Marx's first form of landed property' (1858a: 472-4), the primitive commune, is characteristic of initially pastoral, nomadic societies. Here individuals relate to land as property of the community, of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour'. They are proprietors of the land in so far as, and only in so far as, they are members of the community. Indeed, Marx says, strictly speaking individuals as such are here merely possessors of the soil, for land is the property of the community as a whole (ibid.: 476). Marx is clear that the initial, naturally arisen spontaneous community'- which is the 'family, and the family extended as a clan' - ‘appears as first presupposition' for this form of property:
the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land. When they finally do settle down, the extent to which this original community is modified will depend upon various external, climactic, geographic, physical etc. conditions as well as on their particular natural predisposition – their clan character. This naturally arisen clan community, or, if one will, pastoral society, is the first presupposition – the communality of blood, language, customs – for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life, and of their life's reproducing and objectifying activity (activity as herdsmen, hunters, tillers, etc.) ... The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions. (ibid.:472)
Here, then, particular social relations - specifically, familial relations, extended into the clan community' – are presupposed to appropriation through the labour process, and integral to these relations are communality of blood, language, customs'. These latter are of course 'superstructural' phenomena par excellence for most adherents to base/superstructure models, and things which belong neither in the economic structure' nor the superstructure (and thus lie outside the scope of historical materialist theory altogether) for Cohen.
The so-called Asiatic form' of property (ibid.: 472-4) is a variant of this primitive form, though, Marx says, it at first sight appears not to be because of the individual's apparent propertylessness. Here:
the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence {exist] only as hereditary possessors. Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities. (ibid.: 473)
Marx's language here is dense. But he appears to be saying that in the Asiatic form, the unity' formed in the co-operation of several communities becomes a presupposition of communal property', in exactly the same way as within any single community the existence of the commune itself is such a presupposition. He instances water control as an important form of inter-commune co-operation. Clearly where artificial irrigation is a condition of production, and it requires intercommunal co-operation, such co-operation also becomes a condition of production, and hence of property. Karl Wittfogel (1957) was to develop this line of argument (and apply it to the modern USSR), though in ways uncongenial to most Marxists; modern bureaucratic collectivist’ theorists reason similarly, drawing on Marx's analyses of the Asiatic mode of production, vis-à-vis the ‘socialist' state in modern planned economies (Melotti, 1977).
In such cases, this trans-communal ‘unity' may be personified in the form of a despot'; property appears mediated for [the individual] through a cession [sic] by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of many communities - to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune' (1858a: 473). Such a personification of social relationships is analogous to fetishism in the capitalist mode of production (though Marx himself does not draw the explicit parallel here). Surplus then goes to the personification of this ‘unity' - oriental potentate, clan patriarch, state, or whatever. Marx sees varieties of this Asiatic’form of society as being very widespread, embracing Mexico, Peru and early Celts, as well as India. He also suggests that among Slavs this may have been the origin of villeinage. What is of interest for the present argument, however, is that once again relations internal to a given mode of production and property form embrace evidently superstructural’ phenomena: quasi-political relations (of a tributary sort) and, in so far as a specific mystification of the ‘unity' is involved, ideology too. Marx writes, for instance, of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan-being, the god' (ibid.).
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RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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