THE BLOCKING OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRIBUTE-PAYING FORMATIONS

The examples of the Arab world and Black Africa show that large-scale trade does not engender capitalism and is 'not-itself capitalist. Here were formations that were marked by a substantial development of long-distance trade together with a relatively small surplus produced within the agrarian society.

Civilization, in the Old World at any rate, seems to have appeared if not simultaneously then at least about the same time in four places: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, and the valley of the Yellow River. It was not accidental that these were four river valleys located in relatively hot regions. The natural conditions played a determining role at the start. Irrigation made possible both greater produc­tivity (in terms of the annual product of each peasant family) and a much higher density of population.

In all four cases the form assumed by the given civilization was ' identical. It was the tribute-paying form: a state-class of the theo­cratic-bureaucratic type emerged from the communities and asserted itself as organizer of the political and economic life of society. We. must conclude from this that the first kind of class-divided social formation was not the slaveowning but the tribute-paying kind.

The natural conditions were to cause these four civilizations to experience different destinies. Mesopotamia and the Indus valley were highly vulnerable: surrounded as they were by relatively well- populated zones, their wealth attracted attack by the nomads, seminomads, and settled mountain peoples of the zones where agriculture depended on rainfall. Several times destroyed, they were unable to progress in a systematic and continuous way, as regards either the technology of irrigation and industry or that of political and administrative organization. Egypt and China, on the contrary, enjoyed favorable conditions. Egypt is protected by deserts both on the west and on the east. China is situated not in the heart of the Old World but at its eastern limits and is comparatively isolated from what lies to the west of it by moun­tain barriers that are hard to cross, high rugged plateaus, and deserts. Egypt was thus able to develop its tribute-paying civi­lization in a sheltered setting and soon attained a fully developed form of this civilization. China enjoyed an additional advantage, _r being able to expand southward at the expense of primitive peo- i pies who, equally isolated from the West, were incapable of be- ∣ coming a threat to the Han people in the way the Indo-Europeans ∖ became for Mesopotamia and India. Not only did China soon I reach, like Egypt, the heights of the tribute-paying type of civi­lization: it was also able to expand, establishing along the banks of its southern rivers new zones of agrarian civilization on.

Some remarks are called for regarding these two centers of tribute-paying civilization. Firstly, these two civilizations were truly central, in the sense that they involved a considerable proportion of the world’s population: nearly ten million in Egypt by the second millenium B.C., while China soon reached a population of a hundred million, at a time when the rest of mankind amounted to hardly the same number, scattered over millions of square ∣ miles. Secondly, in these two civilizations the village community^ quickly weakened and almost disappeared as state authority be-1 came more powerful. The community survived as a community of'; families, but lost the dominium eminens of the land, which passed ⁱ. to a broader and higher community that soon developed into a nation. Thirdly, the state-class that became organized on the national scale was not, despite widely held notions, particularly “despotic.” As a national state-class, it took account of the public interest and organized useful large-scale public works. The pyra­mids are unimpressive compared with the works undertaken to harness the Nile, which required an amount of labor several hundred times larger. This class, organized in a state, remained comparatively open, and social mobility in access to it was con­siderable, as is shown by the Chinese system of the mandarinate. In comparison with the violent history of European feudalism, abuses were limited in these civilizations, which deserved the epithet “despotic” only occasionally, when Barbarian invaders took command of the state — and even in these cases the Barbar­ians soon became assimilated and civilized — or in troubled times when the state collapsed, giving way to independent feudal au­thorities, so that these civilizations came to resemble feudal Eu­rope. Fourthly, the power of the state that was characteristic of these formations in their developed condition gave the tribute­paying mode a clear dominance within them: long-distance trade, craft production (whether carried on by free men or slaves), production in those sectors where wage labor existed — all were subject to close control by the state, which taxed them.

were free to oppress them without any restriction. Fifthly, these two well-developed models of the tribute-paying formation were able to digest the progress achieved by the productive forces. The production relations defined by the tribute-paying mode were compatible with a wide range of levels of development of the produc­tive forces. The conflict between productive forces and production relations makes its appearance only when the capitalist mode has been introduced from outside. The historical duration of the fully developed tribute-paying mode was thus, in principle, very long. Never­theless, this compatibility with progress meant Telativelyblocked devel­opment, in relation, that is, to the progress possible in less advanced, less developed formations, in which the conflict between production ι relations and productive forces manifests itself sooner, compelling an advance beyond precapitalist relations.

All the same, Egypt and China remain the two original mod­els, the basic sources of science, technique, ideology, and organ­ization.

Alongside these central tribute-paying formations, exchange between the three poles of tribute-paying civilization in the West led to the establishment of peripheral trading formations: the Phoenician, Syrian, and Arab cities. The Seminomadic tribal king­doms of western Asia and southern Europe sought to reproduce the model provided by Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or the Indus civilization — but without much success, for their material basis was a fragile one. The surplus they were able to levy was small, and for this reason the communities remained hardy and state centralization was poorly developed and constantly threatened by local autonomies.

This slaveowning formation lacked the elasticity of the tribute­paying formations because it presupposed the existence of a pe­riphery from which manpower had to be obtained. The strong trib­ute-paying societies with which it entered into -trade relations, and even relations of domination, did not sell their people. The pe­riphery from which slaves had to be drawn was therefore the Barbarian periphery of Europe — Celtic, Germanic, Slav. It was not slave revolts that put an end to the Roman Empire but the blows struck by the Barbarians. The latter, having established themselves on the ruins of the Empire, superseded the slave­owning mode, setting up the feudal mode, a variant of the tribute­paying mode. The Barbarians, established first of all where natu­ral conditions were favorable, thus ended by making their way (via the slaveowning mode) into new regions.

The feudal variant remained weak in comparison with the original, fully developed tribute-paying mode. This weakness, this peripheral character was to become its strength. At the begin­ning of the feudal order in Europe, it meant a surplus of modest size but also an absence of political, administrative, and economic centralization, the one going along with the other.

The parallel between this exceptional line of evolution in the west of the Old World and what happened at its eastern extremity is striking. The problem of the Japanese “miracle” has never been looked at in these terms of relations between center and periphery. And yet the analogy is impressive. In the region to which Japan belongs, China was the finished model in all respects — a model that was faithfully reproduced wherever natural conditions made this possible: in Vietnam, in Cambodia in the Khmer period, and in Korea. In Japan, however, the natural conditions presented serious obstacles: the feudal fragmentation of the country and the autonomy of the trading cities limited the degree of state central­ization so that there were great similarities between Japan and Europe, separated as they were by thousands of miles. True, Japanese society did not give rise to capitalism until it had received a jolt from without. But when the time came, it became capitalist with the greatest of ease. In fact, this evolution might not have taken place if Japan had been so unlucky as to become integrated in the periphery of the capitalist system. It did not suffer this fate, because it was a poor country. China, on the contrary, with its substantial centralized surplus, attracted the cupidity of Europe and the United States. Also, the fact that the launching of the process of the birth of capitalism was occasioned by a jolt from without caused it to assume special forms, in particular emphasizing the role played by the state.

The evolution of the Indian subcontinent likewise enters into this schema. The tribute-paying civilization of the Indus valley was destroyed in the distant past, but the Indo-Aryan invaders rebuilt it over a larger territory. The process was a slow one because the territory was so vast, and the Ganges valley had to be conquered gradually from nature and from the primitive inhabitants. This process was also disturbed by the opening of India to the west and the successive waves of invasion that this invited. In the cul-de-sac of southern India some tribute-paying formations were also gradually established. India thus arrived at the tribute-paying mode rather late, not long before it was brought under colonial rule. Here, by way of exception, in a few areas where the process was still young, the village communities continued to flourish, and it was these that often led observers to regard the survival of the community as a prerequisite of the tribute-paying mode.

Why did not all the peripheral societies of the tribute-paying mode give birth to capitalism? We have already seen what the reasons were in the Arab world and Black Africa. The Byzantine Empire and its Ottoman successor were also peripheral forma­tions — or, more precisely, groups of formations — of the tribute­paying system. Actually, the tribute-paying mode never succeeded in taking root in this area in a thorough way. Some parts of the area (in the Balkans, Caucasia, Syria, and North Africa) con­tinued to be organized in solid communities, and the tribute levied by Constantinople and later by Istanbul was always in jeopardy from revolt by these communities. Other parts of the area stagnated because the slaveowning or commercial basis to which they had owed their former prosperity had shrunk: this happened with Greece and the Eastern cities. The commodity production of these parts was transferred to the capital, to which Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian craftsmen were deported by the thousand; in the capital alone could the centralization of the tribute levied from an immense empire sustain this commodity production. Here was a case of a tribute-paying formation that was trying to cut its way through an older substratum that offered effective resistance. It is comprehensible that a formation like this was unable to engender capitalism. In other regions of the world, in Iran and Central Asia, tribute-paying formations remained too poor, owing to natural conditions, and too much threatened by Barbarian invaders, to be capable of achieving capitalism.

As in the Old World, the class-divided formation that arose in pre-Columbian America was of the tribute-paying type. This was the case with the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas. Evolving in isolation, without any danger from without, owing to the small population of their continent, these formations appear to have attained a high level of development, comparable to that of Egypt and China in the Old World. We cannot know how they might have evolved further, since from the sixteenth century onward these formations were violently subjected to conquest by Spain and then broken up, to give place to the specific formations on the periphery of mercantilist capitalism.

As for the special formations that were constituted on the basis of European immigration in new lands where there was no pre­viously existing substratum (New England and Canada, Boer South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand), these belong neither to the category of the periphery, nor to that of the tribute-paying systems, nor to that of capitalism. They were exceptional formations that were constituted from the start in close connection with the genesis of European central capitalism. I shall refer to them as the “young centers.”

It has been shown that the precapitalist formations, despite their variety, are made up of a dominant central form (the tribute­paying formation), and a series of peripheral forms (the slaveowning, feudal, and trading formations). The tribute-paying formation is accounted for essentially by its own inner dynamism. In this sense it is autocentric and constitutes the normal path of evolution. The peripheral precapitalist formations are due to the interaction between their own inner dynamism and the influence exercised upon them by the fully developed tribute-paying formations. In this sense they are not autocentric and constitute exceptional paths of evolu­tion. Around two fully developed centers of the tribute-paying formation that appeared very early, namely, Egypt and China, and a third that arose later, namely, India, peripheral constella­tions of various types took shape and entered into relations with each other along their fluctuating frontiers. Thus one may list the Mediterranean and European peripheries (Greece, Rome, feudal Europe, the Arab and Ottoman world), those of Black Africa, Japan, etc. It was in one of these, Europe, that capitalism was born.