Volume 8, No. 1, January 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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There are three basic features in Marx’s conception of Asiatic society. First, there is no private ownership of land (critics would modify this to say instead: only peripheral private ownership). Land (overwhelmingly) belongs to the State. Second, the base of that society is a system of village ‘communes’, each one self-sufficient through a close combination of agriculture and cottage crafts, the products of which are largely self-consumed, not marketed. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and that too a portion of, which finds its way into the hands of the State in the shape of rent in kind. Third, the central power (the State) plays a commanding role, asserting itself historically as a consequence of a natural environment that demanded hydraulic engineering and other public works as an essential element if agriculture was to satisfy the needs of the population. The characteristics therefore of the system are the isolation of the villages scattered over a vast countryside, their economic self-sufficiency, guaranteed by the union of agriculture and craft industry, and the fixed, limited division of labour within the simple structure of each unit. These characteristics ensured its survival in spite of any changes that might occur in the political sphere: “The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics.”(1)
The organisational structure of the Subcontinental village was composed, first and foremost, of a handful of people who fulfilled particular social functions and were maintained by the community. They included the village headman, who was at one and the same time judge, policeman and tax collector; the calendar-Brahmin or astrologer; the schoolmaster; the poet, and the various craftsmen (e.g. the weaver, carpenter, blacksmith, potter, barber, washerman, silversmith, etc.). This Asiatic ‘commune’ contained the seeds of the caste system, originating from the Aryan migrations/invasions of the Subcontinent and reinforced by the development of religion (Hinduism) that cloaked the real purpose: the class division not only of Aryan society into the ‘twice-born’ three castes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas (warrior-rulers) and Vaishyas (commoners, peasants), but a fourth caste of exclusion, composed of the conquered indigenous peoples, the Shudras. This political-economic-social-religious stratification is adhered to even today by conservative Hindus. It arose and was consolidated as the nomadic Aryan tribes settled into agriculture. The scattered village communities became the permanent repositories and fortresses of the caste system at the base of society.
The relationship between these village communities and higher authority, consisting of the despotic monarch, State officials, bureaucrats and the military, all non-productive and parasitically living off tribute, rents, tithes and offerings, was at bottom that between an exploited mass and an exploiting ruling ‘class’. The Asiatic State discharged a function vital to the population: the construction and upkeep of water-control works, without which agriculture would be threatened in arid natural conditions. As a result it gained strongly centralised political power, employing officials appointed for fixed terms and in theory always removable. Hence the tendency towards despotism. The whole ideology of the system owed its shape to the prominent role played by the person at the summit of the political pyramid. He was considered responsible for the fertility of the soil, sole owner of the land, and prime beneficiary of its fruits. He prepared land for cultivation, watered and nourished it, shaped, protected and nurtured it, and watched over its seasonal cycle. This monumental power easily assumed mythic, even cosmic dimensions for peasants living in scattered isolated villages in which the boundaries of the world merged into those of their own communities. The concentration of so much power, economic and political, religious, civil and military, is one of the most unmistakable cultural traits of societies founded on the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP).
In fact Asiatic tradition brought together the divinity or ‘heaven’ and the ruler. The exercise of power, economic and administrative as well as regulatory and repressive, was considered one with the orderly functioning of the cosmos. The harmony between the two was considered the condition and the guarantee of the fertility of the soil and therefore of man’s livelihood. Total power was not only accepted, but sanctified as the guardian of a natural and social order that permits men’s works to succeed and was seen as expressing the will of the gods. Good harvests indicated that the sovereign and the divine power were in harmony and constituted the ultimate legitimisation of power. As Marx commented: “…in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government…”(2) The Asiatic ruler regarded the prosperity of his country as a far greater claim to fame than even military conquests. In the AMP, where collective property had been the rule and the original village ‘commune’ structure had survived, two typical features abounded: the prevalence of organic groups over individuals, and the idea of a natural collectivity in which everyone had a specific place and function.
Marx interrogated the failure of societies based on the AMP to evolve historically. He stressed the long-drawn stagnation of Asiatic societies whose stationary social conditions he saw as the direct result of a mode of production incapable of autonomous development. Despite his dislike of capitalism and colonialism, he envisaged their conquests bringing about the destruction of the AMP, thereby providing the external impulse for breaking out of this gigantic historical impasse characterised by limited private land ownership and class distinctions existing on spurious lines distorted further by the caste system, whose outstanding feature was the creation of accepted inequalities. The form of exploitation was less rigid because of the absence of private slavery or personal bondage and the ruling bureaucracy’s capacity for creating illusions, which enabled the latter to secure a considerable growth of productive forces within the existing socio-economic structure. Town and country formed a unity free from distinctions, with the cities little more than camps of the royalty. Above all, the State loomed as all-powerful.
There is no need whatsoever, therefore, to postulate an unprovable ‘primitiveness’ of Asiatic society in order to provide a Marxist explanation for its stagnation and relative incapacity for autonomous development. One can even find in it a fairly developed class structure without impairing the validity of Marx’s model’s explanation. In Asiatic societies, the State was pre-eminent. Its complete hold over political and economic life prevented the development of an autonomous sphere of ‘civil society’. The massive State presence gave the system stability through its functions of adaptation and integration, deriving from the very vastness of the territory and the dispersion of the small village communities, strengthened further by its control of the waters. These factors objectively transformed the State into the function of preserving the existing order and maintaining its age-old patterns. Far from developing independently under its own steam, therefore, the system tended to perpetuate the existing order, coping with the crises to which it was prone by means of a succession of reincarnations that changed nothing except its outward appearance. The process explains the frequent ‘political storms’, which never succeeded in touching the system’s foundations and did not introduce any elements of change. As Marx puts it: “All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface…However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity…”(3)
Marx was far from unaware of the complexity of Asiatic history. Indeed he stresses its turbulent political vicissitudes. Actually Marx does not deny that Asiatic society has known changes, even substantial changes. He only denies that those changes made any difference to its economic basis, that they ever revolutionised its mode of production. There is development, but only of the forces of production, inasmuch as the greater flexibility of the prevailing relations of production can absorb any contradictions that arise, deferring the emergence of an ‘epoch of social revolution’. The structure of the system remains unchanged and even the ideological and institutional structure does not alter, for a period spanning hundreds of years. From that point of view one can speak of stagnation. But the periodic regeneration of the system, in reaction against the mis-government, outbreaks of warlordism, exhaustion of the tax base and other degenerating factors that tended to bring it to crisis point, gives the progress of Asiatic societies an almost undulatory pattern of development that can well be defined as cyclical.
Notes:
(To be continued)