/edu/ - Education

Marx seemed to have used the "Asiatic mode of production" as a sort of placeholder to describe societies (Middle East, China, India etc) that didn't fit his model of feudalism. Marx thought these societies had two distinct features: collective ownership of property, collectivist cultures, and a an oriental despotic state which owns property and directs production. Marx never really wrote that much about it. Its a highly orientalist concept seeking as it does to explain an entire continent with a single broad brush as if these huge complex societies could be reduced to a single system which can explain every facet of "Asiatic" life.

The Asiatic mode of production never existed and neither did European feudalism. These are ahistorical sociological constructs of the 19th century. Marx's stages of history have been debunked a long time ago. It was never a strength of his theory and isn't really integral to his critique of capitalism. Human societies do not go through fixed stages of history like a choo choo train.

feudalism with Asian characteristics

>>21912
Marx didn't critique capitalism.

>>21912
What do you mean feudalism didn't exist. Lords and serfs etc

>>21916
Modern historians of medieval Europe don't use the concept "feudalism" and see it as an invention back projected onto the past. Medieval Europe probably didn't have a single ruling ideology or socio-political system that governed all aspects of life. We're talking centuries of history here and a lot of it is not well documented. That's not saying lords or fiefs didn't exist but according to Susan Reynolds anyway these Latin legal terms are highly distorted by pop culture and misinterpretation.

>>21912
>Human societies do not go through fixed stages of history
I mean you can do some materialist analysis of the evolution of societies through history based on the material economic conditions and technical/technological progress, cockshott how the world works is pretty good for that, but yeah its not a simplistic fixed series of stages

>>21917
I think feudalism is still a useful concept, although it doesnt tell much about the specifics and can cover many different variations, but Im no medieval expert either

>>21918
>I mean you can do some materialist analysis of the evolution of societies through history based on the material economic conditions and technical/technological progress,
That still assumes there's a fixed objective trajectory for human development which there isn't. Even technological changes are simply choices shaped by power not objective improvements. e.g. why did steam power prevail over hydro? We assume steam is inherently better but better for whom? Steam gave more control and power to bourgeois factory owners and turned out to be more profitable so the vast water works the English parliament wanted to build were cancelled. Steam emerged in countries that burned coal in place of wood during shortages, unlike the Middle East where olive oil and crude were used. This tech may never have developed in another geographic environment. Technological change isn't like a tech tree and what counts as an improvement really depends on your perspective. A steel mill is good for us if we're Qing bureaucrats trying to strengthen our empire against the West, but if we're the peasants who have to live with the smoke, noise, and horrible working environment then technology hasn't improved at all.

>I think feudalism is still a useful concept
If historians and experts in that time period have ditched it and have been saying its unhelpful since the 70s, then I'm not going to challenge them. What might make feudalism useful otherwise? Its politically useful? I'm not sure. If you look at the damage done during the Cultural Revolution you can see how an idea like "feudalism" has had disastrous consequences. Ordinary activists during GPCR tore down archeological sites, raided temples, burned classical literature, beat up Buddhist monks etc. all in the name of combating "feudalism" this mythical reactionary ideology that supposedly had its tentacles everywhere and had to be rooted out. Another example is Turkey's infamous hat law which banned traditional clothing. All they succeeded in doing was bankrupting fez manufacturers and weakening the local economy just because Ataturk thought fezzes and turbans are backward and feudal. In Japan, virtually anything bad is blamed on "feudalism" which never existed.

>>21919
What do you think about the dichotomy between loyalty to individuals and loyalty to institutions? Pre-modern political systems had more of the former while modern political systems attempt to impose the latter with varying degrees of success. Progress occurs when the state functions as a machine, imposing a collective order over government officials. Degeneration happens when institution loyalty collapses and people revert to patronage and personal loyalty.

>>21920
Coorperate personality (the idea that a cooperate body is a legal person) is a feature of Western law and you can't find a similar concept in Islamic or Chinese law. Hence, people in say the Ottoman empire or Tokugawa Japan weren't loyal to institutions or abstractions but to social networks, dynasties, personal relationships. A modern state demands absolute loyalty from all of its subjects in a totalitarian manner. A good example is the headscarf affair in France where women who wear dress perceived as Islamic are portrayed as disloyal to the republic. Homosexuals were once seen to be undermining national values and causing decline with their sex habits. Modern states and work environments demand absolute mind-body obedience while a so-called oriental despot like the Shoguns only wanted tax money and occasional support against their political rivals.

>Progress occurs when the state functions as a machine, imposing a collective order over government officials.
There is no such thing as progress. There is social and material change but if this is an improvement or not depends on your relation to it. The cotton gin was "progress" if you were a slave plantation owner but if you were a slave it made your life worse. Capitalism and militarism need the totalitarian mass surveillance and technologies of social control of the modern state in order to dominate society. But is this kind of totalitarian loyalty necessary to make life better? No. If anything it has made life worse for the vast majority of people.

>Degeneration happens when institution loyalty collapses and people revert to patronage and personal loyalty.
Or maybe that's just our own culturally conditioned brainwashed assumption? We think personal loyalties lead to corruption but not fanatic loyalties to institutions or nations and we think we need rational bureaucracies to manage life for us but there are plenty of human societies that have functioned fine without either.

I need to reread what Banaji said about ""asiatic"" ie tributary modes of production in Theory as History before I will post about this.

Isn't "Asiatic mode" just palace economy by another name?

>>21994
No, it refers to all modes of production that have existed throughout Asia in all of history, including but not limited to the palace economy.

>>21922
>Or maybe that's just our own culturally conditioned brainwashed assumption?
Nepotism and familialism not only always leads to "bad" and "inefficient" outcomes (however that may be defined), but also perpetuates generational & lineal inequalities. Stop defending the conservative and objectively reactionary elements of certain societies simply because they're brown.*

* Or more accurately, because you believe that it's only exclusive to "browns" and fell for muh special western civilization meme.

“…Throughout the entire post-primitive history of mankind,” the review states, “each of the indisputable methods of production for Marxists was represented by two parallel social systems, one of which was based on private ownership of the means of production, and the other on state ownership. Thus, the slave system had its correspondence in statism-I, feudalism - in statism-II, and capitalism - in statism-III” (p. 122) [ 2 ].

One can guess that under statism-I A.N. Tarasov understands the social system that existed in the countries of the Ancient East, under statism-II - the social system of the states of the medieval East, under statism-III - the social system of the USSR and other countries of the so-called. "socialist" camp.

>>21995
What are the different forms of 'asiatic mode'?

>>21912
Feudalism absolutely existed, people claiming it didn’t because it wasn’t codified and the same in all locations are aggressively retarded, one of the main features of feudalism is the lack of codification, and no social system is identical in all of its iterations in all locations

Read Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism by Perry Anderson instead of retarded Canadian contrarians

>>21910
Read Samir Amin.

>>22006 (me)
This goes for all of you fags. Thread is a trainwreck. You're welcome.