Marx and Engels on the Asiatic Mode of Production in
India

Taimur Rahman

Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels formulated the concept
of the Asiatic Mode of Production on the basis of 19th
century political economy. Since the concept can be
attributed to them, it makes sense to look at their
writings on the subject in some detail.

The first reference to oriental despotism can be found
in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marx
writes:

"Either, as in Greece, the res publica was the real
private concern, the real content of the citizens and
the private man was slave, that is, the political
state as political was the true and sole content of
the citizen's life and will; or, as in Asiatic
despotism, the political state was nothing but the
private will of a single individual, and the political
state, like the material state, was slave. What
distinguishes the modern state from these states in
which a substantial unity between people and state
obtained is not that the various moments of the
constitution are formed into particular actuality, as
Hegel would have it, but rather that the constitution
itself has been formed into a particular actuality
alongside the real life of the people, the political
state has become the constitution of the rest of the
state. [Remark to § 279]"

The thrust of the above abstruse passage is that while
the bourgeois state is very different from the states
of ancient Greece or Asia, Hegel’s view that the
bourgeois state has resolved the conflict between
private interests and the general interest was wrong.
This passage may lend the impression that the young
Marx subscribed to the conventional 18th century
notion of oriental despotism, however in a letter
written to Arnold Ruge in the same year Marx
completely rejected Monstesquieu’s distinction between
European monarchies and Asiatic despotism. He wrote,
“The monarchical principle in general is the despised,
the despicable, the dehumanised man; and Montesquieu
was quite wrong to allege that it is honour
[Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois]. He gets out of
the difficulty by distinguishing between monarchy,
despotism and tyranny. But those are names for one and
the same concept, and at most they denote differences
in customs though the principle remains the same”
(Marx to Arnold Ruge. May, 1843). It is quite clear
from this letter that Marx rejected the conventional
view of 18th century oriental despotism, especially as
elaborated by Montesquieu.

Between 1843 and 1853 Marx did not write or publish
anything on Asia because he was occupied with the
development of the basic principles of historical
materialism in the context of European civilization.
For example, the German Ideology and the Communist
Manifesto were principally concerned with the
historical development of Western civilization and
they do not refer to Asia. In fact, Marx really began
to study Asia after the failure of the 1848
revolutions and his exile to London. Influenced by
Hegel, Marx began by pondering the question why the
history of the East appeared as the history of
religions. Upon reading Francois Bernier, Marx felt he
had arrived at the answer and wrote to Engels,
“Bernier rightly sees all the manifestations of the
East — he mentions Turkey, Persia and Hindustan — as
having a common basis, namely the absence of private
landed property. This is the real key, even to the
eastern heaven” (Marx to Engels, 2 June, 1853). Engels
replied, “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” (Engels to
Marx, 6 June, 1853). Marx, taking into consideration
Engels’ addition summarizing his findings in his
reply, “The stationary nature of this part of Asia,
despite all the aimless activity on the political
surface, can be completely explained by two mutually
supporting circumstances: 1. The public works system
of the central government and, 2. Alongside this, the
entire Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is
an agglomeration of villages, each with its own
distinct organisation and each forming its own small
world.” (Marx to Engels, 14 June 1953).

These two mutually supportive ideas, namely public
works and the village community, formed the basis of a
series of articles written between 1852-1858 for the
New York Daily Tribune on the impact of British
imperialism on India and China. The most widely quoted
of these articles with respect to India are “The
British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of
British Rule in India”.

Scathing in his criticism of British rule in India,
Marx wrote in this series of articles that England had
broken the entire framework of Indian society and
uprooted that society from all its ancient traditions
and past history. The handloom, spinning wheel, and
union between agriculture & manufacture were the basis
of Indian society before it was uprooted by British
steam and science. Further, the great irrigation works
had been utterly neglected by the colonial government,
resulting in famine and the destruction of Indian
cities. At the same time, he cautioned against any
kind of romanticism of the Asiatic system. He said
that the Asiatic system had made man the unresisting
tool of superstition, enslaved it beneath traditional
rules, and deprived it of all grandeur and historical
energies. The result was an undignified, stagnatory,
and vegetative life. He argued that the Asiatic system
had been the solid foundation of oriental despotism
that had “restrained the human mind within the
smallest possible compass” and was based on “class and
slavery”.

Some scholars have incorrectly interpreted these
latter remarks as a justification for colonialism.
However, Marx’s position on the 1957 War of
Independence demonstrates quite clearly that his
sympathies were with the colonial people. His emphasis
in the above criticism of the Asiatic system is in
line with his views of capitalism in relation to all
pre-capitalist societies: In other words, that the way
forward was not in the restoration of the
pre-capitalist order but in the struggle for a new
order based on the end of class exploitation that was
made possible by the development of the productive
forces under capitalism. In conclusion, he felt that
the British, though motivated by the vilest interests,
had inadvertently initiated a social revolution in
India and through the introduction of steam and
science were “laying of the material foundations of
Western society in Asia” that would inevitably create
the socio-economic prerequisites for a new socialist
society (Marx, Future Results of the British Rule in
India, 1853).

In the Grundrisse Marx continued working with this
basic model of Asiatic society and clearly
distinguished the Asiatic, Ancient and Germanic forms
of pre-capitalist property. For example, he wrote, “In
the Asiatic form (at least, predominantly), the
individual has no property but only possession; the
real proprietor, proper, is the commune -- hence
property only as communal property in land (Ibid.
Notebook V). Similarly, “Amidst oriental despotism and
the propertylessness which seems legally to exist
there, this clan or communal property exists in fact
as the foundation, created mostly by a combination of
manufactures and agriculture within the small commune,
which thus becomes altogether self-sustaining, and
contains all the conditions of production and
reproduction within itself. A part of their surplus
labour belongs to the higher community, which exists
ultimately as a person and this surplus labour takes
the form of tribute” (ibid.). Regarding public works
in Asia Marx says, “The communal conditions of real
appropriation through labour, aqueducts, very
important among the Asiatic peoples; means of
communication etc. then appear as the work of the
higher unity -- of the despotic regime hovering over
the little communes” (ibid.). Therefore, we find in
the Grundrisse all the features of the Asiatic system
as described by Marx in his articles on India.

In 1858 Marx wrote on the controversy stirred up by
Lord Canning’s proclamation after the annexation of
Oudh that the British Government had confiscated
proprietary rights in the soil. This stirred up a
debate in Britain about the nature of the claims to
property made by the zemindars, talookdars or sirdars.
One side maintained that these were real private
property holders, while the other maintained that they
were to be considered as mere tax-gatherers. Marx
stated that the latter view was based on a “more
thorough study of the institutions of Hindostan” and
was also confirmed by the results of the Bengal
settlement (Marx, Lord Canning’s Proclamation and Land
Tenure in India, 1858). He considered the entire
controversy as the result of “English prejudices or
sentiments, applied to a state of society and a
condition of things to which they have in fact very
little real pertinency” (ibid.).

Finally, in his famous preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, where Marx
summarized the general conclusions of historical
materialism, he introduced the term Asiatic Mode of
Production: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient,
feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be
designated as epochs marking progress in the economic
development of society” [emphasis added] (Marx, A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
1859).

This materialist analysis was carried forward into
Capital without any substantial alteration. For
example in Volume 1 he uses the phrase, “In the
ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production”
(Marx, Capital I, ch. 1). Similarly, in a footnote he
says, “A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and
especially of Indian forms of common property, would
show…” (ibid.). The most significant and detailed
passage, however, is contained in the chapter on the
“Division of Labour in manufacture, and Division of
Labour in Society.”

"Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities,
some of which have continued down to this day, are
based on possession in common of the land, on the
blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an
unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever
a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready
cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to
several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole
producing all it requires. The chief part of the
products is destined for direct use by the community
itself, and does not take the form of a commodity.
Hence, production here is independent of that division
of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole,
by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the
surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a portion
of even that, not until it has reached the hands of
the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a
certain quantity of these products has found its way
in the shape of rent in kind. The constitution of
these communities varies in different parts of India.
In those of the simplest form, the land is tilled in
common, and the produce divided among the members. At
the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in
each family as subsidiary industries. Side by side
with the masses thus occupied with one and the same
work, we find the "chief inhabitant," who is judge,
police, and tax-gatherer in one; the book-keeper, who
keeps the accounts of the tillage and registers
everything relating thereto; another official, who
prosecutes criminals, protects strangers travelling
through and escorts them to the next village; the
boundary man, who guards the boundaries against
neighbouring communities; the water-overseer, who
distributes the water from the common tanks for
irrigation; the Brahmin, who conducts the religious
services; the schoolmaster, who on the sand teaches
the children reading and writing; the
calendar-Brahmin, or astrologer, who makes known the
lucky or unlucky days for seed-time and harvest, and
for every other kind of agricultural work; a smith and
a carpenter, who make and repair all the agricultural
implements; the potter, who makes all the pottery of
the village; the barber, the washerman, who washes
clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who
in some communities replaces the silversmith, in
others the schoolmaster. This dozen of individuals is
maintained at the expense of the whole community. If
the population increases, a new community is founded,
on the pattern of the old one, on unoccupied land. The
whole mechanism discloses a systematic division of
labour; but a division like that in manufactures is
impossible, since the smith and the carpenter, &c.,
find an unchanging market, and at the most there
occur, according to the sizes of the villages, two or
three of each, instead of one. The law that regulates
the division of labour in the community acts with the
irresistible authority of a law of Nature, at the same
time that each individual artificer, the smith, the
carpenter, and so on, conducts in his workshop all the
operations of his handicraft in the traditional way,
but independently, and without recognising any
authority over him. The simplicity of the organisation
for production in these self-sufficing communities
that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form,
and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on
the spot and with the same name this simplicity
supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness
of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such
striking contrast with the constant dissolution and
refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing
changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic
elements of society remains untouched by the
storm-clouds of the political sky" (Marx, Capital 1,
ch. 14, section 4).

It is clear from this passage that Marx continued to
regard pre-colonial India as a society based on the
village community with common property. Further, he
also briefly mentions the state and the appropriation
of surplus through tribute. One may object that Marx
seems to have dropped any reference to public works.
This apparent negligence exists because Marx’s
principle focus in the chapter is the division of
labour in manufacture and society. The passage,
therefore, describes the division of labour in the
village community in India in order to contrast it
with the capitalist division of labour. Public works
receive attention in Chapter 16 where Marx says:

"It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under
the control of society, of economising, of
appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the
work of man's hand, that first plays the decisive part
in the history of industry. Examples are, the
irrigation works in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, or in
India and Persia where irrigation by means of
artificial canals, not only supplies the soil with the
water indispensable to it, but also carries down to
it, in the shape of sediment from the hills, mineral
fertilisers. The secret of the flourishing state of
industry in Spain and Sicily under the dominion of the
Arabs lay in their irrigation works" (Marx, Capital 1,
ch. 16).

In Capital Volume 3, published posthumously by Engels,
Marx comments on India and China that:

"The broad basis of the mode of production here is
formed by the unity of small-scale agriculture and
home industry, to which in India we should add the
form of village communities built upon the common
ownership of land, which, incidentally, was the
original form in China as well." (Marx, Capital 3, ch.
20)

Similarly, in his discussion of ground rent in Part 6
of the same volume, Marx clearly distinguishes three
sets of pre-capitalist landed property relations:
Asiatic, slave, and serf based forms. The analysis of
the ‘The Genesis of Ground-Rent’ in chapter 47 is
based on the same distinction between Asiatic, slave
and serf based landed property relations. In this
context Marx writes:

"Should the direct producers not be confronted by a
private landowner, but rather, as in Asia, under
direct subordination to a state which stands over them
as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign,
then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists
no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent.
Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger
political or economic pressure than that common to all
subjection to that state. The state is then the
supreme lord. 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." (Marx, Capital 3, ch.
47).

In conclusion, there is little doubt that Marx did not
change his opinion during the writing of his most
celebrated work, Capital. The essential features that
were elaborated in his journalistic articles on the
impact of British rule in India – namely a natural
economy based on the unity of agriculture and
manufacture, the village community with common
ownership of land, public works as a precondition for
settled agriculture, and surplus appropriation by the
state through tribute – form the basis of his various
comments in Capital on India.

The same ideas can be found in the works of Engels.
For example, in Anti-Duhring Engels says that the
state and village community own the land in the East.

"In the whole of the Orient, where the village
community or the state owns the land, the very term
landlord is not to be found in the various languages,
a point on which Herr Dühring can consult the English
jurists, whose efforts in India to solve the question:
who is the owner of the land? — were [in] vain”
(Engels, Anti-Duhring, ch. 4).

In the same book Engels explains that that state power
begins with the gradual separation from society of
people vested with a “social function” in primitive
societies. Further, in the specific case of Asia that
social function included the maintenance of
irrigation. Engels says:

"there were from the beginning certain common
interests the safeguarding of which had to be handed
over to individuals, true, under the control of the
community as a whole: adjudication of disputes;
repression of abuse of authority by individuals;
control of water supplies, especially in hot
countries; and finally when conditions were still
absolutely primitive, religious functions. Such
offices are found in aboriginal communities of every
period — in the oldest German marks and even today in
Inda. They are naturally endowed with a certain
measure of authority and are the beginnings of state
power … It is not necessary for us to examine here how
this independence of social functions in relation to
society increased with time until it developed into
domination over society; how he who was originally the
servant, where conditions were favourable, changed
gradually into the lord; how this lord, depending on
the conditions, emerged as an Oriental despot or
satrap, the dynast of a Greek tribe, chieftain of a
Celtic clan, and so on; to what extent he subsequently
had recourse to force in the course of this
transformation; and how finally the individual rulers
united into a ruling class. Here we are only concerned
with establishing the fact that the exercise of a
social function was everywhere the basis of political
supremacy; and further that political supremacy has
existed for any length of time only when it discharged
its social functions. However great the number of
despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India,
each was fully aware that above all it was the
entrepreneur responsible for the collective
maintenance of irrigation throughout the river
valleys, without which no agriculture was possible
there" (Engels, Anti-Duhring, ch. 4).

Thus, Engels argues that the state that developed in
Asia, which he calls Oriental despotism, was based on
the village community, common ownership, and
artificial irrigation.

"Where the ancient communities have continued to
exist, they have for thousands of years formed the
basis of the cruellest form of state, Oriental
despotism, from India to Russia" (Engels,
Anti-Duhring, ch. 4).

That is why when Russian populists advanced the
argument that the Russian commune (obshchina) could be
the foundation of a socialist society, Engels was
scathing in criticism.

"Such a complete isolation of individual communities
from one another, which creates throughout the country
similar, but the very opposite of common, interests,
is the natural basis for oriental despotism; and from
India to Russia this form of society, wherever it has
prevailed, has always produced it and always found its
complement in it" (Engels, On Social Relation in
Russia).

After Capital, Marx returned to the subject of
pre-colonial society in India and he took detailed
notes on Elphinstone’s History of India and Sewell
Analytical History of India, M. M. Kovalevsky Communal
Landholding, The Causes, Was and Consequences of its
Disintegration. These notes were published by the
Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the title Notes on
Indian History (1959). Marx’s comments on Kovalevsky
are extremely instructive on his views of India’s mode
of production. Kovalevsky had argued that India had
become feudal under Mogul rule. He stated:

"Of all the four factors usually, though unjustly,
acknowledged by medieval historians to be the sole
aspects of German-Roman feudalism, three – the
beneficial systems, farming out and commendation – may
be said to exist in India conquered by the Muslims.
Only of patrimonial justice, at least, so far as the
civil code is concerned, it is possible to say that it
was absent in the empire of the Great Mogul" (O'Leary
1989, 127)

Marx’s comments on this were as follows:

"On the grounds that the ‘beneficial system’, ‘farming
out’ (the latter, though, is by no means purely feudal
– the proof – Rome) and commendation occur in India,
Kovalevsky sees here feudalism in the West European
sense. But Kovalevsky forgets about serfdom which is
absent in India and which is of the greatest
importance. As to the individual role of protection
(cf. Palgrave) not only of the bonded but also of the
free peasants by the feudals (who functioned as
vogts), this was in India of little importance, with
the exception of the wakufs. The idealization of the
Land (Boden-Poesie) characteristic of Germano-Roman
feudalism (see Maurer) is as of little interest to
India as it is to Rome. In India land is nowhere so
noble in the sense of being, for instance, inalienable
for the benefit of those outside the nobility.
However, Kovalevsky himself sees the basic difference
– the absence of patrimonial justice where civil law
is concerned in the Empire of the Grand Mogul"
(ibid.).

Thus Marx systematically rejected Kovalevsky attempt
to categorize India as feudal stating that the latter
has failed to prove the most important feature of
feudalism, namely serfdom. As for the other features,
(1) the ‘beneficial system’ existed in Rome and was
not an essential feature of feudalism; (2) land was
not considered a prized or noble object in India, as
it was in Europe where it could not be alienated to
commoners; and (3) ‘patrimonial justice’, by
Kovalevsky’s own admission, was absent in India (L. S.
Gamayunov & R. A. Ulyanovsky in Krader 1975). Marx
also refuted Kovalevsky’s argument that the Muslim
land tax (kharaj) on the peasantry had transformed
land into feudal ownership (O'Leary 1989, 127).

Similarly, Marx’s notes on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient
Society (1877), Sir John Budd Phear’s The Aryan
Village in India and Ceylon (1880), Sir Henry Maine’s
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, and
John Lubbock’s The Origins of Civilization (1870),
published posthumously as the Ethnological Notebooks,
also demonstrate that he continued to reject the
theory that India was feudal. Commenting on John Phear
he wrote, “That ass Phear describes the organization
of the [Indian] rural community as feudal” (O'Leary
1989, 128).

Marx’s remark that anyone who thought that rural
communities in India were feudal was an “ass” sums up
Marx’s views on the subject succinctly and leaves no
further room to comment.

Conclusion

It is quite clear from the writings of Marx and Engels
that they never upheld the view that India was
‘feudal’. During the 1850s they studied India and
developed the concept of the Asiatic Mode of
Production. There is no evidence that they deviated
from the essential framework of this concept at any
points in their mature lives. In Marx’s opinion, his
later studies of anthropologists and sociologists
certainly added new dimensions to the detailed
understanding of the AMP but did not in anyway
contradict the essential features of their earlier
formulation. Marx and Engels’ characterization of the
AMP is summed up in the following four points.

1) Natural economy based on the unity of agriculture
and handicrafts with a fixed division of labour based
on general unfreedom
2) Communal (state) ownership with communal and
individual possession of the land
3) Public works as a precondition for settled
agriculture forming the basis of the state.
4) Surplus appropriation by the state from villages in
the form of a tribute (unity f tax and rent)

In addition to these general characteristics, the
caste system as a form of general unfreedom was
characteristic of the concrete manifestation of the
Asiatic Mode of Production in India and Egypt.

We Marxist-Leninists in Pakistan should recognize that
the theory of feudalism with respect to India finds
absolutely no evidence in the work of Marx and Engels.
They regarded the character of pre-capitalist
relations as Asiatic rather than feudal. The creation
of large landlords is really the product of British
colonial rule. If we want to be more consistent with
the views of Marxism, we should use the term
landlordism instead of feudalism. Further, we have to
undertake a thorough reworking of our views on the
agrarian relations in Pakistan that were, till this
point, based on the notion that pre-capitalist
relations in Pakistan were essentially feudal.