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Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

used the phrase “Asiatic society” and J.S. Mill used the term “Eastern society” in 1848. Others, like Notes
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Emile Durkheim (1855-1917), analyzed
Asiatic societies from a comparative perspective. Hegel was the most influential among these
thinkers, whose philosophy of history not only concurred with this prevailing European perception
of the East, but also influenced—to a very large extent—the left Hegelians with respect to perceiving
colonization as a modernizing force. For Hegel, with his clear Eurocentricism, India and China did
not have any history as these were “stationery and fixed”. This was true of all Asiatic societies.
Hegel’s point that the East lacked history influenced Marx.
Marx described the oriental societies of India and China as lacking in history, incapable of changing
from within, and essentially stagnant. Since, by themselves, they would block historical progress,
the industrialized West, when it became socialistic, would be the agent of liberation in the less
developed areas. In other words, European socialism would have to precede national liberation
movements in the Asian societies. Marx identified Europe with progress, and the Orient with
stagnation. He looked upon imperialist rule as being simultaneously destructive and constructive.
It was degenerative, for it destroyed indigenous institutions and practices; it was regenerative, for
it created the modem techniques of production, brought political unity and social changes.
Marx and Engels concluded that the chief characteristic of Asiatic societies was the absence of
private property, particularly private ownership of land. In contrast to the state in the European
context, which was an instrument of class domination and exploitation, the state in Asiatic societies
controlled all classes. It did not belong to the superstructure, but was decisive in the entire economic
arena, building and managing water supply and the life breath of agriculture in arid areas. It
performed economic and social functions for the whole of society. Social privileges emanated from
service to the state, and not from the institution of private property, as was the case in Europe.
Asiatic societies had an overdeveloped state, and an underdeveloped civil society. Military conquests
and dynastic tussles ushered in changes periodically, without affecting the economic organization,
for the state continued to be the real landlord. The unchanging nature of Asiatic societies was also
buttressed by self-sufficient autarchic villages, which sustained themselves through agriculture
and handicrafts.
In the Grundrisse, Marx and Engels developed on these preliminary sketches of Asiatic societies to
highlight the key differences in the urban history of the West and the East. In the West, the
existence of politically independent cities conducive to growth of the production of exchange
values determined the development of a bourgeois class and industrial capitalism, whereas in the
East, the city was artificially created by the state, and remained a “princely camp” subordinated to
the countryside. The city was imposed on the economic structure of society. Social unity represented
by the state lay in the autarchic self-sufficient villages where land was communally owned. Stability
was ensured by simplicity of production. The state appropriated the surplus in the form of taxes.
Factors like free markets, private property, guilds and bourgeois law, that led to the rise of the
capitalist class in the West, were absent in Asiatic societies due to a centralized state that dominated
and controlled civil society. For Marx, imperialism would act as a catalyst of change since these
societies lacked the mechanisms for change. It was because of its covert defence of imperialism
that Marxists have sought to dismantle the concept.
The Anarchists, and in particular Bakunin, defended the right of nations (including the
predominantly peasant Eastern nations) to self-determination. The West was based on slavery,
and did not prove that it was superior to the “barbarians of [the] Orient”. He asserted that all
states were constituted by their nature and the conditions of the purpose for which they existed,
namely the absolute negation of human justice, freedom and morality. By this logic, he did not
distinguish between the uncouth Tsarist Russia and the advanced countries of North Europe, for
the former did the same thing as the latter, with the mask of hypocrisy.
The concept of the Asiatic Mode has had a chequered history. In the preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx considered the Asiatic Mode as one of the “epochs marking

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