Three Modes for Four

...Such was the strength of the propertied classes in all three phases of European history that it was possible to defend the thesis that they were at all times the real rulers of society, using the state merely as their instrument...

...But Marx did not regard the world of Oriental despotism as admirable or progressive because of the preponderance of the state officialdom over all private property and private enterprise, nor did he see any fulfilment of his ideal of socialism even in the Inca empire, where all land and products were regarded as the property of the ruler...

...Both the feudal nobles and the self-governing towns, together with the clergy of the medieval church, formed corporate bodies represented in the assemblies variously known as diets, parliaments...

...In Europe, on the other hand, there took place a historical development which, although it produced strong monarchical states during certain periods, showed a recurring tendency either to eliminate central monarchical power or to impose organized constitutional checks on it...

...This could not, in Marx's view, be asserted of typical Asian societies, where the bulk of the surplus value of production was extracted by the royal tax-gatherers and redistributed by the monarchy to its officials...

...All these restrictions, however, have another side to their capacities...

...Academically, the only result of thus lumping together indiscriminately all pre-industrial societies is to render more difficult the historical explanation of the emergenco of capitalism, for it ignores the contrast between the Kleinstaaterei of late medieval Europe, in which Florence, Venice or Bruges could be self-governing units, and the great Eastern empires in which such autonomies were precluded...

...The great Oriental monarchies have always prevented the emergence of aristocracies based on secure property rights and capable of exerting political power as an "estate" apart from royal favor...

...The Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia, a country with a historic political development intermediate between the typical European and Asiatic forms...

...Moreover, in certain areas of Europe, notably in Holland and England, parliamentary forms of government persisted and grew stronger, and it was in these countries that the new economy of mercantile capitalism, initiated by the city-republics of Italy, developed and flourished...

...The rise of this class was impossible by the version of Marxism which declared all exploitation and oppression of peoples to be due exclusively to classes owning private property—landlords and capitalists— who managed the state in their own interest as their "executive committee...

...Only in the third century a.d...

...And they are also poorly equipped to combat Communist totalitarianism...

...The Russian Tsardom not only retained an unfettered autocracy longer than any other European monarchy—it was not limited by any parliamentary constitution until 1905 —but even in the age of absolutism it had features which made it more arbitrary in operation than other monarchical governments of Europe...

...It is only by seeing European history in this perspective that the significance of the Marxist classification of basic economic and social forms can be fully appreciated...

...Marx derided the idea that an Indian zamindar could be equated with a European landlord: "What kind of landlord is it," he asks, "who keeps only a tenth of the rent and hands over nine-tenths to the state...

...Thus, behind a thin disguise of popular sovereignty, the Communist governmental system reproduces the ancient pattern of large-scale despotism with an autocratic ruler, his court, his ministers and his various grades of officials ruling over a powerless subject population...

...As Professor Wittfogel puts it in a notable passage of his book: "Western writers, teachers and practicing politicians who do not understand the meaning of their institutional and cultural heritage are poorly equipped to unleash its creative potential...

...But it was the very characteristic of the Tsardom which had most incurred the censure of the revolutionary intelligentsia—its secretive, arbitrary and tyrannical bureaucratism—which was restored and underwent a vast new expansion under the Soviet regime...

...it became the sole employer and entrepreneur, and by excluding all but its own nominees from the leadership of labor unions and professional associations became itself the sole representative of the interests of workers, peasants and intelligentsia...

...Unfortunately, Marx in his reference to the Asiatic mode of production also depicted a form of society in which neither private landlords nor capitalists, but Government officials were the principal beneficiaries of the "extraction of surplus value...

...He shows that the crucial question is that of effective checks on the central state apparatus...

...Supplementary to these, rather than of primary significance, have been the more strictly political limitations of the state power by parliamentary constitution, free elections and guaranteed rights of opposition parties...

...But the dissolution of the Empire itself followed in the fifth century, and in Western Europe it was never reconstituted in its old form...

...From the end of the medieval period, centralized bureaucratic monarchies arose and held the center of the European stage until the 18th century...

...In an age when the memory of autocratic misrule had faded and the more obvious need was to advance toward social justice by overriding reactionary vested interests, it was natural for radical social reformers to be more concerned about enhancing the power of the state as the democratic public authority than about keeping it within bounds...

...Anyone ignorant of the teaching of Karl Marx might infer from these words that the Soviet scholars had just (at least in their own estimation) emerged victorious from an ideological clash with some school of bourgeois theorists working in the service of colonial imperialism...

...And most important, because most fundamental, is a a thorough grasp of the multiform course of history and of the opportunities and responsibilities it imposes on free men...

...What emerged a few centuries later was a group of kingdoms each fragmented by a system of contractual relations involving tenure of land between the kings and numerous subordinate local rulers...

...Marx did not see any analogy between his historic type of Asiatic society and his future socialist order, because he imagined the latter as democratically controlled and administered so that there would be no place in it for privilege or exploitation...

...The great despotic empires of the past have arisen primarily within the hydraulic zone because there the normal factors tending toward monarchical government in a developing society—the need for military leadership and the maintenance of law and order—are heavily reinforced by the need for a strong central authority to organize the making of dykes and canals and direct the distribution of water...

...secondly, professional bodies such as churches, universities and corporations of lawyers...

...Why, then, have the Communists of our time, who claim Marx as the first of their prophets, been at pains to expunge from his teaching an element which belongs to its basic pattern...

...The zone of the former comprises Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkestan and parts of India and China, whereas Europe as a whole belongs to the domain of the latter...

...and thirdly, but only in recent times, labor unions...

...One of them is Professor Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, which examines in detail the main historical examples of the type of social order based on what Marx called the Asiatic mode of production, and points out the practical implications of the facts for socialist theory...

...Two important books which have just appeared (published in the West, not in Communist-governed countries) provide an answer to this question...

...This was feudalism in the strict sense of the term...

...Without the proper performance of these functions, agriculture, on which the life of the people depends, would break down...

...Mogul and Chinese empires...

...Although Marx himself tried to minimize this aspect of his Asiatic mode, the admission that absence or weakness of private property in the means of production did not necessarily mean social justice for the masses was a weak point in socialist theory, and one on which anarchist critics did not fail to attack it...

...But some of his critics—and at a later date, even more, the critics of Lenin—did see the danger that control of publicly owned means of production by a group of persons also in control of the coercive power of the state might lead not to an extension of democratic freedom but to a new system of all-embracing bureaucratic despotism...

...In the meantime, private capital accumulation and investment still had an economically progressive role to play— particularly in transforming the stagnant economies of the East, where the unlimited official "squeeze" and the lack of "security of the person and property of the trader" were the great factors of obstruction to economic development...

...The information thus brought together amplifies, but does not in essentials supersede, the observations which were available to the pioneers of economics and sociology at the beginning of the 19th century and produced the theory of a specifically Asiatic form of society as adopted by Marx...

...What distinguishes the more extreme forms of despotism in past history is the absence or insignificance of organized social factors capable of resisting and curbing the excesses of monarcho-bureaucratic power...

...in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, he enumerated four basic modes of production recognizable in history since the dissolution of "primitive communism"—the Asiatic, the ancient European, the feudal and the capitalist—and elsewhere in his writings he elaborated his view of the Asiatic mode as a distinct form of economic and social structure...

...For practical politics the new doctrine, by attributing past oppressions to landlords and not to state officials—or to the latter only as instruments of the former—avoids arousing the fear that there may be dangers in the rule of an uncontrolled bureaucracy even after landlords have been liquidated...

...The first basic condition of bourgeois acquisition is lacking: the security of the person and property of the trader...

...elsewhere they formed semi-independent political entities within the loose structure of the feudal kingdom...

...Since then it has been Communist orthodoxy that there was never any such thing as a distinct Asiatic mode of production and that the prevailing form in Asia, as in Europe, prior to the rise of capitalism was "feudal...

...it was only when the society actually produced in Russia by the victorious revolution began to show remarkable similarities to the Asiatic precedents that it became politically important for the leaders of the new regime to explain away Marx's embarrassing accounts of the latter...

...This tendency was by no means confined to Marxists, but it was when linked with a theory of irreconcilable class struggle and a purpose of expropriation of all private property in the means of production (including peasant property) that it attained its full momentum...

...What was common to the slave-owning citizens of Greco-Roman antiquity, to the serf-controlling feudal nobles of the Middle Ages and to the worker-employing capitalists of modern Europe was their maintenance through various political and legal institutions of strong property rights, in contrast to the all-devouring state officialdom of the great Oriental monarchies...

...Professor Wittfogel is probably right in attributing this mainly to the Tartar conquest, which made the Grand Dukes of Moscow the tax-gatherers for the Khans of the Golden Horde...

...Finally, combined with the idea of the leading role of a single party as the vanguard of a revolutionary working class, it led inevitably to the achievement of totalitarian power...

...were the municipalities overwhelmed by the growth of the imperial bureaucracy...

...From the conditions of hydraulic agriculture and the centralized organization required to maintain it arises the typical Oriental despotism, drawing revenue from all its subjects and paying salaries to large numbers of permanent officials and soldiers, who in their turn enforce the taxation...

...If mankind is to recover from the disastrous consequences which the doctrine has now had in practice, there must be revision and correction of it by reference to the entirety of historical knowledge now available—much of which, moreover, was already accepted by Marx himself, but has been obscured by his successors...

...as professor of Chinese history at the University of Washington and Director of the Chinese History Project at Columbia, he is highly qualified to speak about the particular Oriental society which is the field of his professional study, and he has collected in addition to his own specialized knowledge a mass of material from recent research work on other Oriental societies...

...It was seen that in a number of Eastern countries agriculture was dependent on large-scale irrigation works requiring highly organized social control, that this control was vested in autocratic rulers, and that such rulers tended to govern in a manner so arbitrary that "Oriental despotism" became a term connoting a type of power more extreme in its unlimitedness than that of the so-called absolute monarchies of Europe...

...This royal bureaucracy is the real ruling class in such a state...

...After the unification of the Mediterranean world by the imperial power of Rome, the Roman city-republic was transformed into an autocratic monarchy, but for at least two centuries the autonomous civitas continued to be the most important administrative unit within the framework of the Empire...

...Since this type of society is to be found not only in Asia but elsewhere—the Peru of the Incas was an outstanding and extreme example of it—Professor Wittfogel prefers to call it "hydraulic...

...Astonishing would it be, then, to such an innocent to discover that this "notorious" doctrine was that of Marx himself...

...Although from the time of the French Revolution the making of parliamentary constitutions was primarily' the work of the bourgeoisie, the tradition of municipal liberties and parliamentary representation came from the medieval feudal world, when nobles and burghers made common cause in resisting the exaction of the royal officialdom...

...the surplus value extorted is not safe from the hands of greedy satraps and pashas...

...It was also noted that property rights were weak in these countries, that private niches lacked protection against the tax-gatherer, and that wealth was to be found—apart from the monarchs themselves and their close relatives— mainly among the governing officials...

...Orthodox Communism, having denied the validity of the category of the Asiatic mode of production as described by Marx, now refers to the traditional social structures of Russia, Turkey, India and China simply as "feudal," implying that they were all passing through just the same stages of necessary economic transition to capitalism as European society had already done at a slightly earlier date...

...Because Marxism worked out such a theory of history, it was able to become the great ideological force which has affected directly or indirectly all the thinking of our time...

...Professor Wittfogel's masterly analysis of hydraulic society enables us to see more clearly how it is that a movement that in its origins genuinely, and at all times formally, has aimed at extending democratic freedoms by elimination of the powers and privileges of private capital should have ended by subjecting entire peoples to an unlimited despotic tyranny...

...As long, however, as Marxists nowhere held political power, they could always pooh-pooh the idea of any such consequences arising from socialization of the means of production through a proletarian revolution...

...It was, nevertheless, no easy matter for convinced Marxists to reject the teaching of their master where he had been so explicit, and Professor Wittfogel points out that there was no outright condemnation of the theory of an Asiatic mode of production until after the Great Purge, which made Stalin the undisputed ideological arbiter of the Marxist-Leninist world...

...Alongside it city-republics again appeared, but only in Italy and Switzerland did they attain full independence...

...They nevertheless differed in vitally important respects from the great monarcho-bureaucratic states of Asia—the Ottoman...

...The Bolsheviks' claim to a monopoly of political power for their party, their intolerance toward every form of opposition or resistance to their policies, and the increasing identification of Party members with the state administration (inclusive of all managerial economic functions) rapidly turned the Russian "socialist" order into something which bore a far closer resemblance to an old-fashioned Eastern despotism than to the workers' democracy anticipated by Marx...

...By G. F- Hudson Three Modes for Four Why Stalin and his heirs have assailed Marx's concept of Oriental despotism In 1950, an official report on Soviet Oriental studies proclaimed "the rout of the notorious theory of the Asiatic mode of production...

...it is not responsible to anyone but the monarch, and its great wealth is derived in salaries, pickings and perquisites from the offices it holds, not from independently owned property...

...Even when the European monarchs were able to rid themselves of states-general as political checks on their power, they did so only by recognizing legally guaranteed property rights and fiscal immunities which confined their governments in a manner unknown to the Eastern autocracies...

...He defines it in a truly Marxist way according to its economic base, which is that of agriculture requiring large-scale irrigation in contrast to agriculture depending on rainfall and petty irrigation...

...Stalin then, in 1939, revised Marx by the simple expedient of quoting him wrongly as speaking of only three and not four pre-socialist modes of production...

...if they are safeguards against tyranny, they can also obstruct desirable national reforms and thus generate oppressions of their own...

...As Engels put it in 1890, referring to the Ottoman Empire of his time: "Turkish like any other Oriental despotism is incompatible with a capitalist economy...

...cortes or states-general, with powers to grant or refuse taxes to the central government...

...Even more have they suppressed the development of bourgeois power through municipal liberties and charters...

...Equally important is the judicious implementation of institutional change...

...It is true that Marx did not originate it, but he definitely accepted it...

...In the most formative epoch of ancient European civilization, the standard form of political structure was the city-republic—the small compact association of citizens with its militia army and its short-term elective public offices without any professional officialdom...

...with private property in the means of production once abolished, there could no longer be any kind of class rule...

...The pattern of administrative practice thus stamped on Russia survived the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great and his successors...

...These have been, in the first place, vested property interests...

...The party-state not only exercised all the normal functions of government, having abolished private economic enterprise...

...Professor Wittfogel is not only, like Djilas, an ex-Communist...

...The power of the ruler and the capacities of the administrative organization at his disposal thus become far greater than in a kingdom where the monarch does not perform such economic functions...

...The Bolsheviks, along with other European Marxists, constantly attacked the Tsardom as "Asiatic," and spoke of the old Russian order as the Aziatchina, which was for them a term of abuse...

...For Marx, socialism was a social order due to come after capitalism, when the advance of the forces of production had reached a point when capitalist relations of production were no longer adequate to sustain them...

...For however necessary military preparedness and a courageous economic policy may be, they are only two among several essentials...

...The other book is Milovan Djilas's The New Class, which shows how the Communist revolution has brought about what its promoters held could not occur—the emergence of a new privileged ruling class in a society dedicated to the abolition of classes...

...it requires at the top, as the recent purge in Moscow has once more shown, a personal autocratic arbiter who must exclude from political life, even if he does not put to death, all serious rivals to his authority...

...Such a system is not only unlimited and arbitrary in its bearing on the individual subject to it...

...In Professor Wittfogel's view, the problem of classification of the historic forms of society and of the transitions between them is not at all remote from the vital issues of current affairs...