The Tudor revolution
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Feudalism did not exist in China it only existed in Europe
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Or AMP?”
alan, you might want to read a good critique of the whole concept of Marx’s ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’, in:
Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson (1979), esp. pp. 462-95.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/ethnographical-notebooks/notebooks.pdf
Marx Ethnological notebooks
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24479582?seq=1
This is a good analysis of the old Indian mode of production and the Castle system. As the writer indicated most historians about Indian history are being influenced by European Centered mentality, in the same that they have tried to apply to China. In 1930 the Soviets rejected the Asiatic Mode of Production concept analysed by Marx and Engels. In the same way, it has been the same thing about Latin America, Spain did not transfer its Feudal mode of production to Latin America, that concept has been rejected by many ML groups
All I was doing was drawing attention to the controversy as to whether pre-capitalist China was feudalist or not. Looking for the quote from Marx where he talks of the evolution of society and mentions one of the epochs as “the Asiatic mode of production” (it’s in his Preface to his A Critique of Political Economy) I noticed that the Moscow editors had added this footnote:
”In the above text, Marx mentions “Asiatic” modes of production. In the idea of an Asiatic mode of production, Marx and Engels were following Hegel’s schema, see: The Oriental Realm). They later dropped the idea of a distinctive Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.”
To be taken with a pinch of salt as Moscow didn’t want the Russian state capitalist regime there to be seen as a modern example of the Asiatic mode of production with a ruling class collectively owning the means of production via the state.
This does not mean that there might not be a case for saying that China was feudalism but will explain why Stalinist academics would want to insist on this.
That looks like an official history issued by the current rulers of the Chinese state. For the reasons explained, they would say pre-capitalist China was feudalism, wouldn’t they !
So how does China fit with the eurocentric model we have always used, of capitalism being born in feudalism and overthrowing it when ripe?
Seems we have to rethink a whole lot about this. Bourgeoisie who never lead revolutions, nobles who are not feudal, capitalism being released by all types of non-bourgeois causes, etc.
Lafcadio Hearn accepts Old Japan as feudal, but likens it closer in religion and culture to ancient Greece.
And then there are theocracies like Tibet.
TM your hubris is getting the better of you again. For a start feudal tenure was not abolished in England until 1660 so if the conservative landowners who supported Charles I derived their income from this source it makes them a feudal nobility. You ask why we use the ‘Eurocentric model’? Obviously because the whole globe is now dominated by capitalism which began in Europe!
Yes I think Old Japan is considered to have had a system similar to European feudalism.
The point is to examine empirically the situation in each part of the world. But I think it is already clear that European feudalism was not a universal form. Pre-capitalist exploitative societies in other parts of the world were much more centralised.
Marcos has already raised the question of how to classify the systems in the pre-Columbus Americas. Karl Wittfogel who wrote a book on the Asiatic mode of production which he called Oriental Despotism categorised the Inca and Aztec societies as such. I don’t know if the “Communist” parties of the area tried to say they were feudalism but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
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