sinologist Karl Wittfogel, in Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957), turned Marx's original formulation into a polemical indictment of the Soviet state, arguing that the real reason for the concept's unpopularity in the USSR was its uncomfortable similarity to the reality of Stalin's Russia; he characterized the Soviet state as a manifestation of totalitarianism akin to Asia's "hydraulic civilizations."

Conceptual variants and distinctions

G. V. Plekhanov was among the first Marxists to construct a coherent concept of "Oriental despotism" from scattered Marx statements. In his interpretation the Asiatic mode of production was, alongside slavery, one of two possible paths from primitive to class society; formations need not be sequential but may be parallel, so that the economic logic of China or Ancient Egypt did not lead to the classical mode of production. Plekhanov treated the relationship between the state and direct producers in the East as class relations: the government apparatus represented not merely a collective exploiter but a class of exploiters.

In writings on China, Trotsky committed himself to remarks contradicting the idea of "Chinese feudalism" dear to the Stalinists, though he never developed this into explicit criticism of the five-stage dogma. In "New Opportunities for the Chinese Revolution" (September 1927) he wrote that unless one is playing with words, there is no feudalism in China; in "Three Letters to Preobrazhensky" (March–April 1928) that China has no landed nobility; and in "Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution" (June 1928) that capitalist rather than "feudal" relations dominated.

Marxist historians such as John Haldon and Chris Wickham have argued that societies interpreted by Marx as examples of the AMP are better understood as Tributary Modes of Production (TMP), characterized by a "state class" as its specific form of ruling class, holding exclusive or almost exclusive rights to extract surplus from peasants over whom it does not exercise tenurial control.

The 1960s revival and the critiques

The AMP resurfaced in Marxist historiography and anthropology during the 1960s amid intensified anticolonial and anti-imperialist resistance. Maurice Godelier and other contributors to the French journal La pensée asserted that the mode of production remained central throughout Marx and Engels, while Jean Chesneaux extended its validity beyond Asia to a variety of traditional societies, arguing for a dynamic perspective departing from the Eurocentric bias of orthodox Marxism. A second discussion stage in the 1960s, involving Soviet, European and Asian historians, reached no final resolution: AMP supporters insisted that societies without private property cannot be considered feudal, while opponents pointed out that private property existed as the right to hold and dispose of land. From the early 1970s the Soviet Marxist historian V. P. Ilyushechkin defended an independent view: by the logic of formation theory, any mode of production can be distinguished only by the historical type of productive forces and the corresponding mode of extracting and distributing surplus; on his reading the "Asiatic mode of production" did not differ from feudalism, since the level of productive forces and the mode of surplus extraction were the same.

In the 1970s the concept was subjected to a barrage of criticisms. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst refused to define it as a mode of production because it presupposes the state rather than explaining it through the analysis of social relations; Perry Anderson subjected it to an empirical critique in Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974); Maxime Rodinson considered it a blunt and simplified way to encase highly complex societies; Claude Meillassoux noted its excessive generalization in conflating diverse social formations sharing tributary surplus extraction; and postcolonial studies following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) rejected it as a reflex of the cultural stereotypes underpinning European imperial expansion. Some critics rejected the whole concept on the grounds that pre-capitalist Asian socio-economic formations did not differ enough from feudal Europe to warrant special designation.