Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 22:40:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Wittfogel's *Oriental Despotism*



I recently finished reading *Oriental Despotism* by Karl August 
Wittfogel. A very interesting work that addresses the kind of societies 
that Marx had referred to as being under the "Asiatic mode of 
production," characterized by hydraulic agricultural systems in arid 
climatic regions administered by very powerful centralized bureaucracies. 
These societies (such as the ancient Chinese dynasties, Sumer, Babylon, 
Assyria, India, Aztecs and Incas, Byzantium, The Arab empires, and to a 
large extent post-Mongol Russia of the czars) had a kind of "generalized 
slavery" (Marx), with corvee labor, ruinous taxes, and so on. The 
important point about them, however, is that Marx, unlike most Marxists, 
never assimilated these civilizations into either the slave or feudal 
modes of production. In fact, he (building on the work of J.S. Mill and 
the classical economists, according to Wittfogel) saw them as static 
societies in which the dialectic of history was essentially frozen. From 
this perspective emerged, for example, his view that British colonialism 
played a 'messianic' (and therefore progressive) role in India, by acting 
as a kind of deus ex machina to jump-start the motor of history. And 
everyone knows how little changed in imperial China for many thousands of 
years. 
	But it is wrong, says Wittfogel, to speak of their having been 
"feudalism" in such countries. The Asiatic mode of production (ignored or 
hastily glossed over by Soviet ideologists since Stalin, and of course by 
maoists, etc.) throws a wrench in the vulgarly progressivist 
marxist-(leninist) schema of the inevitable and unavoidable stages of 
civilization, that is, slavery-feudalism-capitalism-socialism-communism. 
Feudalism properly speaking applied only to western Europe and Japan. 
(Africa I'm not sure about--anyone want to supply some info?) Vast 
regions of the world never experienced it.
	Wittfogel is definitely of the anti-Engels camp (he says *Origin 
of the Family...* is especially mistaken), points to inconsistencies in 
Marx, and criticizes Lenin, saying the Vladimir Ilyich at one time upheld 
Marx's concept of the AMP and had warned of the danger of "Oriental 
restoration" in Russia (viewed as "semi-Asiatic"), later abandoning it. 
He also says that the views of Trotsky and the trotskyists are similarly 
flawed and contradictory. W. devotes a section to Trotsky's (and Harold 
Isaacs's, E. Mandel's et al.) analysis of the Chinese revolution.

Has anyone else on the list read this book and have any comments about it?

A note about Wittfogel: He had an interesting life. He was in the KPD and 
was one of the first in the German left to be interned in the KZ-lager. 
An ethnic German, he was married to a Russian Jewish woman, also a 
Communist, named Olga Lang. She took great personal risks visiting him in 
the camp and agitating for his release. He was released, whereupon they 
fled to the United States. Wittfogel and Lang eventually drifted apart 
politically. He became so embittered against Stalinism that he went 
anti-Communist and even "named the names" before the...hmmm, it wasn't 
HUAC, but something similar--Senate Internal Affairs or something like 
that. Lang, who remained a devoted Communist, refused to speak to him 
after that. At least, that's the tale I'm familiar with.

AT



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