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It is worth noting, then, that nowhere in his unpublished notebooks did Marx actually assemble this array of anatomically distinct forms of society into a progressive historical sequence- instead, they lay side by side, synchronically. Their arrangement into a diachronic sequence can be found in another work published shortly after, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, whose preface provides the clearest statement of what Marx meant by historical materialism in the period prior to the conceptual breakthroughs which organize the later study, Capital.

"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society also create the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation."1

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The postulation of a stationary Asiatic mode of production was introduced to explain the non-universality of historical progress, i.e., the fact that the civilizations of the Orient had long ago abandoned this forward course, thereafter vegetating in the teeth of time. It must be conceded that in this period, as before, Marx's and Engels's interest in non-European societies and histories did not run deep. The level of historical and anthropological research that went into Grundrisse's comparative taxonomy of social forms did not exceed the standard of the time, and was on many points lower than the level attained in the latest scholarship.

"The division into four basic types—oriental (Indian), / Greco-Roman, Germanic and Slavonic (cf. p. 95) –fits in with the state of their knowledge in the 1850s" 2

In The Lineages of the Absolutist State, Perry Anderson situates Marx's notions of the Asiatic form of society within a broader context of the early modern discourse on the Orient.

"In certain respects, it can even be said that Marx and Engels regressed behind their ancestors in the tradition of European reflections on Asia. Jones was more aware of the political variations within the States of the Orient; Hegel perceived the role of caste in India more clearly; Montesquieu revealed a more acute interest in the religious and legal systems of Asia. None of these authors identified Russia so nonchalantly with the Orient as Marx, and all of them showed more serious knowledge of China." 3

What is the implicit historical thesis behind Grundrisse's taxonomy of political communities and social-property forms? It was that the dissolution of a primitive communal order engendered a number of alternate forms of class-society: a tributary Asiatic mode, the Ancient city, and a Germanic tribal form. This variation explained a great divergence. Before its recent subjection to the lords of modern civilization, the Orient had been essentially the same world that it had been in the time of Herodotus. By contrast, the ancient city contained a self-dissolving dynamic of historical change, one which drew into its orbit a tribal Germanic world itself in the process of dissolution. The feudal society which issued from this concatenation in turn contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction- private property in land, and the merchant-artisan city. The Hegelian echoes of this vision of history are unmistakable: history is a process of the emergence of the new out of the self-destruction of the old.

As far back as his dissertation, Marx's reflections on the nature of bourgeois society turned on comparisons to the fate of Rome, classical parallels to modern civil wars. In Grundrisse, Marx transformed this parallelism into an account of a great divergence of not just Europe from Asia, but of modern from ancient times too. Why did the rapacious private appropriation of the city's common land system- the backbone of the old Roman Republic- not give rise to a capital-wage labor society but instead unleashed a system of plantation slavery, which blocked the path to any further economic development?

"There, the dissolution of the old relations of property was also linked to the development of monetary wealth, of commerce, etc. But IN FACT, this dissolution did not result in industry but in the domination of the countryside over the city." 4

Why did the later break-up of European feudal clan society, by contrast, open the way to the formation of a social order characterized by the duality of capital and labor in general-surplus money at one pole confronting an uprooted, exchange-dependent but nonetheless legally free population on the other? In the introduction to Grundrisse, Marx noted that archaic social forms persist in a truncated fashion as subordinate moments within a more advanced social totality. It was the persistence of vestiges of a uniquely individualistic old Germanic form of tribal community surviving in the interstices of the feudal system, which passed over into later bourgeois society in the form of common land, municipal charter,s and parliaments, deflecting early modern European society down a different path than the one Rome had gone down.

"In the Germanic form, the tiller of the soil is not a citizen, i.e. not a city dweller; the foundation of this form is the isolated, independent family settlement, guaranteed by its bond with the other family settlements of the same tribe, and their occasional assembly for purposes of war, religion, adjudication, etc., which establishes their mutual surety. Individual landed property does not here appear as a contradictory form as against communal landed property, nor as mediated by the community, but the other way around. The community exists only in the mutual relation of the individual landed proprietors as such. Communal property as such appears only as a communal appendage to the individual kin settlements and land appropriations."4

The resemblance of this 'Germanic form'- a voluntary association of private landowners- to the Lockean conception of political community is striking enough, suggestive of the organic forms of common law within which capitalist society first took shape. While Marx has perhaps surprisingly little to say about feudalism as a form of society, in accounting for the divergence between the fate of Rome and the rise of modern bourgeois society, he implicitly relied upon a certain notion of it. Bourgeois society could, according to this view, only have arisen out of the specific combination of political community and private property- warring lordships- that distinguished the world of European feudalism from other forms of pre-modern society. 5

The problem at issue in Marx's reflections on variations between pre-bourgeois forms of communal ownership (Indian, Slavonic, Mediterranean, and Germanic) was the genesis of the defining social relations of modern bourgeois society out of a separation of the laborer from the means of labor- the opposition of capital to a dispossessed but formally free labor force.

"Such historical processes of dissolution can take the form of the dissolution of the dependent relationship which binds the worker to the soil and to the lord, but which actually presupposes his ownership of the means of subsistence (which amounts in truth to the process of his 'emancipation' from the soil). They can also take the form of the dissolution of those relations of landed property which constitute him as YEOMAN, as a free working petty landowner or tenant (colonus), i.e., as a free peasant. //The dissolution of the even more ancient forms of communal property and of real community needs no special mention.// Or they can take the form of the dissolution of guild relations, which presuppose the worker's property in the instrument of labor and labor itself, determined as a certain form of artisanal skill, not merely as the source of property but as property itself. Lastly, they can take the form of the dissolution of the various client relationships, in which non-proprietors appear as co-consumers of the surplus produce in the retinue of their lord, and in return wear his livery, participate in his feuds, perform real or imaginary acts of personal service, etc." 6

These dissolutions/separations led to the formation of a totality defined by a complex of socio-political forms whose order of determination could only be made apparent by identifying a unifying socio-economic logic of development. The distinction Marx made for the first time in this period between an economic 'base' and politico-cultural 'superstructure', with the former determining the latter, is grounded in the separation of the political from the economic within this bourgeois totality. Here too, the more advanced, internally differentiated social order distils an opposition of the economic to the political-cultural, which is held to have existed in embryo in earlier forms of society, an opposition which contains a broader conception of a multi-dimensional dynamic of historical change.

"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." 7

The above passage makes a clear case for the causal priority of a trans-historical development of the productive forces over the succession of social-property relations within which this progress unfolds. In the introduction to part three of this study, another conception of historical materialism is proposed, which inverts this order of determination. But the passage above offers another conception of a relation of determination between base and superstructure, which should be considered independently of its proposed relation between relations and forces of production. The metaphor of a base and superstructure has arguably been a victim of its own success: the determination- 'in the last instance'- of politics and culture by the economic (and modern society is characterized by their separation) is so widely accepted as true that it nearly goes without saying. Some still object to it for fear that culture and politics will be denied their autonomy, or alternatively, that they cannot be distinguished from the economic. There is a grain of truth in these objections but true theories provide ways of surmounting the limits of their own categories, ones which always imply orders of determination, whether this is recognized or not. For example, when we think of ancient slavery or Medieval serfdom as economic orders upholding the political and cultural 'superstructures' of the polis and feudal vassalage, respectively, at the same time, we can recognize that in pre-bourgeois forms of society, economic relations of production are inseparable from extra-economic modes of domination and cooperation.

Marx proposed a distinctive account of the primitive accumulation of capital out of the dissolution of older communal modes of social production. But the political community did not cease to exist with the ascendancy of capital, as the latter required new forms of collective organization funded by taxation and public debt to relieve private enterprise of the burdens of performing essential infrastructural services. The separation of the political from the economic, of a public state from a society of legally free and equal subjects, generates a host of institutions that mediate the terms of this duality. Central banking and the capitalization of public debt

becomes the lynchpin of the new system of relationships between the state and private capital.

"All general conditions of production like roads, canals, etc., whether they facilitate circulation, perhaps even make it possible for the first time, or whether they also increase productive power (like the irrigation systems, etc., constructed in Asia and, incidentally, in Europe as well, by governments), will only be undertaken by capital rather than by the government, which represents the commonality as such, where the highest level of development of production based on capital has been attained. The separation of travaux publics† from the State and their migration into the domain of works undertaken by capital itself indicates the degree in

which the real commonality has constituted itself in the form of capital." 8

Writing in the heyday of laissez-faire, Marx assumed that the modernization of the European

State would lead to the privatization of previously publicly provided infrastructural services,

But the real commonality referred to here is suggestive of new and expanded forms of collab-

oration between state and capital.

1 Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, in MECW vol. 29, New York 1987, p. 263.

2. Eric Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, New York 1984, p. 25.

3. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London 1974, p. 470.

4. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, in MECW vol. 28, New York 1986, p. 430

5. Montesquieu was arguably the first to theorize the unique feudal origins of what for him was modern

Europe, and the historically anomalous nature of feudalism itself in comparison to both the republics and

empires of antiquity and the despotisms of Asia, past and present. In The Spirit of the Laws, he memorably

portrays the origins of a historically anomalous, socio-political order, characterized by the parcellation of sovereignty into private lordships. European feudalism could be said to have engendered a unique pattern of

state formation and inter-state conflict, especially conducive to the crystallization of private property and expansion of commerce. In both the ancient world and in Asia, past and present, such possibilities were foreclosed by the establishment of vast empires that extinguished the impetus to commercial expansion coming

from the competition between states.

6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, in MECW vol. 28, New York 1986, p. 426.

7. Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy in MECW vol. 29, New York 1987, p. 263.

8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse in MECW vol. 28, New York 1986, p. 455.