Asiatic Mode Of Production Research Articles

The State and the Class in Qajar Iran, 1794-1925

The form of the relationship between the state and social class throughout the history of Iran has always been explained by theories of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and ‘Oriental Despotism’. According to these theories, the power of the state is unlimited and it has all classes under its control. Meanwhile, many historical data of the Qajar era question this point of view and represent a situation in which various social forces limit the power of the state. The present article was written in response to the conflict between the theory of the ‘Asian state’ and the historical reality of the Qajar era. The main question of the article is: was the Qajar state limited by the social classes or did it have absolute and supra-class power? In answer to this question, the state classifications of Elman Service, Andrew Vincent, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Samuel Huntington are used. The research method is a historical case study that collects and analyzes data using two documentary methods and pattern matching. The results of the research show that the pattern of “balance, opposition and limitation” is established in the relationship between the state and the social classes of the Qajar era. This pattern can be described according to the classification of states based on the criterion of “accumulation and distribution of power”. It is split into three periods. The first period is characterized as a “patriarchal” state, the second — as a “patrimonial” state, and the third — as a “constitutional” state. The state in the first and second Qajar periods was associated with a low accumulation of power and centralized power distribution, and in the third period, that of post-constitutionality, it took the form of a low accumulation of power and scattered power distribution.

Russian Colonization of Alaska: From Heyday to Sale, 1818–1867. By Andrei Val’terovich Grinëv

This third and final entry in Andrei Grinëv’s Russian Colonization of Alaska series takes the history of the Russian colonies in North America From Heyday to Sale, 1818–1867. The text, if billed as a monograph, is foremost a synthesis—a collation not only of other scholars’ findings, but of Grinëv’s own considerable scholarship as well. Anyone acquainted with the series thus far will find no surprises as regards Grinëv’s central thesis. As in previous volumes, the author reserves his most critical attention for arguing Russia’s imperial project in North America as an example of “colonial politarism,” with “politarism” here being Karl Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” (p. 2). Its significance notwithstanding, the argument makes infrequent an appearance in what is otherwise an exceptionally thorough history of Russian America’s final decades. Beginning with the departure of the merchant Aleksandr Baranov as the colonies’ executive in 1818, Grinëv organizes his survey with similar keystones in Russian America’s political history, namely, the five-year terms of Baranov’s successors, nearly all of which serve as headings in one of five chapters. The first of these addresses the challenges of replacing the long-serving Baranov, and the importance of his successors being chosen exclusively from among the Navy’s officer-gentry. The second, bound 1825 to 1840, examines the relation between imperial foreign policy and the ruling Russian-American Company’s efforts to consolidate ties with the Alaska Natives on whose labor, land and waters the Company depended for profit. Readers familiar with the literature will recognize both topics as staples of the historiography, but Grinëv’s intention here is to probe and tweak, not overhaul.

State capitalism as Lazarus meets Loch Ness: Insights from the Asiatic mode of production.

This paper comments on the unexamined bifurcation of new state capitalism studies into two camps: changes in liberal capitalism and analyses of illiberal state forms. I characterize these aspects as Lazarus meets Loch Ness: Lazarus-like when focused on the ever-reborn market interventions of the liberal capitalist state, and Loch Ness-like in its rediscovery of the resurfaced 'other.'

Narrative Strategies of Soviet Historians of Antiquity at the Beginning of the Second Discussion about the Asiatic Mode of Production

At the beginning of the article, the author defines the significance of the discussions about the Asian mode of production for the Soviet historiography of antiquity, and also talks about the special characteristics of the second discussion, the main phase of which dates back to the second half of the 1960s. If the first discussion established the rules for understanding the historical process among Soviet historians, then during the second one some historians tried to revise these rules. At the same time, those historians formed themselves as authors of texts already under unified rules for constructing a narrative. The author of the article consistently examines the principles of constructing statements pro et contra the revision of the unified terminology for historians of the ancient world. It turns out that, in fact, both supporters and opponents of the Asian mode of production used the same arguments, and their texts were built from the same components, only the vector of thought and the volume of concrete textual parts differed. Thus, in the early 1960s the unified narrative still dominated even in the face of diverging points of view. At the same time, another difference between the positions consisted in different vectors of understanding the general theory, and from this angle, the conservative trend, which essentially called for abandoning any significant changes in the Soviet approach to understanding history, looked the most unattractive.

КОНЦЕПЦИЯ ТРИБУТАРНОГО СПОСОБА ПРОИЗВОДСТВА В МЕЗОАМЕРИКЕ В МЕКСИКАНСКОЙ ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ ХХ В.

The article considers the history of the concept of the tributary mode of production in the Mexican historiography between the 1960s and the 1980s. This concept was elaborated by Ion Banu and Samir Amin as an al- ternative to the traditional “Asiatic mode of production”. It entered Mexican historiography in the late 1960s as a result of the spread of Neomarxist ideas. In the mid-1970s various scholars, including Alberto Ruz in the Maya studies and Roger Bartra and Pedro Carrasco in the Aztec studies, became interested in the concept of tributary mode of production to explain the socio-economic nature of Mesoamerican state. Analysis of the ideas of Alberto Ruz (1906– 1979) shows that his interest in tributary mode of production was the result of a search for new theoretical and methodological base and interpretation of the new materials. The problematics of the socio-economic characteristics of the Ancient Maya society became essential for Ruz in the last years of his life. His ideas could develop into an original theoretical model, which would become the basis for the consolidation of Mesoamerican studies in Mexico into a unified school. However, his death and the absence of a comparable figure among the next generation resulted in a denouement of the concept of tributary mode of production during the next decade.

Marx’s Concept of The Asiatic Mode of Production and Its Historical Geography

The validity and implication of the Asiatic mode of production [AMP] has become one of the most controversial issues in Marxist theory since Marx mentioned this concept. A huge space for understanding and misunderstanding is bequeathed by Marx’s oeuvre because he never systematically elaborated on it in his published work. Based on a close reading of Marx’s texts and their contemporary interpretations, this paper argues for the possibility of understanding the mode of production in terms of property relations by clarifying the two-fold character of property; demonstrating the validity of the AMP by decomposing historical modes of production into two dimensions; clarifying its implications and locating its historical geography by distinguishing it from other modes of production, pointing out its significance for anti-capitalism and anti-privatisation.

Marx e os povos sem história

Resumo Argumentamos nesse artigo que as afirmações de Marx sobre a não historicidade e a estagnação do Oriente não representam compromisso teórico com uma suposta superioridade inata dos europeus. Primeiramente, apresentamos as características do Modo de Produção Asiático segundo Marx. Na seção seguinte, argumentamos que as “sociedades asiáticas” são caracterizadas por Marx pela perpetuação endógena de suas estruturas econômicas, que contrasta com o intenso dinamismo capitalista. Mostramos ainda que Marx observa que as sociedades “orientais” são capazes de desenvolvimento capitalista endógeno, tão logo as antigas estruturas econômicas tenham sido destruídas pelo capitalismo. Por fim, apontamos que as afirmações de Marx sobre Modo de Produção Asiático e “povos sem história” devem ser analisadas à luz de sua teoria geral do progresso e do desenvolvimento histórico desigual.

Marx, the “Asiatic Mode of Production,” and “Oriental Despotism” as “True” Socialism

Abstract Marx believed that socialist revolution, i.e., the end of the private ownership of the “means of production”, would make the state weak in the long run: the state would “wither away”. He also believed that the despotic state is related to Oriental despotism, marked by general ossification. Here Marx followed the views of his contemporaries. The socialist revolutions in Russia and China demonstrate that Marx was wrong: the end of private ownership of the “means of production” creates a state similar to Oriental despotism, but it is a quite dynamic and economically viable regime. The USSR’s collapse was due to Gorbachev alone; at the same time, totalitarian socialist China would become an economic and geopolitical global force in the future.

Editorial Foreword

The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies devotes the first half of this issue to novel social analyses and paradigms tailored on societies on the interference of pre-modernity and modernity. A well-known researcher of the phenomenon, especially as it is reflected in an East-Central European setting, Nerijus Babinskas maintains that feudalism, in contrast to the classical Marxist-Leninist interpretation that had become a canon during the Communist regime, “was not an inevitable stage of pre-modern development of all European societies”. By breaking apart of this ideological conception, Babinskas investigates the pros and cons of four Marxist alternative notions such as Asiatic mode of production, African mode of production, early Central European model or tributary mode of production, and a non-Marxist approach based on Max Weber’s patrimonialism. The author contends that a blending of these interpretations is the way out of the conceptual ossification which over the past decades has led social research in the matter into a deadlock.

How did the East and Western styles of production come about? - Focused on Marx's Theory of Asiatic mode of production-

How did the East and Western styles of production come about? - Focused on Marx's Theory of Asiatic mode of production-

The phenomenology of silent blindness: on the Asiatic mode of production, part II

This article is the second part of the understanding of caste in the Indian mode of production and the ‘alternative revolution’ that critical and revolutionary Marxism offers the non-Western world. Here one turns to Marx's original idea of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, whereby we are able to ground the caste question within this mode.

The Foreclosure of the Asiatic Mode of Production and Its Implications: Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Marxian Evolutionary Models in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

The Foreclosure of the Asiatic Mode of Production and Its Implications: Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Marxian Evolutionary Models in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

The Marxian Materialist Interpretation of History and Comparative Sociology

The paper argues that a materialistic understanding of history as Marx’s sociological research program has effectively been implemented in the comparative analysis of bourgeois societies. Both qualitative/case-oriented and quantitative/variable-oriented strategies of comparison were employed by Marx in his scholarship. The authors see the crucial dimension of the classical status of Marx in his engagement with historical comparisons – an analytical tendency he shares with Weber and, to some extent, Durkheim. A short historical exposition tracing the early reception of Marx in sociology continues with the most important contemporary criticisms of Marx’s comparative-historical analysis, focusing on the issues of Asiatic mode of production, the nature of European feudalism and the problem of capitalist rationality.

Rethinking Secularism in India in the Age of Triumphant Fascism

This essay deals with the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to power in the 2014 National Elections, a party that is fundamentally anti-secularist and anti-democratic whose aim is to convert secular and democratic India into a Hindu Kingdom. It deals with the crisis of secularism in India and the Revolutionary Marxist response to this crisis. The methodology that it follows is the Marxist one. The leitmotiv of this paper is rather startling—Marx was not a secularist as one has hitherto imagined. It claims that a new theoretical problematic has to be sought in understanding the dilemma haunting secularism: the discourse and practice of secularism are important, and yet Marx (the exemplary humanist and revolutionary) was not a secularist as one imagines it. What we have done is a terrain shift in our study of secularism, especially on the question of the thesis of the separation of religion and the state. This essay consequently makes a distinction between ‘secularism as we know it’, or liberal secularism, and communist secularism. Besides this, the essay grounds the discourse in material social formations in India that are determined by the Asiatic mode of production and along with this mode, the caste formations that are inherent in the Indic variant of the Asiatic mode of production. By and large, the entire discourses of secularism and the rise of fascism in India determined by the ideologies of liberalism and Stalinism ignore the caste question. Thus along with the caste question, the Asiatic mode of production is also brought in, a mode of production that mainstream Marxists have almost ignored, thereby implanting Eurocentric understandings of secularism in India. We thus discover certain methodological guidelines where we develop new terms and conditions to understand an authentic ‘people's secularism’. This essay deals with the question of secularism in India as rooted in the conflict between ‘secularism from above’ that was grafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and the upper caste elites in the freedom movement against British colonialism and ‘religious politics from above’ that formed the contours of elite politics in India since 1947. In contrast to ‘secularism from above’ (or liberal secularism) and ‘religious politics from above’, this essay argues for ‘secularism from below', which shall serve as the revolutionary critique of Indian fascism.

Continuidade Hegel-Marx? Solução especulativa em Burocracia e Ideologia para a relação entre Estado e sociedade no modo de produção asiático

Resumo: Discussão sobre o argumento de Tragtenberg, em Burocracia e ideologia, segundo o qual o Estado gera a sociedade no modo de produção asiático, o que requereria um regresso de Marx a Hegel ou o aceite de uma continuidade Hegel-Marx. Por meio desta discussão aponta-se que Tragtenberg chega ao aceite do aforismo hegeliano segundo o qual o Estado (e sua burocracia) é o demiurgo da sociedade em virtude do problemático amálgama entre Marx e Hegel, a despeito das inúmeras problemáticas decorrentes.

Examination of Mehmet Refik Fenmen s Life in that Scientists and Educationist

From the 19th century, especially while living the positive effects of the European Industrial Revolution, also The Ottoman Empire who is considered by Western in Asiatic mode of production is in the quest. The Ottoman Empire realized that they need well-trained staff who high equipped in respect of technical and knowledge and educational institutions to train them and for this purpose have worked to eliminate the deficit in the field of education by reorganized the existing training institutions by brought the experts from abroad and on the other hand sending out select students. Returned to the country after completing their education and contributing to the state's development by opportunities they had gained, a team was formed which can be called “Last Ottoman-Young Intellectuals Republic of Turkey”. The subject of our study, Mehmet Refik FENMEN, perhaps one of the best examples of the students in this group. In this weak period of the Ottoman Empire, he is one of the great actors in turnout which preparation of infrastructure of progress which will arise in the development of science and technology in Republican era. Beside he is a scientist who is very well equipped and trained, Mehmet Refik FENMEN has taken to inform of the developments in Turkish society especially his students as a duty and with his book and articles he was able to catch all layers of community. Today, for the younger generations also for new generation of our scientists’ name of Mehmet Refik FENMEN is a model of intellectual that should be known and take as sample.

The Asiatic Mode of Production, Indian Land Law, and the Naxalite Movement

Marx’s views on pre-capitalist non-western societies evolved during his intellectual development and are generally grouped under the (problematic) term “Asiatic Mode of Production.” This article examines the connections between the Asiatic Mode of Production from Marxist economics, post-independence Indian land laws, the violation of those laws after independence and in the period of liberalization, and the continuing popularity of the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency. The contemporary round of globalization seeks to finish what colonization started by forcibly removing Adavasi and Scheduled Tribes in a process similar to primitive accumulation. Understanding this dynamic explains the Naxalites’ continuing appeal in contemporary India.

The Asiatic Mode of Production in World History Perspective: From a Universal to a Particularistic View of History

Discussions on Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” are essentially about the relationship between the universal and the particularistic view of history. Marx adhered to the world history position, but in the course of formulating his theory of the Asiatic mode of production he moved from universal history to a particularistic view of history; whereas the shift from the “Russian path” and “Russian way” provided by the Russian revolution to Stalin’s doctrine of the “five forms” of social development represented a return from particularistic to universal history. In developing a Chinese view of history, three elements cannot be overlooked: the Chinese pattern of historical development and China’s present development experience; Marx’s theory of social forms and his thoughts on Oriental society in his later years; and the “Russian path” and “systemic transformation” launched by the October Revolution.

Zarathushtra in the Indian Underworld: An Ethnographical Study of a Persian Community in India. Part I

The ‘underworld’, strictly speaking, is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, the idea of the underworld also occurs in Zoroastrian literature in dual form: as an abode of evil and as a place of refuge. The ‘underworld’ in this essay is an allegory for migration and exile. This essay is an ethnographical study of a group of Persians living in India called the ‘Parsis’. In contrast to studies on this community which are by and large carried out in the traditions of Orientalism, this study is an ethnographical study from the perspective of historical materialism where the dialectic between history and mythology is placed at the centre of analysis. This study is in three parts. It locates this study within the site of the Asiatic mode of production and then analyses how this community of foreign origin could rise as a dominant class that would play an important role in the makings of modern democratic India. The tensions between endogamy (which this community claims to practice) and modernity, ethnicity and secularism are explored in this essay.

Book review: The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, by Stephen P. Dunn

The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Routledge: London, 2012; 154 pp: 9780415618625, 28 [pounds sterling] (pbk); 9780415616218 (hbk) 70 [pounds sterling] Originally published in 1982, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, by the late anthropologist Stephen P. Dunn (1928-1999), has received a reprint as part of the Routledge Revival series. Since its initial publication, the book has held a unique location in Anglophone academy, since it catalogues the Soviet debate on Marxist theory of history in relation to the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) from 1929 to 1975. Predominantly based on primary sources in Russian, Dunn's book painstakingly charts the isochronal resurgence of the debate over half a century, and astutely reveals the vicissitudes of theoretical, historical and occasionally political positions taken by its participants. As the author makes clear in the preface, the book deals exclusively with the literature written by Soviet authors on the topic. In lieu of treating the study of this body of work merely within the confines of intellectual history, Dunn locates them within a broader framework dealing with the fundamental questions concerning Marxist theory of history. The main theoretical preoccupation, in the author's own words, is 'whether the historical process is to be regarded as single or double or multiple, as determined by one force, or by two related forces, or by a congeries of unspecifiable factors' (p. xii). The starting point of Dunn's chronicle is the transactions of a meeting held in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) by the Association of Marxist Orientalists at the Enukidze Oriental Institute in 1931. Published as 'Diskussia ob Aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva po dokladu M. Godesa' (A Discussion on the Asiatic Mode of Production According to the Report of M. Godes), the proceedings reveal the extent to which contemporary Soviet scholars were divided on both the theoretical position of the AMP in Marxism and its empirical credibility. In this first section, Dunn retraces the original transactions in Russian and offers a verbatim summary of the various positions taken by the 'Aziatchiki' and 'anti-Aziatchiki'. (1) The line of contention is the categorisation of 'ancient societies', which the Aziatchiki camp classifies as the historical site of the manifestation of the AMP. The opposing anti-Aziatchiki perspective leans towards a heuristic rejection of Marx's use of the term (but not an outright rejection of the outline Marx provided in the 'Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', which includes the AMP [Marx 1987 [1859]: 263]) and attempts to relocate ancient societies as social formations operating on variants of feudalism. Illustrative of the pro-Aziatchiki position, Dunn quotes extensively from S. I. Kovalev, who effectively argued that the patterns of landownership in 'India, ancient China, and the states of the ancient Near East' were different from Marx's description of feudalism as a mode of production comprising 'dispersed' or 'noncollective' landownership (p. 19), hence these societies cannot be understood as 'feudal' in the sense that Marx used the term. For Kovalev, the AMP not only corresponds to historical evidence, but it also prevents the degradation of Marxist theory of history into 'a circular conception of the historical process' (p. 23). The discussion proceeds with an overview of the anti-Aziatchiki line defended by inter alia Mikhail Godes, S. M. Dubrovskii and Evgenii S. Iolk. Dunn evades linear interpretations of the anti-Aziatchiki arguments as exclusively political and vindictive reprisals and balances their presentation with rich but equally controversial theoretical and historical opposing claims. Political innuendos and factional invectives crop up frequently, but the provided account suggests that the anti-Aziatchiki position was marred by analytical deficits as much as it was limited by political parochialism. …