Marx's concept of the Asiatic mode of production: a genetic analysis∗

Abstract

Marx's concept ‘Asiatic mode of production’ doesn't conceptualize production in Asia, which Marx knew very little about and never attempted to theorize, but the hypothetical remote ancestry of modern bourgeois production, which he knew a lot about and spent a lifetime theorizing. In Marx's writings from 1857/8 onwards, the AMP figures as the aboriginal, primitively communal mode of production much as in his writings before that date the family, tribe, or clan figure as the aboriginal, primitively communal social formation. Its putative charactenistics derive, less from Marx's examination of its actual structure, than from his retro-spective rational reconstruction, out of the ‘categories’ of the capitalist mode of production and the logic of dialectical development, of a schema which would embrace ‘all’ modes of production in a single progressive (though not straightforwardly successive) system of the economic formation of society.