Conclusion
The tendency on the part of Kosambi, Joshi and Alavi to characterise pre-colonial India as predominantly feudal can be appreciated in the context of a critique of colonialism. The problem of the transformation of the AMP has been left largely unanswered by Marx who vacillates between two accounts of this question. In the New York Daily Tribune articles the AMP is perceived as inherently static and it is this statism that legitimates the colonial intervention. By contrast, in the Grundrisse and Capital I, a more dynamic view is expressed in which the AMP gives way to other modes. Marx's primary thesis provides an indirect justification of colonialism and imperialism, but that justification cannot be upheld if it is established that the prevailing mode in the immediate pre-British India era was feudal rather than Asiatic. By claiming a feudal heritage, Kosambi, Joshi and Alavi can maintain a position in line with Marxist analysis while rejecting Marx's legitimation of imperialism. If, however, it can be established that the AMP does have an inherent dynamic then the defence of the feudal view is weakened. Arguably, the maintenance of massive standing armies — which consumed two thirds of the surplus product but were essential for the reproduction of the mode —constitute the location of such a dynamic. The point at which the maintenance of armies becomes prohibitive is the point at which the mode must start to disintegrate since its reproduction can no longer be guaranteed. In the case of the AMP, unlike the capitalist mode of production, there are no offsetting factors.
The explicitly ideological and geographical connotations of the term “Asiatic,” which are central to Melotti's characterisation of Marx's analysis, are both misleading and unessential. It is difficult to a) reject the term ‘Asiatic’ without b) negating the mode to which that term has been applied. The rejection of the term, however, does not necessarily entail the negation of the mode. For Marx it is the tribute-raising state which appropriates the surplus product from the direct producer and which stands in the same objectively antagonistic relationship to that producer as does the slave-owner to the slave, the feudal lord to the serf, and the capitalist to the wage labourer. Thus, it is the means whereby the surplus product is appropriated which sets apart the mode in question — which may legitimately be designated “tributary”Footnote 1 — from other modes. This is the sense in which the tax/rent couplet does have theoretical validity. However, while the tax/rent couplet may constitute the dominant mode of appropriation of the surplus product in a particular geographical location — Asiatic or otherwise — and at a specific point in time, this does not justify the conflation of mode and society.
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Notes
I have discussed this notion elsewhere: see note 13 and Currie (1980).
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Kate Currie is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lancaster, Lancaster, Great Britain.
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Currie, K. The asiatic mode of production: Problems of conceptualising state and economy. Dialect Anthropol 8, 251–268 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00246003
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00246003