Volume 8, No. 1, January 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Marx and Engels say: “History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles. It is man, real living man that does all that, that possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not a person apart, using man as a means for its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”1 Since it is the result of men’s actions, history is not, and cannot be, the unilinear development of a finally determined process; on the contrary, it is the multilinear and disjunctive expression of something that can take a wide variety of courses, and yet is not without ‘meaning’.
The ‘traditional’ unilinear schema or Marxist model of development looks like this: Primitive commune; Classical (slave-based) society; Feudal society; Bourgeois society; Socialist society. This is not a purely arbitrary interpretation, since it is based on a whole series of Marx’s writings, from The German Ideology to the Communist Manifesto. But it is an over-simplified model. It ignores the richness of Marx’s thought from 1853 onwards, in the articles in the New York Daily Tribune over the period 1853 and 1857-60, the Grundrisse (1857-8), parts of Capital, and the letters and writings of his later years. When asked to clarify his views on this subject, Marx firmly rejected the attempt to “metamorphose his historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself.”2 For a variety of reasons, orthodox Marxists have tended to recreate that interpretation, and tried to cancel at a stroke the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) put forward by Marx himself. The resulting void is papered over by arbitrary extension of the other precapitalist forms: primitive commune, slavery and, above all, feudalism.
Let us begin with the ‘primitive commune’, the primeval natural group based on “common ties of blood, language and custom”, “the family and the family enlarged into the tribe, or by the intermarriage between families, or the combination of tribes”.3 Such a community’s economy is based on hunting, fishing, food gathering, grazing, nomadism, and slash and burn cultivation. This suggests a communal appropriation of the land. The earth is the storehouse and workshop, furnishing materials to work and the means to work them. Man’s approach to the earth is still unsophisticated, as the property of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour. Each individual acts as possessor of the land by virtue of being a member of that community. Marx portrays man as originally a social and tribal being, a herder, who becomes an individual only through the process of history.4 At this point in time, an individual would no more be able to own land than to develop speech. At the very most, he could derive subsistence from it, as animals do. But the real relation to the earth as property “is mediated through the peaceful or violent occupation of the land and soil by the tribe, the commune, in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form”.5
New forms evolve from the primitive commune with the transition to settled agriculture, stock farming and crafts manufacture, i.e., with the development of the forces of production. The extent of the change depends on various social and natural factors. “(The) different forms of the commune or tribe members’ relation to the tribe’s land and soil – to the earth where it was settled – depend partly on the natural inclinations of the tribe, and partly on the economic conditions in which it relates as proprietor to the land and soil in reality, i.e. in which it appropriates its fruits through labour, and the latter will itself depend on climate, physical make-up of the land and soil, the physically determined mode of its exploitation, the relation with the hostile tribes or neighbour tribes, and the modifications which migrations, historic experiences, etc., introduce.”6 Proper weight needs to be accorded to the variety of such communities and to the different forms in which they are dissolved or subsumed within subsequent more complex socio-economic formations in the course of historical development, stimulated by a new development of the existing forces of production.
Marx often reiterated that primitive communes are not all fashioned in the same manner. On the contrary, they form a series of social groupings that differ as much by type as by age and represent successive stages of social evolution. Marx mentions several types of community, including the Asiatic commune, the polis of the Greek and Roman world, the Germanic community, the Slav commune, etc. These communes with the passage of time became the foundation – or at least the starting point – for the more complex socio-economic formations that emerged later. Of all the distinguishing features of these various communes, the most important is the nature of the private property that tends to develop within these communities when the social forces of production have developed beyond a certain level. “All civilised peoples begin with the common ownership of the land. With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, in the course of the development of agriculture this common ownership becomes a fetter on production.”7 The Asiatic commune, however, marked by the least development of productive forces, is distinguished by the persistence of communal ownership of the soil. “In the Asiatic form (at least, predominantly) the individual has no property but only possessions; the real proprietor, proper, is the commune – hence property only as communal property in land.”8 The individual member is only possessor of a particular fraction, hereditary or not. But none of these plots belongs to any member for himself, assigned as they are to him only in his capacity as an immediate member of the commune…”9 The bond of species prevails.
Wherever – as among the Aryans of Asia – the state is born at a time when the commune still works the land collectively, or at most leases the land for a definite period to various families, where as a result private property has not yet taken root – there, state power takes the form of the absolutism of the ruler. Of all the forms of commune that developed out of the primitive commune therefore, “the Asiatic form necessarily hangs on most tenaciously and for the longest time. This is due to its presupposition that the individual does not become independent vis-à-vis the commune; that there is a self-sustaining circle of production, unity of agriculture, manufactures, etc.”10 Marx argues that because there is no private property within it, the original Asian commune suffers fewer internal contradictions than elsewhere and is not so much transformed as subjugated to a ‘higher unity’ – the State – which in this environment is born chiefly out of the need to meet the basic requirements of drainage and irrigation networks dictated by local geography and climate, but soon takes on more or less absolute forms, transforming its original functional powers into political domination and exploitation. Although later researchers have questioned Marx’s view of no private property in the Asiatic Mode of Production on the basis of inadequate knowledge available to him from predominantly Western sources in his day, such instances of private property still appear as peripheral exceptions, and do not necessarily render invalid Marx’s general description. Nor does it refute the characterisation of the extraction by the absolute ruler of surplus labour in the form of tribute.
Besides the actual absolute ruler or principal landlord, there existed an exploiting class, even though the persistent blurring of its functional and lordly roles makes it more difficult to distinguish. As time passes, the State begins to assert itself as the real owner of the soil, and the ensuing mechanism of class exploitation renders rent to be equated with taxes.The chief characteristic, therefore, of this mode of production is that the State is superimposed on the producer communities, which though they continue to exist, no longer produce solely for themselves but are exploited by a ‘higher unity’.
Notes:
(To be continued)