ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION AND THE RETHINKING OF THE INDIAN REVOLUTION

[ From my In the Name of Marx (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2018).]

Marzban Jal

“The fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history”, so Leon Trotsky says in his monumental The History of the Russian Revolution, “is the slow tempo of her development, with the economic backwardness, primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting from it”.[ Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1934), p. 25.] One could replace the words “Russian history” with “Indian history”. The pictures of Russian and Indian histories would be uncannily alike. In India, however, on this very economic backwardness, rose the entire ideological superstructure whose ultimate goal, so we have been told, is Moksha. The formlessness of this cultural superstructure was a reflection of the formlessness of class relations. And behind this formlessness of class relations would stand the Asiatic mode of production and the Indian caste system.
In order to understand the formlessness of class relations within the Asiatic mode of production, it is necessary to look at this mode itself. For the time being I shall denote the Asiatic mode of production in the following simple points. It is important to understand that Indian liberal democracy and capitalism in India have grown from the edifice of the Asiatic mode of production. Not only have liberal democracy and capitalism emerged from the Asiatic mode of production, but also the decaffeinated revolution and fascism triumphant have roots in this mode of production.
In the context of the Indian mode of production—whether India is to be classified as capitalist ripe for the Communist Revolution, or on the contrary whether India is semi-feudal, semi-colonial suited for the New Democratic Revolution or People’s Democratic Revolution (the line held by the Indian Maoists, following Mao’s idea of Bloc of Four Social Classes where the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry, middle class and the national bourgeoisie would lead the revolution)—it is necessary to have a short note on Marx’s own ideas of class and class struggle. And since it is said that class struggle is the bearer of the Communist Revolution, it is important to understand what class struggle means in the Marxist repertoire. It is also important to understand what the character of class is in the Asiatic mode of production and why the formlessness of class and the domination of the caste system with its fetish for rank worship have led to the triumph of fascism in India. What is important to understand here is the nature of social formations in India and whether class relations are present in Indian history and what type of class relations are there, and when and how class relations have developed. Simply copying what Lenin and Mao said on class (the usual practice of the Indian comrades) will not do.
Remember that for Marx the single most important criteria for the understanding of class is that in the material production of life, people get into relation with one another and living as Marx says in “similar conditions”, that “separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition (my insertion, M.J.) to the latter”.[ Karl Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx. Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 170-1.] It is then that “they form a class”.[ Ibid., p. 171.] Living in isolation “without entering into manifold relations with one another” where “their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse”[ Ibid., p. 170.] does not lead to class formation. And if only “local interconnections” exist and “their interest begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class”.[ Ibid., p. 171.]
The question, then is, that would India dominated by caste (and its social organism of isolation and separation), be ripe for class struggle and the Communist Revolution? Or would the Communist Revolution in India be theorised from a perspective different from that already theorised? My argument is that the Asiatic mode of production offers another perspective on the nature of revolution in India, a revolution that cannot be predicated on the revolutions that took place in the 20th century.
It is with this noting of class and another perspective of revolution in India that I turn to the question of the Asiatic mode of production. I base my reading of the Asiatic mode of production on three grounds:

The state as sovereign. Here the state is understood as the sovereign and as the sovereign takes the form of what Marx calls the “absolute landlord”.[ Karl Marx, ‘To Frederick Engels, in London’ Manchester, June 6, 1853, in Marx. Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 80.]
The caste mode of production, where the Caste Overlord is the sovereign. Here sovereignty lies with what Marx calls “village corporations” which are defined as “separate communities and republics” and realised as “idyllic republics” based on “slavery and the caste system”[ Ibid.]
The emergence of feudo-capitalism with the advent of British colonialism.

It must be noted that the Asiatic mode of production, or should one say here the Indic-variation of the Asiatic mode, has all these three intrinsically woven both in its economic belly as well as etched in its ideological cranium. These three grounds stand even today. What I shall also say is that the faulty basis for analysing the mode of production—argued in the simple binary: “semi-feudalism or capitalism” (to borrow the repertoire of Alice Throner[ See Alice Thorner, ‘Semi-feudalism or Capitalism? Contemporary Debates on Classes and Modes of Production in India’, in Economic and Political Weekly, December 4, 1982.]—lies in the inability to understand the Asiatic mode of production, especially the three grounds that I just outlined.
It is with the question of the state as sovereign and patron that controlled all land and labour activities that I begin the question of the Asiatic mode of production. This Asiatic state, or the Tributary State as Samir Amin calls it headed by a “despot”, was involved in economic activity, albeit economic activity largely of an unproductive type in the capitalist sense of the term—unproductive production—where surplus was not reabsorbed in the production process (i.e. in the modern context: in the circuit of capital).[ Remember that when the neoliberals after 1991 called the Indian Nehruvian state a ‘socialist’ state, it was a misnomer. The Nehruvian state (with its industrial licensing regime) in a certain sense was a continuation of the classical Asian state as sovereign and patron.] This mode of production rendered “the expansion of production more or less impossible and reduced the direct produces to the physical minimum of means of subsistence”.[ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), p. 796] What happened here is that restricted productive consumption took place, meaning that consumption of means of production by labour power and consumption of labour power by capital[ See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Eduard Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), pp 178-9.] was (and yet is) stunted. Here surplus produced was not absorbed in the circuit of capital. Instead it was unproductive consumption that took place where the parasitical classes consumed the surplus, stunted the production of surplus as well as repressed the emergence of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat. The formlessness of class relations is situated within this very context.
In the classical formulation of the Asiatic state, economic production was dependent on the state as sovereign. Surplus in the form of the political economy of the Asiatic mode took the form of tax-rent. The state as tax and rent collector was realised as an Oligarchic state under the guardianship of what Marx calls the “Oriental despot”. In India this Oriental despot appears as the “Brahmanical Overlord”. As patron it developed (and continuously develops to this day) a patron-client relation that is deeply institutionalised governing entire economic, political, ideological and cultural life-worlds. “Surplus labour”, in this mode of production, to quote Marx, “belongs to the higher community (i.e. the Asiatic state, my insertion, M.J.), which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus labour appears as tribute, etc….for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despots, partly of the imagined clan—being the god”.[ Karl Marx, Grundrisse trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 473.]
The distinct feature of this Asiatic state is that besides it being a highly centralised state, is the tax-rent-receiving sovereign despot and as rent-receiving sovereign appears, as Marx says, as the “supreme lord”.[ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, p. 791]
Next to this supreme lord stands the caste mode of production with the parasitical castes controlling the economic, social, cultural and political spaces is the second level of the Indian variant of the Asiatic mode of production. The labouring castes are seen as fragmented labour communities in opposition to the parasitical-exploiting castes. The state as Brahmanical Overlord represses the subaltern castes and their life-worlds. Labour is seen as unclean as also the ideology of labour thus giving rise to the manufactured ideology of “spiritualism”. This is the necessary part of the sedentary character of Indian history dominated by the caste system. Stagnancy and the ideology of stagnancy, along with the fetishism for hierarchical society based on status groupism and the ideology of rank society, dominate the Indian mode of production. The ideology of stagnancy and the dominance of the Brahmanical castes are expressed in the form of rituals and the suppression of rationality.
The post-colonial mode of production which I call “feudo-capitalism” or “Indian caste-capitalism” where generalised commodity production takes place, combined with the Oligarchic state, based on rank worship and the caste mode of production (albeit modernised in contemporary times). It is important to note that by “feudo-capitalism” one does mean a European type of feudalism. Feudo-capitalism as a part of the Asiatic mode of production is not the same as R.S. Sharma’s idea of “Indian feudalism”. In feudo-capitalism, the bureaucracy of the modern nation state emerges as a caste group and thus as a political enclosed class dominating the subaltern classes in the forms of State Landlordism and State Monopoly Capitalism. The Managerial Corporate State that is now put in place after the triumph of the Indian fascists will be based on the edifice of the Oligarchic state.
These three points I shall reiterate as the leitmotiv of the Asiatic mode of production—or to be precise the Indic variation of the Asiatic mode. The scientific understanding of the labouring castes is seen within this new mode of production based essentially in the informal and unorganised sectors. These subaltern castes are also seen as the pool of surplus labour and parts of the surplus population. Whether this surplus population is also a part of what Marx calls the Industrial Reserve Army remains to be seen. But these subaltern labouring castes are most certainly like the “great refusal” (to borrow Herbert Marcuse’s term), even like the existentialist “hellish other” (that Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out in his works).
To put it briefly and also to locate the subaltern castes within the ambit of the caste mode of production, I am recalling an earlier observation of mine:

One will consequently have to look at the idea of the Asiatic mode of production from a perspective other than that of both Eurocentrism and the poststructuralist discourses influenced by Edward Said. The ‘unchanging’ character of pre-capitalist India that Marx talked of is to be seen in three perspectives: (1) that of the economic base where a form of sedentary type of culture arose based on a tributary mode of production, (2) where the Asiatic state because of its heavy investments in irrigation projects absorbed the surplus leaving little room for what Marx calls “productive consumption”, thereby suppressing the emergence of a dynamic proto-bourgeois and the development of both cities and the sciences, thus leaving the caste-based agriculture economy and culture dominating the Indian life-world, and (3) the Brahmanical counterrevolution in the realm of ideology that synthesised the above two points in the realms of theology, rituals and ideology.[ See my ‘Asiatic Mode of Production, Caste and the Indian Left’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLIX, No. 19, May 10, 2014, p. 44.]

What one needs to understand is that the Asiatic mode of production was not a mode that existed in some distant past. Instead one needs to see how capitalism grew from its edifice, while retaining the characteristics of the state as sovereign and Caste Overlordship. It is in this new perspective that we shall see the location of the modes of production debate, the relation between pre-capitalist social formations with capitalism, as also the relation between caste and class. It is also in this new perspective that we see how subaltern labouring caste groups become parts of surplus labour where the creation of “subsistence economy” and “informal sector” takes place within contemporary capital accumulation in India. By and large, almost all shadows of the Indian Left have ignored this economic sector, just as they have ignored caste and the reproduction of caste in modern India.
Caste here is not understood merely as primitive division of labour, a view that was held by D.D. Kosambi’[ See D.D. Kosambi The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 2000), p. 50. ], but is something more complex”, a complexity which continues to thrive in India. And it is this very overdetermined complexity that, by and large, the Indian Left missed out. The linking of caste with modern classes, thus the linking of caste with industrial capitalism and the global accumulation of capital remains the leitmotiv of understanding the nature of revolution in India.
Further the incorrect understanding of the Asiatic mode of production as a legacy of Eurocentric thinking, where an alleged superior Europe sought to theorise on a so-called inferior Asia, has led to disastrous effects. Yet it is important to point out that the Asiatic mode of production is indeed not only the most controversial topic in the social sciences, it is what Brendan O’Leary once called the “most controversial mode of production”.[ Brendan O’Leary, The Asiatic Mode of Production. Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 7-39. ] What needs to be done is to sort out this controversy. At the very beginning what I will claim is that it is imperative to understand is that Marx’s idea of the Asiatic mode of production has almost nothing to do with Eurocentric thinking, has nothing thus to do with the 13th century translation of Aristotle’s Politics, nothing to do with the development of the so-called “science of politics” by Machiavelli. Thus it is imperative to understand that Marx’s idea is not to be confused with either the Latin interpretations of Aristotle or with the works of Jean Bodin, Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Nor has one to confuse Marx’s idea with that of Richard Jones’ analysis of pre-capitalist Asia in his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, though Marx did refer to Jones repeatedly. For Marx, the Asiatic mode of production is not a normative discourse. It is not like Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism which drew a fictitious line of demarcation between apparent ‘free’ societies of the West and an alleged ‘totalitarian’ Eastern world. Instead the Asiatic mode of production is a specific and concrete mode of production, existing in its own right, following its own internal mechanism. It cannot be reduced to the same mechanisms of slave, feudal and capitalist societies of Western Europe as the Indian Left has wrongly being doing. As we shall see in the course of this introduction, there will be three different structures within the Asiatic mode of production: the centralised Oligarchic state, caste-stratified village communities and communities defying both the state and the caste system.
Remember that the idea that the Asiatic mode of production is a product of the colonial mind is false where a supposed ‘mystical and idealist East’ stood in contrast to a ‘rational and scientific West’. The Asiatic mode of production draws no “imaginary line” (to borrow Edward Said’s term)[ See Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 3.]. It does not deal with “the romance, exotic locales, and mystery of ‘the marvels of the East’”.[ Ibid.] If the poststructuralist Said was mistaken in his understanding of Marx, so is Irfan Habib mistaken. Because Habib—and remember that Habib is the finest Marxist historian on India—also puts (like Said, but without referring to Said’s Orientalism) Marx as following Hegelian (thus European) “inherited generalisations”[ Irfan Habib, ‘Marx’s Perception of India’, in Karl Marx. On India, ed. Iqbal Husain (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006), pp. XX-XXII.] on India, I am taking Habib as the epistemic point of departure to rethink the idea of the Asiatic mode of production as against Habib’s observations on Marx.
It must be noted that Marx does not oppose “Oriental despotism” to British freedom, following the imperialist Macaulay, as Habib seems to imply.[ Ibid., p. XXVII, n. 46.] Note Habib’s observations:

When Marx wrote in 1853 of Indian society before the British conquest, he seems to have taken as his starting point the descriptive elements in Hegel’s interpretation of Indian civilisation. ‘The Hindoos have no history’, Hegel had said, ‘no growth expanding into a veritable political condition.’ The admitted diffusion of Indian culture had been ‘a dumb, deedless expansion’. Thus, ‘the people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but have on every occasion been vanquished themselves.’ It is essentially this judgment that is repeated by Marx in his well-known passage: ‘Indian society has no history, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.’[ Ibid., p. XX.]

Also according to Habib, Marx gave:

….identical descriptions of the village community for which he quotes in extenso from what was probably Hegel’s authority as well as a passage from the celebrated Fifth Report of 1812.[ Ibid., p. XXI.]

Habib’s claim is that Hegel mentioning in his Philosophy of History of Caste Oligarchy as “the most degrading spiritual serfdom” and Marx’s statement in his British Rule in India where Hinduism “rendered murder itself a religious rite” were both aspects of Eurocentric imagination.[ Ibid. ] Habib continues, Marx was not “simply repeating Hegel”.[ Ibid.] Instead, according to Habib, “Marx had to begin from such assessments of Indian culture as happened to be the accepted one among the best bourgeois thinkers of his day.”[ Ibid., pp. XXI-XXII.]
Habib seems to ignore Marx’s multilinear theory of history. Subscribing to a great extent to the teleological-unilinear theory of history, the Asiatic mode of production is seen as a “lower position.”[ Ibid., p. XXXIII.] Habib’s reading of Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where the Asiatic mode of production is recognised, Marx is seen as appearing as “confident that the ‘Asiatic’ merited a separate place in the classification of the major ‘modes of production’ in human history.”[ Ibid., p. XXI.] But because of the teleological model of history that Habib seems to give consent to—i.e. history moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’—typical of 19th and 20th century evolution theory, the Asiatic mode of production is seen as a ‘low’ stage in human development.
There is without doubt no absolute peculiarity of the East. The East is no exotic or evil land of tales of either splendor or poverty. Nor is the East caught in an alleged ‘low’ mode of production. Instead I will talk of “relative peculiarity”[ See Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 159. ] based on a concrete analysis of modes of production, economic systems and social formations. Thus instead of the Orientalist thesis that a great abyss of the West that separates itself from the East, I shall mention in Trotsky’s terminology as “combined and uneven development” of Europe and Asia.
Being careful about terminology is of great importance. A brief note on Marx’s characterisation of the “Oriental despot” is thus necessary. Marx’s idea of this “Oriental despot” is not anyway opposed to the free thinking liberal European. As we shall see, Oriental despotism—and here we are talking of the Indian variant of the Asiatic mode of production—is linked almost directly to the Indian caste system and the cunning hegemony of caste oligarchy. Hegel’s “cunning of reason” can now be transcribed as the “cunning of the unreason of the Caste Oligarchs”.
Consider this celebrated and much quoted passage from Marx where he talks of: “Idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental Despotism, that they had restrained the human mind within the smallest compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.”[ Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, in On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 40.] Marx also talks of the psychotic character of caste where what he calls “barbarian egotism” concentrates all its energies on “some miserable piece of land” while “quietly witnessing the ruin of empires, the perpetuation of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events…”.[ Ibid.] This caste mode of production or this form of the life-world of caste is “undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative”.[ Ibid.] It is realised as the “wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction” that “rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan”.[ Ibid.]
And in the age of triumphant fascism where a large section of the Indian population is declared as traitors and terrorists who wage their imaginary and phantasmagorical bloody wars on the even more imagined poor Indian state and the even poorer holy land of India, but in contrast where cows are declared as first citizens; we find how revealing is Marx’s 1853 statement where there is a spectacle of the fascist barbarians that exhibits human “degradation in the fact that humanity, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow”.[ Ibid., pp. 40-41.] If in 1853 it was found that humanity was kneeling before monkeys and cows, after 2014 the Indian populace is made to kneel before the fascist barbarians.

Dialectical Reading of the Asiatic Mode of Production: The State and Communes

A further qualification of the Asiatic state is necessary so as not to confuse it with European feudalism. Consider Marx:

Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land.[ Ibid.]

There is a parallel reading of Engels that we need to consider. The reading of Engels goes through a historical materialist reading. It ought not to be confused with a single-tiered reductionist understanding of this mode of production. As we shall see later, there will be a class of landlords (zamindars) developing as the third tier of Lordship, the first being the state, while the second tier will be Brahmanical Overlordship:

The absence of landed property is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Therein lies its political and religious history. But how to explain the fact that Orientals never reached the stage of landed property, not even the feudal kind? This is, I think, largely due to the climate, combined with the nature of the land, more especially the great stretches of desert extending from the Sahara right across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary to the highest of the Asiatic uplands. Here artificial irrigation is the first prerequisite for agriculture, and this is the responsibility either of the communes, the provinces or the central government. In the East, the government has always consisted of 3 departments only: Finance (pillage at home), War (pillage at home and abroad), and travaux publics, provision for reproduction. The British government in India has put a somewhat narrower interpretation on nos. 1 and 2 while completely neglecting no. 3, so that Indian agriculture is going to wrack and ruin. Free competition is proving an absolute fiasco there.[ Frederick Engels, ‘To Karl Marx in London, Manchester, June 6, 1853’, in Marx. Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 39 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), pp. 335-6. ]

The lack of property in land and the inability to create feudal landed property at least till the advent of British colonialism signifies two conflicting arguments. The first argument is that there were communes in Asia (alongside the state as despot and Brahmanical Overlordship), which opens the space of radical collectivity in non-Western societies based on a process of collectivisation and individuation within this collective. The second argument is that there had already developed social divisions based on caste and clans where there was lack of both collectivity and individuality with the dominance of caste, community and state over individuals and subaltern social groups. In the case of the dominance of the caste system, we get formlessness of class relations in Asia—what Marx calls in a different context: a “sack of potatoes”[ Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, p. 170.]—where a type of formlessness develops that has given rise to fascism. Individuality (not individualism, but individuality as critical subjectivity) here is also related to reason—reason that would be destroyed by the caste system. Marx’s argument that the “positing of the individual as worker…..is itself a product of history” would take a different form in Asia [ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 472.]
Here it is important to ask: Is capitalism a necessary stage in history and that communism could only come with the development of capitalism? Or would it be possible to skip the entire capitalist mode of production?” It is in this critique of the absolute necessity of capitalism that we see pre-capitalist communities, as Kevin Anderson says, “as building blocks for an alternative form of modernity”.[ Kevin Anderson, Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity, (2010), http///www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles. ] And that is why I am saying that Marx’s idea of the Asiatic mode of production should not be read as a static civilisation that has reached its dead end, where colonialism was needed for India to progress. Remember that in 1858, a year after the revolution against British rule in India, Marx writes to Engels, “India is our best ally”.[ Karl Marx, ‘To Frederick Engels in Manchester’, London, 16 January, 1858’, Marx. Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010) p. 249. See also Kevin Anderson, op.cit. ] In the same letter, Marx is talking of reading Hegel’s Science of Logic and articulating the dialectical reading of capital accumulation. Marx’s idea of the Asiatic mode of production is anti-elite, anti-colonial and anti-Eurocentric. Here I would agree with Anderson that Marx was

….suggesting that pre-capitalist Asian societies had been on a different historical trajectory. Moreover, although the Asiatic mode of production was said to be based on a rather static form of community property, Marx no longer saw it as necessarily “despotic” referring also to “democratic” forms of community governance in pre-colonial societies.[ Kevin Anderson, op. cit. Anderson uses the terms “communal property” and “communal governance” which in the Indian context has a reverse meaning. I have replaced the word “communal” with the term “community”.]

“Despotic” and “democratic” governance in the Asiatic mode have to be seen in terms of conflicting social groups—the elites and the subalterns. In more than one sense of the term the stalwarts of the Indian Left (including D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib) do not seem to have seen the Asiatic mode of production as an alternative mode of production that provides an alternative path to communism. The reason for this faulty reading in Indian history is that Marx’s notes on non-Western societies have been completely ignored by the Indian Left. Anderson says that Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in the period 1879-82 comprise 90,000 words on the Indian subcontinent.[ Ibid.] The Indian Left seems to have been oblivious to this section of Marx’s repertoire. Anderson further says that a large part of these Notebooks for Marx “have yet to be published”.[ Ibid.]
What is clear from Marx’s writings based on Maxim Kovalevsky’s 1879 Communal Landownership and Robert Sewell’s 1870 Analytic History of India that Indian society “from below”—i.e. the society of the artisans, craftsmen and peasants—was far from static. The idea of “stagnant Asia” is seen from the perspective of the critique of the ruling elite. It is not on stagnancy in economic production, but changes in forms of commune property relations—from “clan or kin-based communities to village communities not organised on kinship that periodically divided the common land on an equal basis”[ Ibid.]—that Marx’s subaltern historiography points out. One also finds in Marx’s writings “social antagonisms…within the non-kinship based rural commune.”[ Ibid.] This dynamic of Indian history has to be noted. Unfortunately post-Kovalevsky and post-Marx, the history of communes in pre-capitalist India has yet to be written. The obsession with capitalist modernity and with European ideological thinking has made the ideas of private property and capitalism as timeless fetishes. For Marx, the capitalism which he analyses in Capital was the history of capitalism as it emerged in Western Europe. In “England alone”, as Marx says, “which we take as our example has it the classical form.”[ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 670. See also Karl Marx, ‘First Draft of the Reply to V.I. Zasulich’s Letter’, in Marx. Engels. Selected Works in Three Volumes. Volume Three (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 152.] Marx says that England serves as the “classical ground”[ Karl Marx, ‘Preface to the German Edition’, Capital, Vol. I, p. 19.] for the development of his ideas. But there are also other grounds, from the non-capitalist basis—a feature that he keeps central to his Ethnological Notebooks—which serves as an alternative path in historical studies. What happens is that these alternative paths meet. What is to be noted is the character of this meeting place. Would it be brutal capitalism being thrust on the non-capitalist world? Or would it imply that revolutions start not from the capitalist world, but from the margins of capitalism, revolutions that should ignite also revolutions in Europe and North America?
The point is to understand the nature of the revolutionary subject emerging in different cultures. What happens in India is that the caste system would crush all forms of rebellion, since it would also crush the ideas of individuality, collectivity and critical thinking. After all it is important to note that the “crisis of reason” to recall Max Horkheimer, “is manifested in the crisis of the individual”.[ Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 87.] It is in this context of alternative histories and alternatives forms of property—especially with the idea of no property of land in Asia—that I claim that since there are accusations against Marx that the idea of no property of land in Asia was false (thereby falsifying Marx’s idea of the Asiatic mode of production and arguing for a unilinear theory of history combined with the idea of “Indian feudalism”), it is imperative to state that Marx made no generalised statements of “no property in land” in Asia. For instance in his 1853 letter to Engels, Marx talks of property in land in South India.[ Karl Marx, ‘To Frederick Engels, in London’ Manchester, June 6, 1853, in Marx. Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 80.] It is imperative to understand how private property developed in India, how Manu’s laws and Brahmanism were instituionalised in the development of private property and how caste and caste alliances dominated the history of the development of private property. What is important to understand is that the state as sovereign with highly centralised powers differentiated state power in Asia from Medieval Europe. What is also important is to differentiate property relations and classes emanating thereon from the European model of class formation.
There are a number of points that one needs to note on the specificity of Indian history. For one, it has been noted that the Asiatic state did not emerge from class contradictions (a point that Irfan Habib critiques), but emerged as a bureaucratic elite which was itself part of an economic system[See Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 101]. Secondly concentration of power was not merely on economic differences, but primarily on social ones built on the principle of social stratification[ Ibid.]. The absence of private property in the West European sense and the lack of individuation led to the ‘civilisational’ lethargy, an Asian Confucianism, which impeded economic and political development[ Ibid., p. 102.]. But this does not mean that private property as such did not exist in India. Note what Marx once said about the emergence of private property with the dominance of the Brahmanical priest class:

The priestly pack thus plays a central role in the process of individualisation of family property. The chief sign of undivided family property is its inalienability. In order to get this property, the legislation, which is developed under Brahman influence, must attack this bastion more and more…(What we find in India is, my insertion, M.J.) that gifts to the priest first, precede every other mode of alienation of immovable property. [ Karl Marx, ‘Excerpts from M.M. Kovalevsky’, in The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, trans. Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 366-67. Also see Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 210.]

It is this character of the dominance of the priestly class as Brahmanical Overlords that is directly related to the second tier of the Asiatic mode of production, namely the emergence of Caste Overlordship. At this point it is important to note that the idea of Brahmanical Overlordship is not to be seen as existing in some remote past, or only with political reactionaries. It is something so deeply woven in Indian society that not only the liberal, but even the Indian communists were and are unfortunately yet seduced by it. Just look at the top brass of the Indian Left and you will find the Brahmanical Overlords—though dressed as one must confess in the uniform of Josef Stalin.
“Scratch a Russian Communist”, so Lenin said in 1919 “and you will find a Great Russian Chauvinist”[ V.I. Lenin, ‘Speech Closing the Debate on the Party Programme’, March 19, 1919, at the Eight Congress of the R.C.P.(B), in V.I. Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 194.]. How true these words seem for India! The words however could be rewritten as: “Scratch an Indian party elite and you will find the soul of the Brahmanical Overlord residing in his unfortunate breast.” To illustrate, note a recent textbook of the Communist Party of India (CPI) written by Anil Rajimwale. Note how this A Brief History of the CPI: Through the Party Congresses locates the legacy of the Indian communist movement in Swami Vivekananda, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai.[ Anil Rajimwale. A Brief History of the CPI: Through the Party Congresses (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 2012), pp. 3, 5.] This ideology of Brahmanical Overlordship is based on ritualistic and elitist ideology which promotes nothing but stagnancy. This is how I am reworking on Marx’s idea of stagnancy.
To come to the main features of this stagnancy, let us reflect on “stagnant Asiatic despotism”[ Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 79.] which is said to be based on:

…two circumstances which supplement each other: 1). The public works were the business of the central government, 2). besides, this the whole empire was divided into villages, each of which possessed a completely separate organisation and formed a little world in itself.[ Ibid., p. 313.]

What I am claiming is that this two tiered structure is what Louis Althusser would call “structure in dominance” or the structure of the dominant classes. This structure of the dominant classes cannot be confused with a civilisational reading of Asia.
Further: village society dominated by the caste system was (and yet is) controlled “village corporations”[ Karl Marx, ‘Lord Canning’s’ Proclamation and Land Tenure in India’, in On Colonialism, p. 192.]—the Panchayats—while the “zamindars and talukdars were nothing but officers of the Government, appointed to look after, to collect, and to pay over the prince the assessment due from the village.”[ Ibid.] The zamindars were the “middlemen”[ Ibid. ] who took the form of “feudal landholders[ Ibid., p. 193.], while the state is seen as the “sole proprietor”.[ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 472.] “Real communities” in this Asiatic mode are only “hereditary possessors”.[ Ibid., p. 473.] This is what Irfan Habib calls, “State Landlordism”.[ Irfan Habib, ‘Marx’s Perception of India’, in Karl Marx. On India, ed. Iqbal Husain, p. XXXVIII.] After the 1793 permanent settlement of Lord Cornwallis a class of zamindars was created who would cease being sole tax collectors for the Mughal state. These zamindars would be the New Landlords. To quote Kevin Anderson:

Cornwallis’ “permanent settlement” of 1793, which made the zamindars, formerly hereditary tax farmers for the Mughal Empire, into landlords. The zamindars therefore gained unrestricted capitalist-style ownership over the areas they had formerly only taxed, including the right to evict those who were their tenants, the ryots, and the right to pass down these new acquisitions to their heirs.[ Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-western Societies, p. 211.]

What happens here is that this legacy of State Landlordism, Caste Overlordship and New Landlordism is inherited by modern India. The subaltern labouring castes became clients of this State Landlordism, Caste Overlordship and New Landlordism. They were left in the peripheries of village society in pre-capitalist India, and in contemporary times are left in the peripheries of both village society and civil society. Here it is important to note what Ambedkar said about the village:

I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. I am therefore surprised that those who condemn Provincialism and communalism should come forward as champions of the village. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.[ B.R. Ambedkar, ‘On the Draft Constitution’, in Thus Spoke Ambedkar. Vol. I. A Stake in the Nation, ed. Bhagwan Das (New Delhi: Navayana, 2010), p. 176.]

In contemporary neoliberal times, the den of ignorance along with landlordism remains. What happens is that the character of the state takes the form of the Managerial Corporate State, but this form of Managerial Corporate State reiterates the totalitarian form of the classical Indian variant of the Asiatic state. Bureaucracy and rank worship, essential factors of the Asiatic state, also appear as the essences of the modern Indian state. Unlike feudalism in Europe that gave birth to a proto-bourgeois from the wombs of the artisan classes, the economic and cultural repression of the artisans (mainly classified as unclean-untouchables through the rituality of Brahmanical-Hindu religion as “religion from above”), did not give rise to the radical anti-feudal bourgeoisie.

Pre-capitalist Societies and the Question of “Direct Socialism”

In contrast to both the Orientalists who imagined India to be a part of the ‘low’ culture of development and also in contrast to the teleological theoreticians who worked with concocted ideas of evolution, I am talking of complex histories within the Asiatic mode of production and the possibilities of “direct socialism” for the Asiatic mode of production, i.e. a direct jump skipping the entire capitalist mode of production. What I am saying is that there is a genre called “Marx’s late writings on non-Western societies” which have largely not been recognised by the Left in India. And this is despite Theodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road and Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins. What needs to be understood is that there are different perspectives argued for understanding social formations in non-European societies and these different perspectives are from a non-European viewpoint. And because of the lack of articulating this very important aspect of Marxism, the tendency to understand non-European societies came from the Mao-inspired articulation of agrarian societies which missed out Marx’s important contributions as he had envisiaged in his Ethnological Notebooks, a work that was published only partially and only for the first time in 1974 by Lawrence Krader. Even stalwarts of Indian history like Habib have said that these Notebooks are “not available to me”.[ Irfan Habib, op. cit., p. XXXIV, n. 84.] The impression one got of Marx’s understanding of India was only from his articles in the New York Tribune from 1853-1861 and the Marx-Engels correspondence (1852-62) and that too from the faulty thinking that I outlined in the previous section.
The result was that complex social formations and their internal dynamics were missed out. What was missed out was also the dynamics that could lead these societies directly to socialism without going through the process of capitalism. Not much has been said of this form of “direct socialism”. A brief note on this is therefore extremely necessary. Writing in 1881, especially after the then Narodniki radical Vera Zasulich had written to Marx about the problems of socialist action in pre-capitalist Russia, Marx had claimed that Russia because of “unique combinations of circumstances” could compel the village commune to discard its primitive features and develop “collective production on a national scale”, where one need not go through the “dreadful vicissitudes” of capitalism.[ Karl Marx, ’First Draft of the Reply to V.I. Zasulich’s Letter’, p. 153. ]
What has been the tragic irony of history is that the very same “dreadful vicissitudes” of capitalism were carried through perfection by Stalin. What also needs being said that even today a large part of the Indian Left have not been able to understand these same “dreadful vicissitudes” of capitalism. In this very ironic situation and inspired by a form of Revolutionary Cynicism one chalks out a path of direct socialism that is able to skip the teleology of these very dreadful vicissitudes. What I am saying is that one should not be obsessed with a form of class-fetishism where only class in a West European type matters and nothing else. In this new reading one proceeds to a non-teleological understanding of history whereby one is able to articulate the idea of “subject positions” instead of the idea of the “vanguard classes”. In this new perspective the historical conjuncture of class struggles in India from the perspective of South Asia is sought and thereby one finds both real social formations, as well as finds out how the unity of the Indian popular classes is possible.
And it is in this site that one claims that in more than one way the disconnect of the mainstream Political Left from the labouring masses is based on a strange form of spurious theorisation of India, a theorisation that almost misses out Marx’s original contributions to the study of non-Western societies. Despite Marx’s warnings in 1877 that there could be “no general path of development prescribed for all nations” [ Karl Marx, ‘Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski’, London, Nov., 1877, in Marx. Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 293.]and that historical materialism did not have a “master-key” to study each and every society,[ Ibid.] what happened is that even the best scholars theorising on India worked with this general path of development prescribed for all nations governed by the phantasmagorical master-key. Consider the following from Marx’s letter to Zasulich where the idea of the iron laws of history is placed in the hermeneutics of suspicion. And because a form of Marxism articulated a theory of the iron laws of history, all history was seen as necessarily going through the process from primitive communism via slave society, feudalism and capitalism to socialism. Note Marx’s critique of this point of view:

One should be on one’s guard when reading the histories of primitive communities written by bourgeois historians. They do not stop at anything, even outright distortion. Sir Henry Maine, for example, who was an ardent active supporter of the British government in its policy of destroying Indian communes by force, tells us hypocritically that all noble efforts on the part of the government to support these communes were thwarted by the elementary force of these laws! [ Karl Marx, ’First Draft of the Reply to V.I. Zasulich’s Letter’, p. 154). ]
and

In my analysis of the origin of capitalist production I stated that its secret lies in the fact that it is based on ‘divorcing the producer from the means of production’ and that ‘the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different accepts….In England, alone, which we take as our example, has it the classical form.’ In so doing I expressly limited the ‘historical inevitability’ of this process to the countries of Western Europe.[ Ibid, p. 152.]

What happened is that the Left in India could not understand what capitalism in its classical form meant. They also could not understand that Marx implies a limit to the reading of the development of capitalism in Europe, a limit that has to be transcended. Instead the Indian Left has by and large mechanically applied what they thought Marx said in their study of the Indian mode of production. What needs being done is arguing for a new reading of Marx’s study of India.
Consider the class-fetishism that the Indian Left suffers from. I shall once again turn to Habib. Habib notes that for Eric Hobsbawn, “the Asiatic system is not yet a class society, or if it is a class society, then it is a primitive form of it.”[ Irfan Habib, op.cit., p. XXXI.] Habib further says, “If no classes then no class struggle.”[ Ibid., p. XXXI.] In opposition to this form of class-fetishism I am recalling Engels 1888 note the lead sentence from the Manifesto of the Communist Party: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”[ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Marx. Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 35-6, n.]:

That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Hauxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social formation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communist society was laid bare, in its typical form by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonist classes.[ Ibid., n, pp. 35-6.]

What needs being recognised is that besides classes there are also other non-class formations which need critical and scientific exploration. What happens with this new reading of Marx is that not only is the idea of iron laws of history questioned, but also the necessity and inevitability of capitalism is critiqued. Because what happened in the old reading of iron laws of history, is that one had a dislocation of real history from the imagination of the hitherto known Left scholars, such that the most important “moment” (to borrow a term from Hegel) is missed out, namely the moment of class conjunctions and their relation to the Indian caste system. This dislocation would not allow the following: (1) the study of the emergence of the revolutionary proletariat in India, (2) what caste means even today, and (3) what the radical anti-caste thinkers from Jyotiba Phule to Ambedkar meant. This dislocation would not allow a Radical Left imagination of the understanding of the programme of the annihilation of caste and its relation to direct socialism.
In this site of direct socialism one says that the stages theory that the Indian Left believes in: namely that a bourgeois democratic revolution has to precede a socialist revolution is as false as the belief that history is an automaton governed by a puppet master. One knows that Walter Benjamin had critiqued this type of mechanical reasoning. Consider Benjamin:

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.[ Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Colins, 1979), p. 255.]

Since we all know that there is no expert chess player guiding the puppet and since we know that history is no automaton, but comprises of real people with real needs, one would have to re-think the idea of Indian history from a Radical Left perspective.

Class Formlessness and Fascism as Political Moksha

Classes, class struggle and class solidarity are, as we all well know, the basis of Marxist science of historical materialism. The formation of proletarian class formation and class solidarity would need what Marx calls “common existence” and “common interest”.[ Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), pp. 159-60.] In India, this commonness would manifest itself not so much as in proletarian class solidarity, as in the brutal antagonism of caste groups built on monopolistic power, rank worship, the upper caste ideology of “labour as outcaste” and a parasitical-auAsiatic Mode of Production and the Rethinking of the Indian Revolution

Also according to Habib, Marx gave:

Dialectical Reading of the Asiatic Mode of Production: The State and Communes

A further qualification of the Asiatic state is necessary so as not to confuse it with European feudalism. Consider Marx:

It is this character of the dominance of the priestly class as Brahmanical Overlords that is directly related to the second tier of the Asiatic mode of production, namely the emergence of Caste Overlordship. At this point it is important to note that the idea of Brahmanical Overlordship is not to be seen as existing in some remote past, or only with political reactionaries. It is something so deeply woven in Indian society that not only the liberal, but even the Indian communists were and are unfortunately yet seduced by it. Just look at the top brass of the Indian Left and you will find the Brahmanical Overlords—though dressed as one must confess in the uniform of Josef Stalin.
“Scratch a Russian Communist”, so Lenin said in 1919 “and you will find a Great Russian Chauvinist”. How true these words seem for India! The words however could be rewritten as: “Scratch an Indian party elite and you will find the soul of the Brahmanical Overlord residing in his unfortunate breast.” To illustrate, note a recent textbook of the Communist Party of India (CPI) written by Anil Rajimwale. Note how this A Brief History of the CPI: Through the Party Congresses locates the legacy of the Indian communist movement in Swami Vivekananda, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai.[ Anil Rajimwale. A Brief History of the CPI: Through the Party Congresses (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 2012), pp. 3, 5.] This ideology of Brahmanical Overlordship is based on ritualistic and elitist ideology which promotes nothing but stagnancy. This is how I am reworking on Marx’s idea of stagnancy.
To come to the main features of this stagnancy, let us reflect on “stagnant Asiatic despotism”[ Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 79.] which is said to be based on:

Pre-capitalist Societies and the Question of “Direct Socialism”

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