Marx's Ghost by Thomas C. Patterson

Author:Thomas C. Patterson [Patterson, Thomas C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781859737064
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2003-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Gledhill (1984; Gledhill and Larsen 1982) then turned his attention to archaic states and Marx’s undeveloped concept of the asiatic mode of production, which had already been used by some Mesoamericanists in their descriptions and analyses of the Aztec state. He pointed to the contradictions that existed within the dominant class of the Aztec society, contradictions that were promoted by the expansion of the Aztec state. Here the state was not an agency that mediated between the particular interests of different fractions of the dominant class, since “political centricity is itself constantly threatened in imperial systems, and conflict and competition at the top of the social hierarchy underpin change at the politico-administrative and socioeconomic levels” (Gledhill 1984:141). In a phrase, discrepancies appeared between the interests of the ruler and those of the dominant class. Aztec society witnessed “the emergence of specific organs of class struggles, such as court cliques,” as well as the appearance of private domains (Gledhill 1984:141).

In 1986, Christine Gailey and I prepared two papers on class and state formation (Gailey and Patterson 1987, 1988). In the earlier paper, we argued that the rise of civilization – i.e. class and state formation – entailed what Stanley Diamond (1974:1) had characterized as “conquest abroad and repression at home.” It involved exploitation – the emergence of class-based patterns of production, distribution, consumption, and cultural practices. It was a process that created border peoples, whose relations of production were altered by virtue of tributary or exchange relations with their state-based neighbors. Since some states were more successful than others in specifying the labor and goods they demanded from subordinated classes and communities, and since some enveloped peoples were more successful in their resistance to those exactions, state formation tended to produce heterogeneous mosaics of societies rather than polities with the same sociopolitical structure. We also argued that states were, and still are, destructive of kin-ordered communities in their midst. Ethnocide and genocide were, and are, aspects of class and state formation. Class and state formation were also episodes when ethnogenesis, the creation of new cultural forms, occurred (Gailey and Patterson 1988).

Gailey and I further argued that class and state formation can be understood as the articulation of diverse communal and tributary modes of production. While strong tributary states specified what tribute they desired, weak tributary states were unable to demand in a consistent manner what labor or goods would be exacted from the subject communities, because the kin communities retained control over either their members or the goods they produced. Diverse trajectories of development were discerned as kin-ordered communities were enmeshed in tributary or exchange relations or succeeded in breaking away from them (Gailey and Patterson 1988).

In the other paper, we reasserted Marx’s view that class structures are a manifestation of exploitative social relations, and that what distinguishes one social formation from another is the way in which surplus goods and labor are extracted from its members. It also is apparent that class formation affects men and women differentially. We further

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