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Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of production; the origins of capitalism; the dichotomy between free and unfree labour; and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production'.
Essays on Marxism and Asia begins with the largely forgotten prophet of ancient Iran Zarathushtra, remembered and immortalised by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. In contrast to the infamous clash of civilisation thesis, this book argues for a humanist theory of civilisations and studies the Parsis or Persians who left Iran to settle in India and make it their home. It claims that Parsis, despite being a migrant community, took strength from their Persian heritage and civilisation and rose to become the architects of industrial modernity in India. This book locates this humanist theory in the larger genre of the Asiatic mode of production with caste as its sub- text. It then takes a phenomenological reading of caste in India and says that India is afflicted by a very strange illness called ‘silent blindness’ where humanity is silenced and blinded in front of the caste apparatus. It then analyzes how capitalism and modernity fashioned caste in the image of capitalism and how the Indian right- wing imagined its fascistic politics of race and racial superiority based on the image of caste hierarchy. The problem in India has been that the liberals could not take caste seriously so as to confront it and then annihilate this violent apartheid structure. This, the book argues, has led to the rise of fascism in India. The book concludes with positing two different strands of secularism, namely liberal or bourgeois secularism which merely separates religion and the state (but mixes these when required) and revolutionary secularism which humanises religion and politics first in order to find the human and class content in both. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory.
In The Magic of Concepts Rebecca E. Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.
First Published in 1978. This book seeks to fill the gap of works in English that systematically deal with social and economic life in 'primitive', 'tribal' and 'peasant' societies - the main object of economic anthropology, as of any branch of anthropology - from a Marxist theoretical standpoint. Using such relevant texts as Marx himself, the Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (which appeared in English in 1964 with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm), and that of Engels, of which The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
A clear and compact guide to Marx’s road to Das Kapital Ernest Mandel traces the development of Marx’s economic ideas from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the completion of the Grundrisse. In a series of crystalline chapters, he provides an overview of subjects central to Marxist economic theory. Mandel focuses on Marx’s concept of alienation, which gained much currency among Marxists in the twentieth century, and traces the development of debates surrounding the labour theory of value, and Marx’s writings on communism and “crisis.” These discussions remain pertinent today, and these texts vital to all those who wish to interpret and to change the world.
Through an historical analysis of the theme of Oriental despotism, Michael Curtis reveals the complex positive and negative interaction between Europe and the Orient. The book also criticizes the misconception that the Orient was the constant victim of Western imperialism and the view that Westerners cannot comment objectively on Eastern and Muslim societies. The book views the European concept of Oriental despotism as based not on arbitrary prejudicial observation, but rather on perceptions of real processes and behavior in Eastern systems of government. Curtis considers how the concept developed and was expressed in the context of Western political thought and intellectual history, and of the changing realities in the Middle East and India. The book includes discussion of the observations of Western travelers in Muslim countries and analysis of the reflections of six major thinkers: Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Tocqueville, James and John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Max Weber.
Presents the perceptions that the Chinese and the Japanese have of each other, and the information that helped to fuel those perceptions. There are two sections: China in Japan, debating the Asiatic Mode of Production and kyodotai; and Japan in China, covering the Manchurian Railway.