Late Imperial China
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Marcos is self-contradicting when he says there was no feudalism in China, and then recommending I read Mao, who definitely sees pre-capitalist China as feudal.
Well, Mao was of peasant origin, so maybe he should know.
Mao Tse-tung:
THE OLD FEUDAL SOCIETY
Although China is a great nation and although she is a vast country with an immense population, a long history, a rich revolutionary tradition and a splendid historical heritage, her economic, political and cultural development was sluggish for a long time after the transition from slave to feudal society. This feudal society, beginning with the Chou and Chin Dynasties, lasted about 3,000 years.
The main features of the economic and political system of China’s feudal era were as follows:
A self-sufficient natural economy predominated. The peasants produced for themselves not only agricultural products but most of the handicraft articles they needed. What the landlords and the nobility exacted from them in the form of land rent was also chiefly for private enjoyment and not for exchange. Although exchange developed as time went on, it did not play a decisive role in the economy as a whole.
(2) The feudal ruling class composed of landlords, the nobility and the emperor owned most of the land, while the peasants had very little or none at all. The peasants tilled the land of the landlords, the nobility and the royal family with their own farm implements and had to turn over to them for their private enjoyment 40, 50, 60, 70, or even 80 per cent or more of the crop. In effect the peasants were still serfs.(3) Not only did the landlords, the nobility and the royal family live on rent extorted from the peasants, but the landlord state also exacted tribute, taxes andcorvee services from them to support a horde of government officials and an army which was used mainly for their repression.
(4) The feudal landlord state was the organ of power protecting this system of feudal exploitation. While the feudal state was torn apart into rival principalities in the period before the Chin Dynasty, it became autocratic and centralized after the first Chin emperor unified China, though some feudal separatism remained. The emperor reigned supreme in the feudal state, appointing officials in charge of the armed forces, the law courts, the treasury and state granaries in all parts of the county and relying on the landed gentry as the mainstay of the entire system of feudal rule.</p>
It was under such feudal economic exploitation and political oppression that the Chinese peasants lived like slaves, in poverty and suffering, through the ages. Under the bondage of feudalism they had no freedom of person. The landlord had the right to beat, abuse or even kill them at will, and they had no political rights whatsoever. The extreme poverty and backwardness of the peasants resulting from ruthless landlord exploitation and oppression is the basic reason why Chinese society remained at the same stage of socio-economic development for several thousand years.The principal contradiction in feudal society was between the peasantry and the landlord class.
The peasants and the handicraft workers were the basic classes which created the wealth and culture of this society.
The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the Chinese peasants forced them into numerous uprisings against landlord rule. There were hundreds of uprisings, great and small, all of them peasant revolts or peasant revolutionary wars–from the uprisings of Chen Sheng, Wu Kuang, Hsiang Yu and Liu Pang in the Chin Dynasty, those of Hsinshih, Pinglin, the Red Eyebrows, the Bronze Horses and the Yellow Turbans [8] in the Han Dynasty, those of Li Mi and Tou Chien-the in the Sui Dynasty, those of Wang Hsienchih and Huang Chao in the Tang Dynasty, those of Sung Chiang and Fang La <b>[11] </b>in the Sung Dynasty, that of Chu Yuan-chang <b>[12]</b> the Yuan Dynasty, and that of Li Tzu-cheng <b>[13]</b> in the Ming Dynasty, down to the uprising known as the War of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the Ching Dynasty. The scale of peasant uprisings and peasant wars in Chinese history has no parallel anywhere else. The class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society. For each of the major peasant uprisings and wars dealt a blow to the feudal regime of the time, and hence more or less furthered the growth of the social productive forces. However, since neither new productive forces, nor new relations of production, nor new class forces, nor any advanced political party existed in those days, the peasant uprisings and wars did not have correct leadership such as the proletariat and the Communist Party provide today; every peasant revolution failed, and the peasantry was invariably used by the landlords and the nobility, either during or after the revolution, as a lever for bringing about dynastic change. Therefore’ although some social progress was made after each great peasant revolutionary struggle, the feudal economic relations and political system remained basically unchanged.
It is only in the last hundred years that a change of a different order has taken place.
Mao has just put the orthodox Stalinist view that China was feudal ( because there wasn’t anything else, according to their theory, that it could have been).
This link you posted in the other thread puts the case against calling China feudal:
I’m not partisan in this. Do we have a name for the society of Imperial China?
Maybe we should accept that, in China as in Europe, there was a system between feudalism and capitalism that we can call absolutism. That would explain France too, under Richelieu, as well as Tudor England.
The Wikipedia entry on the Asiatic Mode of Production is quite good:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production
I would highlight these two passages.
”In the 1920s, Soviet authors strongly debated about the use of the term. Some completely rejected it. Others, Soviet experts on China referred to as “Aziatchiki”, suggested that Chinese land ownership structures had once resembled the AMP, but they were accused of Trotskyism and discussion of AMP was effectively banned in the USSR from 1931 until the Khrushchev period”.
”The theory was rejected in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Karl August Wittfogel suggested in his 1957 book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, that his concept of Oriental despotism showed that this was because of the similarity between the AMP and the reality of Stalin’s Russia; he saw the authoritarian nature of communism as an extension of the need of totalitarian rule to control water in “the Orient”.”
I am inclined to agree with Wittfogel.
TM
It looks like that you do not know how to argue a topic, or to continue arguing on the same topic, you have used the tactic of the sniper by throwing several shot, but you have not tied everything together, and you are publishing copy and paste topics which are not your own conclusions, I do not do that, learning is expressing what you have learned in your own words, or to be an independent thinker, Marx himself said that everything must be questioned
I did not mention Mao Tse Tung because he supported the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production, I mentioned him because he was part of some of those peasants revolts that took place in China. Another thing, Mao was not a peasant, his parents were rich peasants, and he was an intellectual who studied at the university of Pekin and he was also a librarian
In the past I learned something known as Legal research by going to a library the whole day just to work in one particular topic but I have to look for all the sources related to that topic because it was the best way to come to a conclusion by reading and studying all the facts, history is the same thing, all facts and information must be read, collected and studied in order to come to a conclusion, by just citing European sources you are not going to obtain the proper conclusions, as I said in another message that I am an atheist but I have also studied the Bible in 5 different versions, and I have read books written by right-wingers, anticommunists, and I am planning to read the Memoirs of Barrack Obama
Mao Tse Tung was not a Marxist, he was a stalinists, even more, he distorted Leninism too and they created what was known as Mao Tse Tung thought, and he was even criticized by others Stalinists such as Enver Hoxha and the Party of Labour of Albania, I was involved in that process and I know what I am talking about.
There was another message where I indicated that in many parts of the world the only thing that militants knew was something called as Stalinism, Marxism and real socialism it is still unknown in most part of the world, and in the soviet union the concept of the AMP was rejected in 1930 even that it was developed by Marx and Engels, and there was another group which wanted to apply the same method used in Asia, the AMP does not apply exclusively to China, it covers a vast area of the world including some part of the South American natives and the Autonomous University of Mexico ( UNAM ) made a profound study about the subject matter, and I published the analysis made by them. It is a topic which is being studied at the present time after it was rejected by many Marxists groups
Mao had to say that China was a feudal country because he did not know many of the works of Marx, as well Lenin did not know many of the works of Marx, and the ones that he knew were distorted by him, he created his own Marxism known as Leninism, and Marxism Leninism is a creation of Stalin, Mao as many others ( including Trotsky ) spread the idea that Feudalism existed in all part of the world, but Marx had a different point of view before he died he was working in a different mode of production different to European Feudalism
What, then, about other Asian lands?
The Islamic?
Are we to assume that Tibetan serfdom is another Maoist lie?
Not a peasant. A rich peasant. (?)
I am certainly going to copy and paste in order to give sources, rather than drag my pain-wracked self into my library in order to leaf through numerous tomes. I have already admitted that I accepted the standard view of Ch’ing feudalism all my life but am not now insisting on it.
I am offended by your assumption that I, unlike you, am not a reader and thinker. Might I also suggest that you not limit yourself to Marx and Engels – important as they are – nor dismiss all other historians as “bourgeois” liars. It seems you regard Marx and Engels as Holy Scripture, as infallible experts on everything.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2012_02.dir/pdfXSzpVPe6x8.pdf
This article indicated part of the problem of the Asiatic Mode of Production. The concept was unknown for many years and it was hidden by many so-called Marxists, and It was difficult to be read because it was written in different languages due to the fact that Marx was able to speak and write in more than 20 languages. The same thing happened with the Paris Notebooks they were unknown for many years.
The SPGB has said that without Marx and Engels they could have created their own version of socialism, or the concept of socialism/communism would have existed but It could have taken a longer period of time to create a coherent theory of socialism because they already did the research for us, they spent more than 25 years working in one subject: The working class of the world.
The Bolivarians were saying that Marx was wrong because he raised a critique against Simon Bolivar, and he did not know anything about Colonialism, but they were wrong because Marx and Engels wrote extensively about Colonialism, even more, Franz Mehring who is Marx biographer said that after Marx died, Engels was surprised to see that he was working in too many things at the same, but Engels had to concentrate all his energy in Volume 2 and 3 of Das Kapital
“What, then, about other Asian lands? The Islamic? Are we to assume that Tibetan serfdom is another Maoist lie?“
No idea but that’s not relevant since the argument is not that there are no examples outside Europe of what might be called feudalism but that there are some, perhaps most, that this description does not fit.
Each case needs to be decided on the evidence of an empirical study. So if there is evidence that something akin to European feudalism existed in Japan or Tibet does not mean that it did in China,
The Asiatic Mode of Production is something that is not final yet, as ALB said that every case must be studied. There were some traces of European feudalism in Japan but it does not mean that It must be applied to other countries around the world. Alan Johnston mentioned about a particular case of the Mayas and the Incas. Islamic is not an ethnic group it is only a religion, and there are atheists in the Arabs countries. We are not talking about Maoist lie, we are talking about theoretical ignorance. In the Caribbean most Marxist Leninist applied Lenin concept of the revolution in two steps, it was something only applicable to Russia, as well, the vanguard part was a particular thing for Russia, and Lenin said that it was only applicable to Russia, but the Stalinist applied the vanguard party to all the countries around the world. The concept of Marxism/Leninism was spread thru the whole world by the Stalinists, that is the reason why China printed millions of copy of his book on the Fundamentals of Leninism, and on the Opposition
“I am certainly going to copy and paste in order to give sources, rather than drag my pain-wracked self into my library in order to leaf through numerous tomes. I have already admitted that I accepted the standard view of Ch’ing feudalism all my life but am not now insisting on it.
I am offended by your assumption that I, unlike you, am not a reader and thinker. Might I also suggest that you not limit yourself to Marx and Engels – important as they are – nor dismiss all other historians as “bourgeois” liars. It seems you regard Marx and Engels as Holy Scripture, as infallible experts on everything.”
Hear! Hear! Thomas
Thanks Robbo. And he calls me arrogant!
Fortunately, ours is not a Bolshevik party, and I don’t have to please any tribunal of commissars.
That is not the answer we expect!
Not a peasant. A rich peasant. (?)
His parents were peasants, but he was an intellectual. You also said that Lenin was a peasant, his brother was a populist, but he was not a peasant. Lenin was a lawyer
I am offended by your assumption that I, unlike you, am not a reader and thinker. Might I also suggest that you not limit yourself to Marx and Engels – important as they are – nor dismiss all other historians as “bourgeois” liars. It seems you regard Marx and Engels as Holy Scripture, as infallible experts on everything.”
That is not what I said, I said that everything must be questioned, and I also said that I read books and articles written by right-wingers. In the case of the AMP Marx is the only source of information, and it is the best one, and it is also the best source of information on Political economy. Another source of information on Marx ethnological notebooks are the Marxist Humanists
I think that Alb explained in another message about the evolution of the concept of the bourgeoise, there are some bourgeois economists who are not members of the bourgeoise class, but their conceptions are considered to be part of the capitalist economy, and there are bourgeoise historians too. The concept of proletarian also had its evolution, it is applicable to all wage earners.
The concept of proletarian comes from the Roman world and you say that during that period of time the working class did not exist, since the dissolution of primitive communism division of classes have existed, and the history of mankind is the history of the class struggles since the emerge of the social classes in our society, and the investigation made by Lewis Morgan forced them to change their definition of history. That is the reason why I said that every concept must be connected
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