Asia

Eastern Despotism

Three of four large communities that arose between 8000 and 6000 B.C.E. and generated the first states were situated in the Asian major river valleys of the Tigris, the Indus, and the Huang Ho. The fourth one, in the Nile in Africa, was close to Asia. That is why Asia embodied what became known as the ancient societies of the East and become synonymous with the East (or Orient). Asia has seen the rise and fall of many civilizations, from Akkaida in Mesopotamia to the Moghal empire in India. The states of the ancient East were the earliest slave-owning ones. They differed from the later Greece and Rome of antiquity.

In the East, the slaves were not the main productive force of the society. They were not producers of material goods. The people who were formally considered free were employed in agriculture and handicraft. The land in the East belonged to the state or was a statecommunal or common property. The political system in Asia had a special form of Eastern despotism, that is, the inhabitants of the state were absolutely rightless before the authority.

The causes of such peculiarities can be explained by the existence of the commune system, the root of leftist political philosophy in Asia. The overwhelming number of inhabitants of the ancient East were engaged in agriculture. “The communal conditions for real appropriation through labor such as the irrigation systems (very important among the Asian peoples) … will then appear as the work of the higher unity—the despotic government—which is poised above the lesser communities,” wrote Karl Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.

In that way, the state tightened its grip over the commoners or cultivators and they practically lost their freedom. They were applied in constructing complicated irrigation systems, sanctuaries, and other megastructures. Unlike the slaves, it was a costless work force that needed neither to be dressed nor fed. In Asia the state had its special sphere of governing, the superintendency [Page 34]of public works. Such a system needed a considerable bureaucratic apparatus. “An economic function devolved upon all Asiatic governments, the function of providing public works,” Marx added. The centralized state system of managing the economy came round.

...