Volume 7, No. 11, November 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Karl Marx has not always been well served by his followers. Recall his famous riposte to some of his dogmatic French partisans: “If these are Marxists, I am not a Marxist!” The profundity of his ideas, particularly their dialectical complexity, has very often been oversimplified, distorted, applied out of context and mangled beyond recognition by his ardent disciples. One amongst many such examples stands out, particularly since it relates to our Subcontinental history. This is the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP), which, if properly studied and followed, illuminates our understanding of the Subcontinent’s historical journey, and in the process deepens our understanding of the profound changes in economy, state structure and politics wrought by British colonialism.
Marx prudently refrained from claiming universality for the pattern and progression in history he had recorded for Western Europe. He repeatedly and explicitly emphasised this. That did not dissuade many, perhaps even a majority, of his followers from mechanically transposing and applying the Western European ‘formula’ to all five continents and the path their history had taken. This does not mean Marx restricted his vision to Western Europe. The account of the evolution of capitalism there would be incomplete and unsatisfactory without the essential complementary explanation of the reasons for the failure of capitalism to develop elsewhere. Marx had to attempt to determine why Western Europe alone had succeeded in the transition from a precapitalist mode of production (feudalism) to industrial capitalism. But if feudalism was assumed to be a worldwide phenomenon, a mode of production arising from the ruins of preceding formations based on slavery, answering the question ‘why Europe?’ became trickier and even more complex. The way out of this dilemma was to postulate a variety of precapitalist modes of production, which was the direction Marx took. Of these precapitalist modes of production, one attained, by reason of the potentially vast range of its application, almost exclusive subsequent prominence: the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP). What, we must ask, were the specific features of the AMP that rendered it inhospitable to the seeds of capitalism?
Orthodox Marxists continue to reduce Marx’s views to the bare bones of a unilinear schema of five different types of society, following on from each other chronologically and logically, as progressive stages in mankind’s historical development: classless primitive community (or primitive communism), slavery-based classical society, feudalism based on serfdom, modern bourgeois capitalist society, and lastly the classless society of the future, communism, the end to which world history is said to be progressing. Once the Soviet Union and China, among others, were claimed to be in a state of that transition from socialism to communism. Those claims today appear tragically misplaced in the face of the collapse of the former and the embrace of capitalism by the latter. History has yet to reveal the fate of the Chinese admixture of newly embraced capitalist economy (and to some extent culture) and the remains of the state-owned economic structure.
Marx was not a unilinearist. His much more complex view of historical development posits a clear alternative model of a multilinear type. One must try to reconstruct his schema as accurately as possible, even if only to be sure that all the precautions that he himself suggested are applied to the right schema and not to another one arbitrarily (and wrongly) credited to him.
What exactly does Marx mean by historical development? The principal sources of Marxist thought are well known: classical German philosophy, British political economy, and French proto-socialism. Each of these, in its own way, was strongly imbued with the idea of progress, that eminent idea that the 19th century inherited from the Enlightenment. Hegel in particular, who had deeply transformed the Enlightenment’s characteristic concept of unlimited progress, was for Marx and Engels “the first to show that there is an evolution, an intrinsic coherence in history” (1). What distinguished Hegel from all the other philosophers of his time was the strong historical sense that formed the basis of his thought. However, his ideas remained idealistic and abstract. Hegel saw history as the unfolding of the World Spirit. Though he saw in it the progress of the consciousness of freedom, a progress that should be recognised as necessary, his emphasis lay on consciousness. The relationship between being and consciousness was stood on its head.
Marx took up Hegel’s idea that history is a progress towards the liberation of man. But he made no concessions to idealism: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness” (2). The first premise of history, Marx says, is that men should be able to live. Hence man’s first action is the propagation of life itself, his own through work, that of others through reproduction. History is first and foremost the ‘production of man’. This entails from the very beginning a dual relationship: with nature, and with other men. The forces of production are human labour power and natural resources such as soil fertility, water, etc. The relations of production are those socially structured relationships between men, into which they must enter as a result of their participation in the process of social production. The relations of production appear as the ownership of the means of production or property relations. The forces of production and the relations of production taken as a whole constitute the mode of production. A mode of production is the particular form taken at a given stage of social development by the metabolic process between man and nature, i.e. that process allowing the production of material goods, especially the means of supporting life, and the means of production. Each mode of production differs from the others in the method of organisation of the forces of production and the relations of production. Each one has a characteristic form of exploitation (extraction of surplus). Corresponding to these are specific forms of the appropriation of others’ labour. The only modes of production that do not entail exploitation are the primitive classless society and future (hoped for) socialist society, with their obvious natural differences.The relations of production form the structure of society, the real foundations on which arises a superstructure of laws, politics, religion, philosophy, art, etc., along with a specific form of social consciousness. Structure and superstructure together form a social-economic formation, a historically delimited structure such as the Asiatic, classical, feudal or modern bourgeois society, with an anatomy moulded by the dominant mode of production in that society. In actual social-economic formations there are always other modes besides the dominant one, whether as hangovers from the past or precursors of the future.
For Marx the process of history is characterised by the succession of different social-economic formations, i.e. by different dominant modes of production. These therefore have a specifically transient historical nature because their existence presupposes, as both a constituent element and a necessary condition, a particular level of the forces of social production and of the forms of their development. Historic change comes ultimately from the development of the forces of production, simply because every generation already possesses the forces of production conquered by its predecessors and can in its turn use these as a base to develop its own. The ensuing social process, however, is dialectical (i.e. revolutionary), not merely cumulative (or evolutionary). As the forces of production are developed they come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From being the forms of development of the productive forces, the relations of production now become their fetters and a new era of social revolution begins. The conflict is conducted by the principal classes in existence. The struggle, if it does not end in the common ruin of the contending classes, which is a possibility, results in the long run in the victory of the oppressed class. Marx characterises that class as ‘the greatest productive force’ since its interests coincide with the supersession of the existing relations of production, which impede the development of the productive forces.
When the dominant mode of production changes, society is changed in every aspect. A new social-economic formation is created. The process has affected every man and every society in the world. But that is not to say that it takes place simultaneously and completely everywhere in the same way. A schema or model of historical development is a simplified representation of the structures that characterise the various social-economic formations, and of their fundamental dynamics. Its purpose is to facilitate the understanding of the real process of historical development that has actually occurred in the past, is occurring at present, and can reasonably be hypothetised, from existing tendencies, as likely to occur in the future. Such a schema is naturally only a theoretical model, which as such cannot be a complete representation of history. Yet it is an essential heuristic tool, for it helps to lay bare the implicit ‘logic’ of historical development by stripping away the fortuitous accretions that blur its outline. Such a model is not opposed to historical reality, although it cannot do justice to its much greater richness. On the contrary it catches its essential meaning.
Notes:
(To be continued)