What is Asiatic mode of production?

 In twentieth-century Marxist politics and social sciences, the concept of the Asiatic mode of production was at the center of debates and controversies over how to apply the idea of mode of production to non-Western societies. Marxist theorists also turned to the Asiatic mode of production to argue for different revolutionary strategies in societies subject to colonial and imperialist domination.

The concept’s status within Marx’s own work is uncertain. The young Marx’s references to Asian societies are influenced by a political tradition that, from Aristotle (384-322 bce) to Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), saw the Asian continent as characterized by political despotism and socioeconomic stagnation.

The initial theorization of modes of production in Marx’s German Ideology (1845) makes no mention of an “Asian” mode. His Misery of Philosophy (1847), however, discusses India as a society where village-based production coexists with common land property. After 1850 Marx’s view of Asia became more systematic, and he outlined a specific mode of production for the region.

A series of articles he wrote in 1853 for the New York Daily Tribune dealt in detail with the Indian case, and to a lesser degree with China. The chapter on “precapitalist economic formations” in the Grundrisse (18571858) inserted the Asiatic mode of production into a theory of stages of social development, where it followed “primitive communism.”

Marx tended to chronologically overlap the Asiatic mode of production with slavery and feudalism as two other, successive precapitalist societies where laborers are not separated from the means of production.

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