Chinese marxist historiography and the question of the Asiatic Mode of Production

Abstract

In the history of Chinese Marxism, a noticeable intellectual phenomenon has been the prolonged Chinese discussion of a Marxist concept- that of the Asiatic mode of production (hereafter the AMP). The voices in this discussion, as Timothy Brook has written,1 have largely gone unheard in the West. Therefore, it is the primary purpose of this thesis to present in detail the background, the reasoning and the conclusions of Chinese discussions on the question of the AMP. Since the 1920s, the Chinese have had three important discussions on this question. All these corresponded to frustrations or even crises in the Chinese communist movement. The first was in the late 1920s, when the Chinese communists were threatened with disaster by the break of the united front with the Kuomintang (KMT). The second. occurred in the 1950s; when the world communist movement was in a deep crisis as a result of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. The third, which continues in post-Mao China, is a direct product of China's de-Maoification. This thesis is thus also concerned with the question of the connection between the academic debate on the AMP and the political development of Chinese communism. This thesis is not a study of Marx's own conception of the Asiatic mode of production or of its place in his general theory or theories of history and society. That has been done well by Western scholars - initially, from within communism, by L. I. Madjar, Eugene Varga and Karl August Wittfogel in the latter's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas and essays and then, from an anti-communist position, in his Oriental Despotism, and by later scholars such as Lawrence Krader in his The Asiatic Mode of Production (1975), Umberto Melotti in his Marx and the Third World (English edition 1977), Marian Sawer in her Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (1977), Anne Bailey and Josep Llobera in their The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (1981) and most recently Brendan O'Leary in his The Asiatic Mode of Production (1989). Their explorations have brought out both inconsistency and variation in Marx's views, as well as the importance of drafts, notes and neglected manuscripts not published, or not widely available, until well into the 20th century. The unilinear view of world historical development prescribed as a sketch in the Manifesto of the Communist Party has been amplified, from Marx's own words, into a more complex picture in which the AMP produces a different line of historical development, or lack of historical development, and in which there are also significantly different lines of development for the Graeco-Roman world, the Germanic and the Slavonic. They become completely unified for Marx only through the world expansion of capitalism - an expansion he confidently predicted for much of his life. The recognition of the much greater complexity of Marx's thought is largely a product of Western academic scholarship of the last fifty years. It has brought with it increasing recognition of the ambiguities, inconsistencies and fundamental problems in the classical formulations of Marxian and Marxist social theory and of the materialist interpretation of history. These too have been explored very fully indeed in Western academic scholarship, and in Western Marxism in recent years. The Chinese have become increasingly aware of these but they have not, and perhaps still do not, significantly contribute to the debate. Here, we shall concentrate on Chinese perceptions, not on Marx or on Marxist thought as a wider social and historical theory. In China, renewed discussions of the AMP were of obvious significance to a would-be Chinese Marxist thinker. Yet, each initial burst of interest tended to be followed by a remarkable reduction of enthusiasm. Generally speaking, the concept never obtained the position it held or holds among intellectuals in other communist countries and among Marxist intellectuals in the West. In this thesis, I thus raise the question of what, apart from political pressure by the communist authorities, caused the relative indifference of Chinese intellectuals to this concept. Intellectually speaking, there is no doubt that the Marxist theory of history brought about revolutionary changes in historical studies in modern China. After the attacks by radical iconoclasts in the late Qing and the early Republic, the Confucian tradition in the Chinese academic world lost its dominant position. The collapse of the political order in China led to the collapse of the official ideology and left behind a sort of "paradigm vacuum". Belief in such ideas as scientism, social evolutionism, anarchism and radical revolutionary change quickly filled the gap between the Confucian tradition and Marxism. However, the acceptance of historical materialism became possible only after certain modifications, even certain compromises with the "idealist" tendency in the traditional thought of historical studies, which emphasized human will and the importance of politics and morality in historical development. Above all, the acceptance was possible only after Marx's ideas on non-Western societies, reflected in his theory of the AMP, were incorporated into historical materialism, even if only in a very modified form. From the late 1920s to the late 1980s, during different periods of debate, the Chinese treatment of Marxist theory of history in general and of the question of the AMP in particular were varied and had different political implications. During all these discussions, however, the concept of the AMP constituted a challenge from within Marxist theoretical framework to the official line on the question of revolution and modernization. However, criticisms based on the theory of the AMP have never formed a strong political and theoretical opposition to Chinese communism. The reason for this, I argue, is that on the one hand the political implications of the concept failed to justify the nationalist demand for radical social change and denied any possibility of a socialist revolution in China, while on the other hand, from the Chinese side, there was a failure to understand that Marx's idea of the AMP embodies a more complex consideration of Marx on the question of historical development of human society and of the communist movement. Finally, the Aziatchiki's challenge is a challenge from within the Marxist system and does constitute a Marxist threat to the official ideology of Chinese communism. However, as the new generation of Chinese intellectuals tends increasingly to depart from Marxism, the question of the AMP will probably lose its charm. Show more