The Thinking Reed

After all, facts are stubborn things, and take harsh revenge on those who disdain them. Here one bold hypothesis is quickly replaced by another, the ‘serfdom’ of one writer is easily transformed into the ‘slavery’ of another; but nothing is gained from all this for a scientific solution of the problem. Evidently, the time has come to say, frankly, that the entire three-thousand-years’ history of China — and, in the first place, the history of ancient China — testifies convincingly against any automatic application of a priori schemas.114

The authors of a work on the Asiatic mode of production made the following observation:

In contrast to what happened in the Graeco-Roman world, in most of the countries of the East a different process took place, the gist of which was this, that, given the absence (or only very slight presence) of private property, the management of a growing social organism, together with a number of purely political factors (conquests, necessity of defence against invasion, etc.), stimulated the development of state power on the basis of the absence (or slightness) of economic and property-owning differentiation in society.115

During the discussion on the Asiatic mode of production the Orientalist historians confirmed that appropriation of surplus product was effected in these societies not on the basis of private property but on that of state monopoly. An estate of officials became transformed everywhere into a class of exploiters. One and the same picture is seen in Egypt, in Persia [Iran] and to some extent in the Byzantine Empire. The countries of Southeast Asia — Cambodia [Kampuchea], Java, Burma — also knew exploitation of the people by a ‘temple-bureaucratic aristocracy’ and, directly, by a bureaucratic apparatus, ‘the apparatus of officialdom coinciding with the ruling class’.116

Thus, long before Shafarevich undertook his amateurish attempts, Orientalists had already begun to study the bureaucratic state of the past. They were not, of course, out to look for socialism in Byzantium: rather, their researches revealed the similarity between the Soviet state and the Byzantine system, a similarity which cannot be concealed under any ‘socialist’ phrases. M.A. Vitkin even sees a special category of ‘primary formation’ which includes all varieties of the Asiatic mode of production. This formation is connected not with the development of private property but with the growth of the state; in general, private property really develops only with transition to a higher ‘secondary formation’: ‘After concentrating in its hands the accumulated surplus product extracted on the basis of its power over the persons of the producers, the state distributes this surplus product among the members of the corporation of rulers’.117 The real question is not why the East hardly knew private property but why it developed in Greece. This was presumably connected with the collapse of the archaic bureaucratic monarchy of Mycenae and with the shortage of land needed for growing corn, which gave rise to an acute need for commodity exchange.

European feudalism had some features in common with the East, but these were overcome: ‘in this case we should not speak of an Eastern variant of feudalism but of a rebirth of the Asiatic system in the West.’118

I.F. Kosesnitsky wrote that in the West, too, in the early Middle Ages, the state emerged as exploiter of the direct producers, which corresponded to a ‘still undeveloped form of economic relations’.119 In Europe, however, the small size of the territory, along with a relatively rapid growth of population — especially after the tenth century — evoked a need for commodity exchange. And here those immense spaces in which a mighty bureaucratic apparatus found its justification were lacking. Here there was no objective necessity for it.