The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx by Ernest Mandel

Author:Ernest Mandel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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1. The two letters, together with Marx’s reply to Engels of July 14, 1853, are in MEGA, III, 1, pp. 474–477, 478–482, 483–487. The article of June 10 appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on June 25.

2. Grundrisse, pp. 375–413. (In English as Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Eric Hobsbawm, ed.)

3. Maurice Godelier has compiled a provisional bibliography of the writings of Marx and Engels on the Asiatic mode of production, but it omits Theories of Surplus Value and passages in the Grundrisse other than the section “Pre-capitalist forms of production.” (See La Pensée, April 1964, pp. 56–66.)

4. See Karl A. Wittfogel (Oriental Despotism, pp. 389–400), where he gives a fairly complete summary of the passages in Lenin relating to “Asiaticism.”

5. See in particular G. Plekhanov (Introduction à l’histoire sociale de la Russie, p. 4): “We now know not only that Russia, like Western Europe, passed through the phase of feudalism but also that this same phase occurred in the history of Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria, Persia, Japan, and China—in short, in all or nearly all of the civilized countries of the East.” On the same page, however, the author writes of the “great despots of the East.” In Fundamental Problems of Marxism (pp. 68–69) Plekhanov retained the concept of an Asiatic mode of production, while correctly pointing out that it could not be regarded as preceding the ancient (slaveowning) mode of production.

6. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 56.

7. Year I, No. 2, pp. 370–378. Lucien Goldmann has pointed out to me that the concept of the Asiatic mode of production was “re-launched” not by Ryazanov, but by the Hungarian Communists who published the review Communism from 1920 onward.

8. Jan Pecirka, “Les discussions soviétiques sur le mode de production asiatique et sur la formation esclavagiste” (1964), in “Premières sociétés de classe et mode de production asiatique,” special issue of the review Recherches internationales à la lumière du marxisme, May-June 1957, p. 62. See also Eugene Varga, pp. 370–394.

9. Three examples: (1) The textbook by W. I. Avdijev, Geschichte des Alten Orients, published in Moscow in 1948 and translated in Berlin in 1953, was based on the views of Academician V.V. Struve and declared (pp. 12–13) that “the peoples of India and China have followed the same road, from gentile society to slaveowning society.” (2) In 1950, Kuo Mo-jo was still writing about a “slaveowning society” in ancient China which evolved toward a “feudal society” (“La société esclavagiste chinoise,” in Recherches internationales à la lumière du marxisme, May-June 1957, pp. 32–33, 41, 51), although what was involved was obviously a society which, while there were slaves present, was nevertheless definitely not based upon a slaveowning mode of production. (3) Similarly, An Outline History of China, published in Peking in 1958, speaks (p. 15) of the earliest class society in China (under the Shang Dynasty) as a “society based on slavery.”

10. Karl A. Wittfogel, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, p. 768.

11. See Maurice Godelier, “La notion de ‘mode de production asiatique’ et les schémas

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