A World to Win by Sven-Eric Liedman

Author:Sven-Eric Liedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Society Beyond Capitalism

One of the most famous sections in the Grundrisse deals with the forms of production and property that preceded capitalism.58 What Marx called the Asiatic mode of production has in particular attracted attention and debate.

The immediate reason for the interest cannot be sought in Marx’s own text, but in the Marxist orthodoxy that developed chiefly during the Stalin epoch. According to this, development and all societies follows a fixed schedule. First came a primitive proto-society, then a slave society of the Greek and Roman type, and after that a feudal system from which the capitalist system sprouted forth. Faced with the simple theory of stages, a particularly Asiatic mode of production appeared as an inconvenient exception or even an alternative road to capitalism.

Ideas that China – and India in particular – fundamentally differed from most European states had turned up in the 1850s in Marx’s and Engels’s newspaper articles and correspondence. But the idea’s presence in the Grundrisse signified something entirely different. It could not be blamed on any temporary deviations; it constituted an integrated part of an ambitious work.

Heated discussions broke out about pre-revolutionary China not having been a feudal society, as had previously been said. In fact, how did it relate in general to what was sometimes called the Third World, the lands beyond Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union?

The debate acquired new overtones when, in 1957, German historian Karl A. Wittfogel published his work Die orientalische Despotie (Oriental Despotism). Wittfogel was a peculiar man; he began as a communist but gradually developed into the exact opposite. In the United States, where he emigrated, he even took part in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign of persecution against ‘un-American activities’. In his book, Wittfogel maintained that both the Soviet Union and the newly communist China were contemporary examples of Oriental despotism. But he also carried out a rather ambitious survey of Marx’s theories on the Asiatic mode of production.

After Wittfogel’s book, a few more level-headed voices also made themselves heard. Back in 1964, Eric Hobsbawm authored an elegant and illustrative introduction to the first English translation of the Grundrisse, in which he concentrated on the question of the Asiatic mode of production. The preface can be found in the updated 2011 version of his great book, How to Change the World. In 1969, Italian political scientist Gianni Sofri published Il modo di produzione asiatico, which not only meritoriously summarized the ongoing discussion but also – and above all – went through the Marxist text and the historical background to it.59

A new angle on the question of the Asiatic mode of production emerged with the Marxist and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Marx and Wittfogel, Hobsbawm and Sofri had regarded the Asiatic mode of production from a European point of view. Spivak’s starting point was Asia – India, to be precise – at the same time as she also analysed British, French, and North American culture at the highest level. Marx came into her life early, and the

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