Total Power: Its Origins and Spread

...Ultimately the readiness to sacrifice and the willingness to take the calculated risk of alliance against the total enemy depend on the proper evaluation of two simple issues: slavery and freedom...

...In the case of Russia, the Mongols introduce "the organizational and acquisitive methods of hydraulic statecraft, although they themselves do not, to any relevant extent, practice agriculture, not even in its hydraulic form...

...It stagnates, even degenerates...

...Censuses, registers and other controls are needed by the agro-managerial bureaucrats to assemble the necessary amount of corvee labor...

...He classifies his social data into categories and through comparison of common characteristics arrives at concepts, which he analyzes, organizes and unites into a theory about the nature of social power...

...Property, indeed, is politically impotent, as is commerce...

...Such cooperation and such subordination lead to massive levies of forced labor...

...The masters of hydraulic society were great builders because they were great organizers: and they were great organizers because they were great record keepers...

...Despotism, to be sure, encounters "the law of diminishing administrative returns...

...His theory accounts also for a series of special despotic characteristics that recur in many civilizations: • Calendar-making and astronomy, needed to get corvee labor on the job at the right time...

...Some sinologists, for instance, may see increasing laissez-faire in Han Dynasty China where Wittfogel sees continuing despotism...

...The nature of this spreading force is illustrated by its presence in Russia and its absence in Japan...

...The theory literally rests on water, particularly on its widespread use in ancient social orders: "A large quantity of water can be channeled and kept within bounds only by the use of mass labor: and this mass labor must be coordinated, disciplined and led...

...Oriental Despotism, is to stress the connection of the present work with that of its intellectual forebears...

...institute their own control over land, trade and industry...

...This work has now culminated in nothing short of a new theory of social organization which, although it builds on the analyses of such men as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Max Weber, goes far beyond them...

...and the sense of property is loose...

...Wittfogel illustrates these simple issues by a telling story from classical Greece...

...The consequence of this organization is a state power unchecked by the power of private groups, "a state stronger than society...

...It is not that I do not know of these things...

...Long roads and quick communications, necessary to summon labor and to maintain agromanagerial control...

...Violence and terror...

...Once saddled with agrodespotism, Russia was unable to throw it off, even though an overthrow seemed likely for a time before the October Revolution...

...The genius of the work of Karl A. Wittfogel during the past thirty years has been to turn the traditional approach to theory upside down, to treat Asia as the cradle of generalizations and the West as their testing ground...

...Revieived by Herrymon Maurer Associate editor, "Fortune...

...I should be ashamed to use them...

...Perhaps they may be illustrated also by a story from classical China...

...The countries committed to freedom, in Wittfogel's view, are those which have the checks and balances of societies with multiple centers of countervailing power...

...The main purpose of the title...

...author, "The Collision of East and West" Asia is usually the grave of generalizations...

...A new insight," Wittfogel concludes, "that is fully perceived, convincingly communicated and daringly applied may change the face of a military and ideological campaign...

...But Wittfogel chooses and defines his field as specifically societal and conceptual ("the discrete cultural traits of a given civilization do not always clearly and surely reveal its specific society structure"), and his work is not to be understood unless it is examined from the point of vantage he has selected...

...Chwang-tzu writes about a scholar who was watching a gardener watering vegetables by hand: "If you had a machine there, you could irrigate in a day a hundred times your present area...

...the practice of prostration to emphasize subordination to him...

...Hydraulic institutions,'' writes Wittfogel, "account for the origins of all known agrarian despotisms...

...The use of eunuchs to guard the despot...

...Wittfogel's method is rational explanation of social phenomena, illustrated by a vast number of fascinating details drawn from places as varied as China, India, ancient Egypt, the Mayan civilization, the Chagga tribes, indigenous Hawaii, ancient Assyria, the Roman Empire, the Suk of East Africa, the Rio Grande Pueblos, post-Mongol Russia...

...It draws water up smoothly in a continuous flow, which bubbles forth like boiling soup...

...Primogeniture is not customary...

...It is called a well sweep...

...It is a contrivance made of wood, heavy behind and light in front...

...A family structure that emphasizes obedience to superiors: e.g., subjugation of sons to fathers and of fathers to despots...

...Thus, a number of farmers eager to conquer arid lowland and plains are forced to invoke the organizational devices which—on the basis of a pre-machine technology—offer the one chance of success: They must work in cooperation with their fellows and subordinate themselves to a directing authority...

...The labor required is trifling compared with the work done...

...But Lenin and Stalin deserted Marx's concept of Oriental society as specifically despotic and chose to consider it as feudal—a change in view which Wittfogel criticizes incisively and demolishes effectively...

...The Wittfogel theory states that the despotic state arises out of societies that lacked the countervailing forces of property, commerce and church to check the ruler and the bureaucracy...

...His method may make entrenched empiricists uneasy, and his exclusion of cultural and psychological considerations may trouble persons who believe that such considerations are essential to an understanding of social facts...

...asked the gardener, looking up at him...

...It may change the face of a historical crisis...

...Despite small-scale hydraulic works, despite a social order based on obedience to overlords and the habit of prostration before them, despite early registers of inhabitants and the early nonuse of primogeniture, Wittfogel argues, Japanese society remained feudalistic and multicentered, with the clans serving as a check upon the power of the overlord, and with the daimyo serving as a check upon the power of the shogun...

...Mass armies, huge fortifications, palaces, capital and tombs, made possible by corvee labor...

...Their problem is now to understand the attraction which the total despotism of Communism has to peoples accustomed to agromanagerial bureaucracies and the danger which any loss in countervailing power would bring within the democratic countries themselves...

...Being nomadic, they may carry these methods far beyond the political and cultural borders of any major area...

...A key point in Wittfogel's theory is that "the organizational and acquisitive forms of agrarian despotism can spread without specific hydraulic institutions" to other societies...

...This point of vantage throws into view economic bases of social power— e.g., the desire of men to maximize their self-interest—but it does not involve heavy-handed economic determinism...

...Thereupon the gardener flushed up and said with a laugh: "I have heard from my teacher that those who have cunning implements are cunning in their dealings, and those who are cunning in their dealings have cunning in their hearts...

...Social, political and historical theories, born in the West, have a way of coming apart when they encounter the many complexities of human existence in the world's most populous continent...

...The agrobureaucrats, who experience "a cumulative sense of unchecked power...

...Public works, vast and munificent, are handled by corrce labor the same as water works...

...What is it...

...But it retains great staying power at home and great spreading force abroad...

...and—for the sake of comparison —Greece, Japan and the West...

...Confiscation of the property of persons who fall out of favor...

...Today in Russia the methods of Oriental despotism have achieved a totality unmatched by any previous despotism, and those methods are part of the battle for men's minds in the world's uncommitted countries...

...In his new book, Oriental Despotism, Wittfogel's generalizations are of such force that they topple older notions about property and class struggle (and more recently about feudalism) as keystones of social organization in Asia, and of such breadth that the Chou Dynasty in China sheds light on the Communist regime in Russia...

...Would you not like to have one...

...Amid the mass of details, Wittfogel, professor of Chinese history at the University of Washington and director of the Chinese History Project at Columbia, employs methods comparable to those of the natural scientist...

...Wittfogel holds that human choice is a factor in history, and he intends his book to be a scientific weapon for freedom in today's "open historical situation...