China is one of the countries that is a classic example of what Marx termed the Asiatic Mode of Production. As a result of a series of material conditions, in relation to the geography of the country, requiring large-scale civil engineering for control of water, terracing of land, for agriculture, and so on, its people undertook this work collectively, establishing an administrative superstructure to organise and oversee it. Over a long period of time, this administrative body, which requires to fund its operations, separates from the society, providing a privileged position for its members. In order to preserve itself, it establishes rules on who can become a member of it, and turns itself into a bureaucratic collectivist state apparatus. From as early as 2100 BCE, this took the form of hereditary dynasties, such as the Xia.
Melotti describes China as “The Most Typical Example of 'Asiatic' Society In Marxian Terms” (Marx and The Third World, Chapter 17)
“China can be called the most classic and significant society based on the Asiatic mode of production, in that it achieved the fullest social development of any society so based. Moreover, it did so without having any contacts with the rest of the world, not even those important periodic relations with the West experienced by India and the Middle east back to Hellenic times at least.” (p 105)
As with feudal Europe, the remit of these dynasties was geographically limited, leading also to continual wars between them. Unlike the feudal system, which is based upon a hierarchy of social estates, and land ownership, the Asiatic Mode of Production, is based upon control of the state, and the ability to extract surplus product, on the basis of it, rather than the ownership of land and extraction of feudal rent. A landlord class exists, but does not form a ruling class. As Barrington Moore Junior describes, they often seek to have their children accepted into the state bureaucracy, and families comprising that bureaucracy adopt the brightest children from the rest of society, able to pass the exams set for entry into it.
The dynasties can be apparently stable for long periods of time, but, are subject to periodic violent upheavals, in which one dynasty replaces another, but the basic structure of the society remains the same, unlike the social revolutions that occurred in Europe, resulting in the development of different forms of property ownership, and social classes, and replacement of feudalism with capitalism. Its why Marx describes these societies as stagnant, requiring external shocks to bring about real social revolutions, as with his description of the role of British colonialism in India.
Marx notes, in A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy,
“Conquests may lead to either of three results. The conquering nation may impose its own mode of production upon the conquered people (this was done, for example, by the English in Ireland during this century, and to some extent in India); or it may refrain from interfering in the old mode of production and be content with tribute (e.g., the Turks and Romans); or interaction may take place between the two, giving rise to a new system as a synthesis (this occurred partly in the Germanic conquests). In any case it is the mode of production – whether that of the conquering nation or of the conquered or the new system brought about by a merging of the two – that determines the new mode of distribution employed. Although the latter appears to be a pre-condition of the new period of production, it is in its turn a result of production, a result not simply occasioned by the historical evolution of production in general, but by a specific historical form of production.” (p 202-3)
China experienced conquests, as well as engaging in trade with Asia and Europe, in the Middle Ages, and later with the United States. It helped to engender commodity production and exchange, and the development of a commercial bourgeoisie. As Marx and Lenin describe, commodity production and exchange, itself leads, inexorably, to the development of a bourgeoisie and proletariat, and of industrial capital, as competition between the producers results in winners and losers. The winners grow larger, and ultimately, produce on such a scale as to need to employ wage labour, and machines, the losers, who previously became paupers, slaves, serfs or servants, become wage labourers. Means of production, becomes capital.
No comments:
Post a Comment