China: the Puzzle of the Past (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the Marxist view of China’s history? Prior to modern developments and the establishment of the Communist régime, the scene was of vast tracts where millions of peasants eked out existence on strips of land, under the thumbs of landowners and at the mercy of warlords; manufacture and trade belonged to only three or four well-populated areas. The ready conclusion is of a feudalism going back to the earliest kings. In China's Three Thousand Years (1973) C.P. Fitzgerald writes:

The Chou kingdom [1025 BC] was designed on what is familiar to the western world as the feudal system: the country was divided into fiefs whose rulers, more or less closely related to the monarch, had the duty of raising forces to fight for him and were also required to pay ceremonial visits to court.

In a later chapter Brian Hook refers to the view “employed by Chinese Marxist historians” that China “passed through primitive, slave and feudal societies, the impact of the West occurring, however, before the onset of the capitalist stage of society” This is taken directly from Mao Tse-tung’s statements in the official edition of his Selected Works:

[Up to now] approximately 5,000 years have passed since the collapse of the primitive communist society, and the transition to class society, first slave society, and then feudalism.

It sounds too probable to question. Yet preceding it was a doctrinal change-over in Russia, in which Stalin altered Marx and eventually his officials announced that a part of Marx’s historical theory had been disposed-of completely. The Chinese Communists adopted Moscow’s teaching to help build their own régime. And the question remains: what is the Marxist view of China’s history?

The Meaning of History

The basic statement of Marxism is the materialist conception of history. The way in which men stand to one another in the production and distribution on which they must depend is the foundation of all social organization. Marx put it thus in the Preface to The Critique of Political Economy :

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Since the passing of primitive society, the relations have been those of owning and non-owning classes. Class interests have centred on the ownership of the productive resources, and the changes from one historical epoch to another have been the triumphs of new owning classes. Marx’s economic theory is not distinct from but part of this understanding of history: the labour theory of value is the detailed working-out of the class struggle in present-day society.

In the same passage in The Critique of Political Economy, Marx states the forms society has taken:

In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society.

“Ancient” is the slave societies of the Mediterranean and the near-East, from whose break-up feudalism emerged. Marx identified “Asiatic” society principally with India and China. In Volume I of Capital (pages 350-352, Allen & Unwin edn.) he described the self-sufficiency of Indian villages, linked with a communal system of land tenure, as “the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies”; and the handicraft paper-making of India and China as “two distinct antique Asiatic forms of the same industry” (p.377).

That Marx saw Asiatic production as a separate type of economic organization is made plainest in the Grundrisse. In the latter part of Notebook IV references to it occur repeatedly. For example:

In Asiatic societies, where the monarch appears as the exclusive proprietor of the agricultural surplus product, whole cities arise, which are at bottom nothing more than wandering encampments, from the exchange of his revenue with the ‘free hands’, as Steuart calls them. There is nothing of wage labour in this relation, but it can stand in opposition to slavery and serfdom though need not do so . . .

(p.467)

In the Asiatic form (at least, predominantly), the individual has no property but only possession; the real proprietor, proper, is the commune — hence property only as communal property in land.

(p.484)

Hydraulics and Hierarchy

The requirement on which Asiatic society was founded was that of large-scale irrigation. In Capital Volume I (p.523) Marx wrote:

It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the works of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive rôle in the history of industry.

He went on to name examples, all of irrigation works, in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, India, Persia, Spain and Sicily. In some of these, of course, the economy was simply a farming one involving some irrigation. The social and political consequences when all depended on major irrigation were shown in two footnotes on the same page:

1. The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the dominion of the priests, as directors of agriculture.
2. One of the material bases of the power of the state over the small disconnected producing organisms in India, was the regulation of the water supply

Because of its importance the management of water could not be left to diverse hands. The characteristic of Asiatic “hydraulic society” was large scale government-managed works of irrigation and flood control.

The amounts of private property varied in Asiatic societies, but had to be subject to the hydraulic regime. In Volume 3 of Capital Marx said that in the Asiatic system there existed “no private land- ownership, but both private and communal possession of the soil”; i.e. there was no universal system of land tenure as in feudalism. The rulers, priests and supervising bureaucrats had the surplus and the pickings from supreme autocratic leadership. Engels summarized Asiatic society thus in Anti-Duhring:

However great the number of despotic governments which rose and fell in India and Persia, each was fully aware that its first duty was the general maintenance of irrigation throughout the valleys, without which no agriculture was possible . . . The ancient communes, where they continued to exist, have for thousands of years formed the basis of the most barbarous forms of state, oriental despotism, from India to Russia.

(pp. 202-3, Lawrence & Wishart edn.)

In the hydraulic works continually in hand, the bulk of labourers remained peasant's without differentiation or division of labour. There had to be reservoirs, sluices, dykes, aqueducts, drainage and navigation canals. The armies of labour were transferable to non-hydraulic projects: huge defence structures, roads, capital cities — and tombs and temples for the rulers. The first Chinese emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, is said to have had 700,000 employed on building his palace and his tomb.

The Case is Altered

The question of Asiatic society as an inconvenience to the official doctrine-makers of Soviet Russia first came to the fore between 1925 and 1930. Ryazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute, and the economist Varga published articles on the Asiatic mode of production depending on government-controlled water works, and declaring China to be a society of the Asiatic type. In 1926 Stalin began designating China as “feudal”, and the 1928 Programme of the Communist International spoke of “feudal mediaeval relationships". The assertion was that if Asiatic society was to be recognized it was only as an Oriental variant of feudalism.

Karl Wittfogel in his Oriental Despotism argues that the matter goes back to the original break between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1906. Lenin in his early days not only accepted Marx’s and Engel’s theory of Asiatic society but applied it strongly to Tsarist Russia. Planning land nationalization to win the support of the peasant masses for the seizure of power, he was — says Wittfogel — hoist with his own petard: the proposal closely resembled what he had condemned as Aziatchina. Thus, from 1906 he gradually dropped speaking of Asiatic society substituting “mediaeval”, “pre-capitalist”, and “feudal”.

The debate was sealed in 1938 with the publication of Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. In it (pp.43-44, L. & W. edn.) he quoted Marx’s Preface to The Critique of Political Economy — short of the sentence referring to the Asiatic mode of production. Only three forms of class society were named: slavery, feudalism and capitalism. But in particular, Stalin laid down that geographical environment could not be a “determining cause” in social development: “for that which remains almost unchanged in the course of tens of thousands of years cannot be the chief cause of development of that which undergoes fundamental changes in the course of a few hundred years” (p.24).

Engels dealt with this question in 1894 when replying to H. Starkenburg about the materialist conception of history. He wrote differently:

Under economic conditions are further included the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived — often only through tradition or the force of inertia; also of course the external milieu which surrounds this form of society.

(Selected Correspondence, p.516)

Truth is a Class Affair

Because this adoption of a different view of history is recent, it is still possible to read books published before the “revision” that describe the Asiatic hydraulic societies. There are V. Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself and What Happened in History — and, as a curiosity, the British Communist Party’s Handbook of Marxism. In general, however, the 1939-45 war intervened conveniently to avoid critical arguments; western Communists were able to resume believing, or saying, history had always been so. The final act was an official Russian report in 1950 which announced the consummation of Soviet Oriental studies: “the rout of the notorious theory of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’.”

Wittfogel’s book has established itself as the standard detailed work on Asiatic society, and in 1962 he published two articles in The China Quarterly (nos. 11 and 12) on “The Marxist View of China”. Much more research needs to be done before reaching conclusions, of course. For instance, Wittfogel apparently did not have access to the Grundrisse, and in some observations about the “political myth” of the government’s rôle in various societies he is a long way from understanding either Marx or western history.

Nevertheless, here it is. Marx postulated an Asiatic form of society to which China almost certainly belonged. The Russian state, for its own ideological purpose, set out to erase that it had existed; and the theorists of the new Chinese state, following similar purposes, adopted the re-fashioned analysis of its history. Before crying out at such cynicism, it is as well to remember that every nation has misrepresented its own — and other countries’ — history. The point of the proper Marxist view of history is to see the class interests at work. Lying about the past is a necessary part of lying about the present.

Robert Barltrop