Abstract
Thus Marx was led to conclude that there was no potential for autonomous development within societies based on the Asiatic mode of production. Just as classical society lacked ‘creative capacity’ and had to await the external impetus of ‘barbaric vitality’, so Asiatic society was to receive the requisite stimulus from European colonialism.
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Notes
Marx has adopted the observations of Sir Stamford Raffles, Governor of Java during the British occupation (1811–16), on this point: ‘Under this simple form... the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even devastated by war, famine and disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged.’ (Marx, Das Kapital, vol. I, p. 376; Eng. trans. p. 352.) It was also with a quote from Raffles that Marx noted elsewhere how European colonialism could superimpose itself on the Asiatic system without destroying it, and make use of it for its own ends. The Dutch East India Company, for instance, in Governor Raffles’ opinion, ‘employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labour, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous government by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians and all the monopolising selfishness of traders’, and in Marx’s opinion ‘it is sufficient literally to repeat’ those words ‘to characterise the working of the British East India Company’. For Marx, ‘European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism’ formed ‘a more monstrous combination than any of the monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette’. (Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, p. 23, in Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 578–9.) (The quotations from Raffles are from The History of Java, London, 1817, vol. I, pp. 285, 151.) On the mechanism of colonial exploitation in the ‘Asiatic’ context cf. Enrica Collotti Pischel, ‘Natura e caratteri dello sfruttamento coloniale e neocoloniale nei paesi ad alta intensità demografica’ in Terzo Mondo (Milan), vol. I, no. 1 July–Sept. 1968) pp. 45–7. A similar method of colonial exploitation has come to light during some recent research into those American Indian areas mentioned by Marx in ‘Asiatic’ terms. Here too there was a social and economic structure ‘based on intensive agriculture and the exploitation of a huge class of agricultural labourers’. The Spaniards ‘placed themselves at the top of the hierarchy and governed the mass of the population through native intermediaries in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy.’ (R. Erman Service, ‘Indian-European Relations in Colonial Latin America’, in American Anthropologist, no. 57 (1955) p. 416.) As a result, the colonisers did no more than impose tribute, without bringing about those profound transformations that were so common in the plains and along the coasts. Thus pre-Columbian forms of social organisation have been preserved in those areas up to the present day. (Cf. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Les classes sociales dans les sociétés agraires, Editions Anthropos, Paris 1969
Fernando Guillen Martínez, Raiz y futuro de la revolutión, Ediciones Tercer Mundo, Bogotá, 1963, pp. 76–7
That is the attitude taken in a recent article in Monthly Review, where it is held that their previous attitude — supposedly notably prejudiced against anti-European colonial resistance movements — was only modified at the end of the 1860s, and that was probably under the influence of the American left. (See Horace B. Davis, ‘Capitalism and Imperialism’, in Monthly Review (New York), vol. XIX, no. 4 (Sept. 1967) pp. 14–21).
A great many scholars, including some who are usually very careful and accurate, have taken up untenable positions on this question. Let Carr speak for all of them: ‘Marx gave little thought to colonial questions, since it did not occur to him that colonial and backward regions of the world would be called on to play any part in the overthrow of capitalism.’ (Edward H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, Macmillan, London, 1957, vol. III, p. 229.)
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Melotti, U. (1977). The Historical Function of Colonialism. In: Marx and the Third World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15801-0_20
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