MARXISM 21 Article

Marxism and East Asian History

from Eurocentrism and Nationalism to Marxist Universalism
Owen Miller*

1)

This paper argues that Marxist historiography has encountered serious problems in fulfilling its promise of producing a theoretical framework for a universal human history and makes a preliminary examination of three Marxist theories that can help to overcome these problems. It begins by looking at the problem of Eurocentrism in historiography in general and how Marxist history has thus far been unable to break through the Eurocentrist impasse. Focusing on the problem of how to integrate East Asian history into historical materialism, an overview of Korean historiography is offered as an illustration of some of the symptomatic problems. The paper then considers in turn the theories of uneven and combined development, the tributary mode of production and bourgeois revolution from above, arguing that they need to be developed and systematically combined to draw Marxist historiography out of the impasse of Eurocentrism and toward a universalist human history.

Keywords: historiography, economic history, Marxist theory, East Asia, Korea, Eurocentrism.

* Research Associate, University of Cambridge, om248@cam.ac.uk

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1. Introduction
The Marxist tradition of history may claim to have a number of different purposes: to rediscover the history of those who have been ignored by ruling class historiography since records were first made; to historicise capitalist society, and more generally class society, as delimited forms of human society1); and to provide a repository of experience for revolutionary strategy aimed at the transformation of society. But what is perhaps its grandest claim is one that is still far from being fulfilled: the creation of a universal human history, supported by coherent theoretical foundations and free from the dichotomisations and idealism of bourgeois historiography. From the perspective of a historian of East Asia the problem of actually fulfilling this promise seems particularly acute when it comes to the integration of East Asia into the Marxist account of human history. A huge amount of time and effort was expended in the twentieth century by historians in the East Asian countries, the USSR, and to some extent Western Europe, to place China, Japan and Korea into a Marxist historical scheme.2) I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that these efforts ended largely in failure, along with much of the rest of so-called Marxist history that remained faithful to the mechanistic, stageist theories of the Second International and Stalinism.3)
1) Although the primary focus of Marxs own research programme was the explanation and historicisation of capitalism, the materialist conception of history can also play a key role in historicising such natural features of human society as the gendered division of labour and oppression on the basis of sexuality and so-called race. 2) For an account of the Asiatic mode of production in East Asian historiography see Joshua Fogel: The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China and Japan. For an analysis of the role played by the concept of feudalism in Chinese Marxist historiography see Dirlik (1985). 3) For a critical account of the historiography of the Second International and the Stalinist period see Blackledge (2006: Chapter 3).

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Such a bleak assessment has led some to think that the Marxist research programme is not capable of developing the universal human history that it promises.4) But the resources do exist within the Marxist tradition to create a non-Eurocentric human history. Within the Marxist research programme or often at its political fringes in the era of Stalinism a number of theories have already been developed, which are essential to this enterprise, but which have not yet been systematically connected and applied in a coherent way. Although I am not going to attempt it here, this sort of theoretical synthesis and application is a task that is urgently needed for a revitalisation of Marxist history. We should be confident that historical materialism has the best tools for understanding human history, as well as our contemporary world, but there is no doubt that those tools have to be sharpened and reassessed. If we look at the Korean case simply as an example of a much wider phenomenon we can see why this sort of renewal of Marxist historiography is an urgent necessity. After a couple of decades in which left-wing historical scholarship was in the ascendancy in South Korea, the pendulum has begun to swing back toward the right during the last decade. The reaction that has taken place during the 2000s, targeting some of the obvious problems of Stalinist and nationalist historiography, has seen what Han Kyuhan has called a reactionary duet between postmodernism and the right (Han Kyuhan, 2006). These emerging postnationalist and New Right historiographies would claim to eschew essentialisms of all types, opting for a deconstruction of ideological categories or a scholarly objectivism on the
4) Some self-proclaimed radical historians such as John Chalcraft argue that we need a post-Marxist methodology for global history, reciting some fairly typical charges against what he calls classical Marxism for its inability to adequately theorise colonial and postcolonial societies (Chalcraft, 2005).

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one side and a sort of globalist pragmatism on the other.5) But as Irfan Habib has pointed out in reference to the Subaltern Studies Group in India, postcolonialism can all too easily provide cover for new forms of transnational colonialist discourse.6) Meanwhile, the New Rights anti-nationalism seems to be little more than a thin veneer for a wholesale rehabilitation of South Koreas military dictatorships and cheerleading for its domestically unpopular role as a US client state. However, these challenges from the right cannot be taken on successfully by a Marxist historiography that is compromised by Eurocentrism, nationalism or mechanistic stageism. In order to intervene in debates on colonial modernity, East Asian development and global history on a much firmer footing, Marxist historiography needs a more coherent theoretical framework for understanding non-European history. The most basic assumption of this article, and I would contend, historical materialism itself, is that human history forms a unity or totality. Karl Marx and many subsequent Marxists have argued that it is capitalism specifically that has been the most thoroughly universalising force thus far in history. However, speaking more broadly, we could say that the development of class society and civilisation over the last few thousand years of human history has seen the gradually increasing interrelation and integration of formerly disparate human groups. But underlying this historical process there is the more basic unity of humans as a species, most fundamentally characterised by their socially organised interaction with nature. This is the ultimate framework within in which human history takes place and it sets the constraints on what is possible. This means that despite all the bewildering superficial variety of human cultures and societies the same technologies, pat5) As an example of the postnationalist approach, in this case from a non-Korean historian of Korea, see Eckert (2001). 6) Irfan Habib, Critical notes on Edward Said.

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terns of social relations and even developmental paths have been reproduced repeatedly by humans in their interaction with nature and each other. While emphasising the differentness of different historical periods, Marx also recognised their underlying unity in the following way in the
Grundrisse:
Some determinations belong to all epochs, others to only a few. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature their essential difference is not forgotten (Marx, 1973: 85, Quoted in Barker, 2006: 79).

The same point is made in a different way by Allinson and Anievas in their discussion of unevenness in history, describing history as an ontological whole:
It [unevenness] is expressed in myriad ways throughout pre-modern history, as well as across differing dimensions and planes of internal differentiation within the ontological, though not yet causally integrated, whole of world-societal development (Allinson and Anievas, 2010: 50).

In this article I aim to introduce in outline some of the ideas that I plan to expand on and develop in a monograph length study of Marxist historiography in East Asia. In the first section I will look first at the problems of Eurocentrism and existing Marxist historiography and why we need an explicitly universalist global human history to overcome them. A schematic outline of the development of Korean historiography will be used to illus-

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trate these problems in the East Asian context. In the next section, I will look in turn at three key theories that I believe are essential to any such project of universalisation: Trotskys theory of uneven and combined development; the concept of the tributary mode of production and precapitalist cores and peripheries developed mainly by Samir Amin; and finally the theories of bourgeois revolution from above and passive revolution, first developed by Antonio Gramsci, but more recently extended by a number of contemporary Marxists. In the conclusion I will draw some of the connections between these three theories and point toward how they might be applied in the Korean and East Asian contexts.

2. The problems of Eurocentrism and Marxist historiography 2.1 Eurocentrism and history
The greatest obstacles to any universalising historical project are the particularist or exceptionalist discourses that currently dominate, namely Eurocentrism and the nationalisms which often form its mirror image, particularly in the non-Euro-American7) world. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Eurocentrism still forms the framework in which almost all history is written, including much Marxist history and much history that consciously sets itself against historical Eurocentrism and imperialism.8) First of all, then, what does Eurocentrism in historiography mean? The following is not an exhaustive list of the components of this ideology, but an outline of some
7) I am using this somewhat awkward terminology to avoid the use of Western, which I think can serve to perpetuate the framework of East-West dichotomies which Eurocentrism creates and which Marxists should seek to overcome. 8) This section draws on Samir Amins book Eurocentrism (1989).

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of the most important for the discussion here. The first thing to note is that Eurocentrism has its origins in a material historical process: the rise of capitalism. This should not be understood to mean that the rise of capitalism was a European phenomenon, as it was clearly part of a broader historical process that involved interconnections between various parts of the Eurasian and African continents.9) However, the world historical break created by capitalisms rise to dominance in Western Europe and the expansion of European kingdoms beyond their corner of the continent during the last 500 years is the real source of our Eurocentric ideology. A second key element of the ideology is its ahistorical tendency to hide these real origins behind essentialist myths of European superiority or exceptionalism. In historiographical terms these are exemplified by ideas about the Greek and Roman origins of European civilisation and certain supposedly European inventions such as democracy, science or rationalism. Another typically ahistorical Eurocentrist tendency is to understand either the rise of capitalism within Europe or the rise of Europe to a position of global dominance, as teleological processes that had to happen in the time and place they did, perhaps because of the innate virtues of European civilisation. In the contemporary world, long after the age of formal colonialism and in a time when open racism is largely unacceptable, European history still dominates historical thinking, education and public discourse in most of the
9) See Banaji (2007). We should note that the elements of the new capitalist mode of production that finally took root in Western Europe wage labour, extensive commercialisation, factory production, dispossession of peasants etc were by no means unique to Europe in the precapitalist period.

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world. Beneath this there is the deeply embedded idea that European history is somehow more important than other human histories, or even that some other parts of the humanity have no real history. This has led to a sort of false universalism that stretches from the civilising mission of the colonial era to the ideology of human rights and secular enlightenment values proclaimed by liberal proponents of US imperial strategy (or war on terror). This oxymoronic Eurocentric universalism even has its own Marxist variant, as I will discuss below. Thus, although the Eurocentric historiographical world-view has been incrementally undermined by research on the non-European world (and the re-establishing of much that was already known but suppressed), and by an increasing realisation of the interconnectedness of human historical development,10) it is very far from being buried. Indeed, Eurocentrism also forms the framework within which the multiple national histories of the modern world have been reflexively formed over the last 150 years. As Samir Amin puts it:
[N]ationalist culturalist retreat proceeds from the same method, the method of Eurocentrism: the affirmation of irreducible unique traits that determine the course of history, or more exactly the course of individual, incommensurable histories. These fundamentalisms are no different from Eurocentric fundamentalism (Amin, 1989: 135).

So the reaction to European historical chauvinism or liberal Eurocentric universalism has created a world of incommensurable histories with each modern nation state forming its own centre with its own essentialist and teleological historical narrative. Few parts of the world exemplify better the de10) This is exemplified by the new trend for world history or transnational history since the 1980s, particularly in the United States.

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velopment of nationalist historiography in reaction to the advent of Eurocentrism than the modern nation states of North and South Korea, China and Japan with their highly solipsistic approaches to history.

2.2 Eurocentrism and Marxism

There have been some rather crude analyses of Eurocentrism, such as Edward Saids Orientalism, which have seen Marxism as simply another form of racist, Eurocentric thought.11) Samir Amin, however, has taken a far more constructive approach to the apparent problems of Marxist theory and the non-European world, making a materialist analysis of both Eurocentrism in general and its Marxist variants in his book Eurocentrism. We do not have to accept Amins solutions in their entirety to recognise that there is much of value in his analysis of the problems of Eurocentric Marxism.12) First of all, Marxs own attempts at creating a universalist account of social development were tentative and based on the relatively limited information about world history available to him at the time.13) But as knowledge of the totality of human history expanded in the twentieth century the general tendency was not for Marxists to creatively absorb this and develop Marxs theories on the basis of his method. Rather, as Amin points out, Marxism after Marx succumbed to the temptation to extrapolate from the European example in

11) See, for example, Said (1995: 153156). See also Irfan Habibs critique of Saids approach to Marx: Critical notes on Edward Said. 12) Amins solutions to the problems of Marxist theory and strategy centre around his theories of unequal development and delinking which derive from his own version of dependency theory. 13) See for example Marxs well-known but extremely brief outline of the epochs marking progress in the economic development of society in his Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Marx, 1859).

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order to fashion a universal model (Amin, 1989: 120). Thus a generally Eurocentric Marxism has dominated for the last century or so, but this Eurocentric Marxism actually comes in two forms. On the one side there is the two roads thesis in which Europe followed the normal or progressive historical path through the feudal mode of production, while the East found itself in the stagnant dead-end of the Asiatic mode of production. On the other was what might be called the hyper-universalist five stages theory that became Stalinist orthodoxy in the early 1930s. In this version a rigid scheme of five stages (primitive communism ancient/slave society feudalism capitalism socialism), derived from a particular reading of European history, was imposed on the whole of human history. Although much has been written on both these forms of Marxist historiography, since the latter part of the twentieth century there has been a growing sense among Marxists that a new approach was needed in applying the Marxist method to history.14) Amins solution to the Eurocentric impasse in Marxist history is to apply his theory of unequal development to the birth of capitalism. In his thesis it was European feudalism that was a relatively backward and peripheral form of the universal tributary mode of production, but this backwardness also gave it greater flexibility (Amin, 1989: 121). While there may be major problems with Amins application of his theory of unequal development to the contemporary world and to socialist strategy,15) his development of the concept of tributary mode of production is powerful and has recently gained
14) In the 1960s and 1970s dissatisfaction with the Stalinist five stages orthodoxy among Western Marxists led to a revival of the Asiatic mode of production. However, the logical, theoretical and empirical failings of the AMP were lucidly exposed in Perry Andersons 1974 essay The Asiatic Mode of Production. 15) For a critique of Amin, see for example, Glap (1986).

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considerable influence among Marxist historians. It is an idea that needs further development and, in my opinion, synthesis with the historical ideas of Leon Trotsky. This is something I will return to in section 4 of this article but for the moment I want to turn briefly to the question of historiography in East Asia.

3. Korean historiography and Eurocentrism

A brief overview of the development of Korean historiography and its various traditions will provide a useful illustration of the historiographical problems I have outlined above and their particular configuration in the East Asian context. The periodisation of Korean history and its place in world history have been recurring problems for historians of Korea, and I would argue that they are still unresolved, not only because empirical research on Korean history is still at a relatively early stage, but also because of a failure to break out of the Eurocentric framework of historical thinking. In the following I will give a very schematic outline of some of the main tendencies in the study of Korean social and economic history over the last century.

i) European and Japanese colonial historiography

The first stage was the creation of classical Eurocentric and colonial histories of Korea by Europeans and subsequently Japanese historians at the end of the nineteenth century. These accounts of Korea relentlessly emphasised Koreas backwardness and inability to develop in a progressive direction in much the same way as contemporary European historiography on China. This approach took a somewhat more scientific turn with the stagnation thesis first put forward by the Japanese economist Fukuda

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Tokuz in his 1904 essay Koreas economic organisations and economic units (Fukuda, 1925)16) which subsequently formed the basis for the official Japanese colonial view of Korean history after the 1910 annexation. The core of Fukudas thesis was that Korea had not passed through a feudal stage in its history and was stuck almost 1,000 years behind Japan or Europe in developmental terms.

ii) Nationalist historiography

Within Korea itself, these new ideas of progress and backwardness along with their ally Social Darwinism, which formed such a central pillar of capitalist ideology at the time came as a shock to the Korean ruling class, which had been raised on a traditional Sinocentric historiography that centred on a didactic, moralistic historiography of the rise and fall of dynasties. But it did not take long for colonial historiography to produce a nationalist reaction in Korea and the leading figure in the emerging nationalist historiography of the early twentieth century was Sin Chaeho.17) He, along with other nationalist historians such as Pak nsik, set about locating the unique essence and origins of the Korean people (minjok18)) in the countrys distant past. They focused particularly on early Korean kingdoms and the mythical progenitor mentioned in certain traditional sources Tangun in order to fashion a Korean history isolated from Chinese influences. In so doing the nationalist historians created a new nationalist historiography that was the
16) For more on the life and ideas of Fukuda Tokuz see: Inoue Takutoshi and Yagi Kiichiro, Two Inquirers on the Divide: Tokuzo Fukuda and Hajime Kawakami; Morris-Suzuki (1989); Kang Chinchl (1986). 17) For more on Sins historiography see Em (2001). 18) Originally a Japanese coinage, this word, which arrived in the East Asian languages in the late nineteenth century, can perhaps be translated best as folk but also carries similar meanings to the English words race and nation.

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mirror image of Japanese essentialism and emperor worship. The ideas of these early nationalist historians still play important roles in popular discourse and state-directed education about Korean history in both Koreas today.

iii) Marxist historiography

As Marxist ideas filtered into colonial Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly through Korean students returning from study at Japanese universities, the two different forms of Eurocentric Marxist historiography described above were also reproduced in Korea. On the one hand were Japanese Marxists such as Moriya Katsumi, who taught at Keij Imperial University19) and their Korean co-thinkers such as Kim Kwangjin, Yi Chngwon, Chn Soktam and Pak Kkchae, who were advocates of versions of the two roads theory, emphasising the stagnation and particularity of Korean history.20) On the other hand was a group headed by Paek Namun, famous now as the founding father of Korean Marxist historiography. He was a hyper-universalist who set about applying the five stages and the regular laws of historical materialism to Korean history.21) He had studied under Fukuda Tokuz but turned his stagnation theory on its head, arguing in his 1933 book Chosen shakai keizaishi (Socioeconomic History of Chosn) that Korea had passed through all the necessary stages of precapitalist development and even begun to show some signs of capitalist sprouts before the
19) The central university founded by the Japanese colonial government in Seoul and the forerunner of todays Seoul National University. 20) Chn proposed the lack of slave mode of production in Korean history as an explanation for the peculiarities of Koreas feudal society and its inability to develop. For more on Chns historiography see Miller (2010a). 21) For more on Paek Namun and his debates with the two roaders, see Pang Kie-chung (2005).

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arrival of Japanese colonialism. This binary division in Korean Marxist historiography between those who emphasised the particular and those who focused on the universal echoed to quite an extent the contemporary debate on Japanese capitalism between the Kza-ha and Rn-ha factions of Japanese communist intellectuals.22) In the post-liberation period, Marxist historiography has continued to play an important role not only in North Korea but also in the South where it emerged from the underground to take a near dominant position in academia in the 1980s. In both Koreas however, a form of Stalinist-nationalist historiography has dominated and this has also meant the domination of the five stages theory and all the inevitable but largely sterile debates concerning the precise nature and periodisation of the primitive communist, slave and feudal modes of production in Korean history.

iv) Postnationalist historiography and New Right historiography

Right-wing nationalist and positivist historiography also played an important role in post-liberation South Korea. These tendencies covered the spectrum from the essentialist reading of history learnt from Japanese cultural nationalism to a much more moderately nationalist, empiricist historiography. However, they all tended to incorporate a good dose of historical developmentalism that chimed well with the prevailing political orientation of South Koreas developmentalist dictatorships. As I mentioned above in the introduction, South Korean academia in re22) The Japanese version of the universal/particular debate was not at all novel itself but had earlier precursors in Russia: the Narodniks who emphasised the peculiarities of Russian development and the Mensheviks who believed that Russia would follow the general laws of capitalist development. See Lwy (2006: 33).

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cent years has seen a turn away from historiography that claims to stand in the Marxist tradition toward a variety of new theories and approaches reflecting global trends in historical research, from postcolonialism and transnational history to the history of everyday life. The last decade has also seen the rise of a new quantitative economic history which has produced some impressive new data on the late Chosn period (16001910).23) However, much of this research suffers from the problems of Neo-Smithian or New Economic History approaches which focus almost pathologically on prices and markets to the exclusion of all else.24) It is a trend that has also split into two distinct tendencies, echoing the earlier debates between stagnationists and proponents of internal development. At the stagnation end of this spectrum stand economic historians like Rhee Young-hoon (Yi Ynghun) whose emphasis on the backwardness of the late Chosn economy forms part of a right-wing project to rehabilitate both the Japanese colonial period (1910 1945) and the developmentalist dictatorship of Park Chung-hee (1961 1979).25) Korean historiography in the twentieth century has thus seen a repeated oscillation between theories of stagnation and progress which shows no signs of coming to an end. Thus far Marxist approaches to the Korean past have also oscillated between these two poles and not found a satisfactory way to bring Korean history (or indeed Chinese or Japanese histories) into the Marxist account of world history.

23) See for example the collections: Yi Ynghun ed. (2004); An Pyngjik and Yi Ynghun eds. (2001). 24) See the critique of New Economic History offered by Fine and Milonakis: Milonakis and Fine (2007). 25) I deal in greater detail with Rhee Younghoon (Yi Ynghun) and the historical project of the New Right in my forthcoming paper: Miller (2010b).

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4. Toward a universal historical materialism: three key elements

The task of overcoming all the problems described in this article so far is not an easy one, but as was stressed earlier, historical materialism already has many of the key theoretical ingredients that can successfully integrate East Asian, European and other histories into a coherent whole. I would like to argue, therefore, that we can begin this task by developing and synthesising three existing theories, which I will outline in turn below.

4.1 Uneven and combined development

The first of these is the theory of uneven and combined development first proposed by Trotsky in his writings on history and revolution in Russia. This thoroughly dialectical approach to historical development is absolutely key to establishing a universalist historical materialism and its application to real historical questions carries the potential to overcome a whole series of problems related to Eurocentrism and mechanistic Marxism (stageism, linearity, inevitablism). The origins of Trotskys theory lie in his attack on the stageism of his fellow Second International Marxists (including both Lenin and Plekhanov). Ironically enough, a very similar form of stageism would later become the Stalinist orthodoxy of the Comintern only a decade after the Russian Revolution that had so clearly demonstrated the validity of Trotskys position. The application of this stageism in practice by the Comintern during the Chinese Revolution of 1927 and its subsequent defeat would have disastrous consequences for the whole of East Asia, and indeed for Russia itself.26)
26) For a thorough application of Trotskys ideas to the history of the 1927 Chinese

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Generally speaking, Trotskys theoretical contribution has been neglected in the academic world but just recently it has been resurrected in a serious way by a number of scholars working in various fields, including Justin Rosenberg, Michael Lwy, Neil Davidson and Alex Callinicos.27) My intention here is not to provide a thorough account of the theory28) but to limit myself to highlighting four key aspects of uneven and combined development in relation to the problems of Marxist historiography and East Asia.

4.1.1 Transcending the universal/particular dichotomy

At the most abstract level the key feature of the theory for our purposes here is its ability to transcend the dichotomies of progress/stasis and particular/universal that have dogged the historiography of the non-European world. Uneven and combined development provides a classic example of a dialectical sublation or aufhebung, in other words, a reconceptualisation that transcends and incorporates the previous conceptualisations. As Michael Lwy points out in his essay on uneven and combined development, in forming his theory Trotsky adopts the viewpoint of totality, starting from capitalism as a world system rather than starting from individual states (Lwy, 2006: 3132). But, crucially, Trotsky also claims that unevenness is the most general law of the historic process (Trotsky, 1977: 27). According
Revolution, see Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. 27) The volume 100 Years of Permanent Revolution edited by Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice contains a number of interesting essays on the theory of uneven and combined development, while recently an issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs was devoted to the relevance of the theory in international relations (vol. 22: 1, 2009). 28) For a sophisticated recent exposition of Trotskys theory see Allinson and Anievas (2009). For the classical sources of the theory see Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (1969), as well as chapter one in his History of the Russian Revolution (1977).

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to this understanding then, human history is an inherently uneven totality developing over time.

4.1.2 Opening up human history

A second feature of uneven and combined development that I want to highlight here is its potential for opening up history and expunging the inevitablist tendencies that have repeatedly crept into historical materialism. One of the original aims of Trotskys theory was to attack the idea that history has clear stages that follow a certain order and the subsequent political conclusion that the revolutionary practice of socialists must follow this order. Instead, the theory inherently re-emphasises the need for open history in which outcomes are never completely determined and there is always a role for human agency and chance. As Lwy puts it, Trotsky had a rich and dialectical understanding of historical development as a contradictory process, where at every moment alternatives are posed. This aspect of uneven and combined development is also one of the meeting points between Trotskys theory and practice; between the theory of unevenness and the
strategy of permanent revolution which was built upon it.29)

4.1.3 Combined development and the advantage of backwardness

The theorys emphasis on the totality of human society means that it is based on the premise of inter-societal development, but particularly recognises the importance of the asynchronicity of development (Allinson and Anievas, 2009). This unevenness across societies in their co-evolution commonly leads to situations in which the advantage of backwardness comes into play.30) To put this another way, history is a like a continuous game of
29) See Trotsky (1969). 30) The idea of the advantage of backwardness has a much longer history than Trotskys theory, as described in Neil Davidsons chapter: From Uneven to

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leapfrog in which later developing societies in contact with more advanced ones often do not need to pass through all the same phases of development but can leap over them. As its name suggests, uneven and combined development goes further than simply recognising the unevenness of development across time and space, it also suggests the importance of combinations of different levels of development within a single social formation and perhaps across complexes of separate but linked social formations.31) A representative example of this internal asynchronicity would be the retention of older social forms and ways of life alongside the simultaneous adoption of the most advanced technology and organisation of labour. This notion of combination was key to Trotskys understanding of Russian society in the early twentieth century, but it applies just as well to the history of the East Asian states, particularly from the late nineteenth century up until the present day.32) For Trotsky combination was key to understanding the relative instability of Russian society and its highly combustible class relations. Furthermore, it led him to see a (socialist) revolutionary potential in Russia that was borne out by the events of 1917 but not predicted by other Russian Marxists.

4.1.4 Uneven development and precapitalist history

Although unevenness in the development and spread of technologies, ideas and social systems is clearly a general feature of human history (as Trotsky explicitly argued himself), the extension of the other half of the
Combined Development in 100 Years of Permanent Revolution (Davison, 2006: 10 26). 31) This latter possibility is argued for in Colin Barkers article. Barker (2006: 7287). 32) For an application of uneven and combined development to contemporary China see Davidson (2006, 211229).

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theory combination to precapitalist history is more controversial. Such an extension has been proposed recently by Colin Barker in an article entitled Beyond Trotsky: Extending Combined and Uneven Development, partially on the basis of the earlier arguments of Justin Rosenberg (Barker, 2006).33) This extension of uneven and combined development may be useful, for example, in understanding the early state formation process and establishment of the tributary mode of production in chains or networks of emergent class societies forming around a civilisational core, or within what anthropologists and archaeologists often call interaction spheres. Surely this sort of process one which must have been repeated again and again across the globe in the course of the last 10,000 years of human history is highly suited to the sort of analysis facilitated by Trotskys theory? And, as I will explain in the next section, the theory of uneven and combined development can also be synthesised fruitfully with another late twentieth century theoretical development of Marxs historical materialism: the tributary mode of production.

33) It should be noted that Barkers understanding of combination is somewhat different to Trotskys original understanding, and the understanding I will use in this article. For Barker development in one social entity enters into the conditions of development in others, such that they inter-penetrate each others conditions of development. In that sense of social entities being bound together in an interacting whole - their development is combined (p.77). This is essentially the same as Lwys point about Trotsky adopting the viewpoint of totality, although brought to a less abstract level. But for Trotsky it seems that combination referred more specifically to the combination within a social entity of older and newer elements (social forms, institutions, technologies, ideologies etc.) creating a novel and potentially explosive social formation toward which socialist strategy had to be specifically orientated. This internal combination was of course itself made possible in the first place by the combined development of interacting social entities (in exactly the way that Barker emphasises).

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4.2 The tributary mode of production

As I discussed above, twentieth century Marxism produced two equally unsatisfactory schemes aimed at understanding world historical development: the two roads and the five stages. Rather than facilitating historians understanding of the rich complexity of social development, both of these approaches have tended to produce sterile and abstract debates over periodisation or the particular way in which a mode of production in one part of the world deviated from the supposed norm. While uneven and combined development has the potential to do away with the mechanical stageism and inevitablism inherent in these two developmental schemes, this still leaves us with the task of making Marxs key analytical concept, mode of production, both more rigorous and more universally applicable to human history. Some scholars such as Perry Anderson, for example, have argued that a more satisfactory application of the mode of production concept would mean a multiplication of the types of modes beyond primitive communism, slave, feudal and capitalist to match more closely the actual political and institutional features of societies that have existed in history.34) In fact, on this basis, almost every historical society could have its own mode of production. But, as others such as John Haldon have pointed out, this is a very unsatisfactory solution that actually negates the intended usefulness of mode of production as an abstraction that serves to guide a research programme rather than describe a concrete society (Haldon, 1995: 9394).
34) In his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1996), Perry Anderson argues, for example, for a distinct nomadic mode of production as well as slave, tribal-communal and feudal modes (p.218). His understanding of the concept of mode of production is also clearly set out in the conclusion to his Lineages of the Absolutist State.

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The theoretical development I would like to outline here the tributary mode of production (TMP) takes the opposite direction to Anderson, establishing the concept of mode of production at a high level of abstraction. Samir Amin was the first to propose the TMP as a universal alternative to the five stages or two roads approaches, an alternative that would encompass all precapitalist class societies based on coercive surplus extraction.35) This redefinition of the concept of mode of production and the use of the TMP as an alternative to both the feudal and Asiatic modes has since been sharpened further, most significantly by Eric Wolf36) and John Haldon, and is now accepted by a growing number of Marxist historians.37) At the centre of the TMP concept is Marxs own description of the feudal mode of production as a form of production in which surplus is appropriated from the direct producers by coercion, or by non-economic means, in other words, without the widespread commodification of labour.38) This minimalist definition of the TMP avoids the particularist pitfalls of the feudal or
35) For Samir Amins original description of the tributary mode of production see: Amin (1976: Chapter 1, The Precapitalist Formations, 1358). 36) Eric Wolfs chapter on modes of production in this book Europe and the People without History (Wolf, 1982: 73100) is one of the most concise and illuminating pieces on the concept. For Wolf, human societies have been dominated by three MOPs: kin-ordered, tributary and capitalist, although he deliberately refuses to see these three as part of some form of evolutionary sequence, preferring to talk of historical relations between them. 37) For example, Neil Davidson in his comment Asiatic, Tributary or Absolutist? (Davidson, 2004) Historian of the middle ages Chris Wickham also takes the same position as John Haldon on the nature of the pre-capitalist mode of production in his Framing the Early Middle Ages, Europe and the Mediterranean, 400800, p.60. 38) Marx himself put it in the following way in Capital volume III: the surplus labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be (Quoted in Wolf, 1982: 80).

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Asiatic modes, but at the same time allows for us to employ a different, lower level of abstraction to discuss the various social formations that have existed within the boundaries set by the mode. Amin, Wolf, Haldon and others argue that what have been thought of as different modes of production feudal, Asiatic, perhaps even slave are actually different forms of the TMP, or as Wolf puts it oscillations within the continuum of a single mode (Wolf, 1982: 82). The different forms of class society that we encounter in much of human history before capitalism therefore occupy a continuum of power distributions (Wolf, 1982: 80), with centralised, bureaucratic states at one end, decentralised feudal societies at the other and many possible variations in between. For Haldon, this unevenness in the way ruling class power is distributed in different societies and its continuous flux within the evolution of societies reflects the ongoing struggle for surplus among different elements of non-producing or ruling classes.39) Samir Amin has gone further than this and fused the tributary mode of production with his own theory of precapitalist inter-societal relations. His ambitious approach to the broad sweep of Old World history proposes that for much of the last few thousand years the history of the Eurasian and African continents has been characterised by three main tributary cores (Hellenic/Islamic Middle East/Mediterranean; India; China), two smaller cores (Central Asia and the Southeast Asian archipelago) and a number of peripheries (Europe, Japan, Sub-Saharan Africa).40) The cores saw the re39) John Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (Haldon, 1995). See in particular chapter 5, State Formation and the Struggle for Surplus where Haldon examines a number of different tributary social formations. 40) Amin (1993: 262276). This article represents the most developed version of Amins own universalist account of human history, based on his concept of the tributary mode of production, and as such deserves to be dealt with in a separate critical article.

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peated establishment of centralised states capable of extracting large surpluses and developing sophisticated civilisations, but the peripheries, where political power was more decentralised, also had certain advantages in their looseness and flexibility. This eventually allowed the capitalist mode of production to take root in one of the peripheral regions (Europe) and for newly emerging expansionist states in that region to come to dominate much of the world. Although Amin does not mention uneven and combined development, he seems to be arguing for something very similar to Trotskys theory, in which precapitalist states across Eurasia developed interactively and unevenly, allowing regions to enjoy the advantage of backwardness during certain periods and the disadvantage of priority during others. A more thorough synthesis of uneven and combined development with the approach to precapitalist history engendered by the tributary mode of production could take historical materialism in a very fruitful direction, decisively away from Eurocentrism.

4.3 Bourgeois revolution from above

The third theory Id like to discuss is closely linked to the other two but deals with a more concrete moment in human history. It concerns the important question of how most of the world became capitalist over the last 150 years. It was a truism of the mechanical stageist approach that dominated historical materialism in much of the world after the 1920s, that colonial and post-colonial countries must experience a bourgeois democratic revolution in order to progress to full-blown capitalism. Such a revolution would usually be imagined as a modern retreading of the classical European revolutions like the French Revolution, in which a revolutionary bourgeoisie rises up against the old ruling class, or in this case, a combination of the old ruling class and the colonial power. But this sort of approach clearly does not

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accord with the experience of much of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when one independent capitalist state has been established after another, either after a period of colonialism or in reaction to the threat of colonial domination (as in the case of Japan). Trotskys theory of uneven and combined development was formulated in part to deal with this question, but Trotsky himself did not expect the socially volatile latecomers to capitalist development, or the colonised nations of Asia and Africa to produce a proliferation of more or less stable, independent capitalist states by the end of the twentieth century. Rather, he saw the latecomers, such as Russia, as largely incapable of establishing such a stable bourgeois regime. What he didnt predict was that such a proliferation would indeed be possible on the basis of a particular form of capitalism: state capitalism.41) Alex Callinicos and Neil Davidson have both argued for a redefinition of the concept of bourgeois revolution within Marxist thought. Davidson therefore argues that we should understand the bourgeois revolution not in the narrow sense of an emergent bourgeois class taking power and establishing capitalism, but as the establishment of an independent centre of capital accumulation (Davidson, 2004a). He points out that while no bourgeois revolutions in history have matched exactly the ideal bourgeois democratic revolution of Stalinist historiography, these revolutions did nonetheless happen. Whether or not the bourgeoisie played a leading role or democracy was established, such revolutions have repeatedly laid the foundations for the development of bourgeois society on the basis of the capitalist mode of production (Davidson, 2004a).

41) See Tony Cliffs classic account of the theory of state capitalism: State Capitalism in Russia (Cliff, 1974). For a Korean overview of recent debates on state capitalism see Jeong Seongjin (2006).

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Another related theoretical development worth mentioning here is Tony Cliffs modification of Trotskys theory of permanent revolution. Cliff argued in the early 1960s, after the experience of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions that a whole series of colonial and post-colonial countries had seen not socialist revolutions led by the working class, as Trotsky had predicted, but state capitalist revolutions led by middle class elements and the state. He called these deflected, state capitalist, permanent revolutions, although stripped of the window-dressing of socialist rhetoric these revolutions can appear as just another form of bourgeois revolution from above (Cliff, 1963). A third idea that is closely linked to the concept of bourgeois revolution from above is Antonio Gramscis concept of passive revolution in which society is transformed from above by the existing ruling class. Drawing on these three different variations on the theme of revolution from above I think we can discern three broad ways in which modern capitalist states (or independent centres of capital accumulation) have come about over the last two to three centuries:
1) The classical bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century in which the bourgeoisie played a revolutionary role, often alongside elements of other classes and with the pressure of powerful movements from below. (the Netherlands, England, France, Scotland,42) America). 2) The passive revolutions from above of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which elements of the old ruling class endeavoured to transform their states into centres of capital accumulation, often under pressure from outside (Japan, Italy, Germany etc). 3) The state capitalist revolutions from above of the middle part of the twentieth century in which the middle classes or intelligentsia of colonised or
42) For the Scottish Revolution see Davidson (2003).

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post-colonial nations led processes of anti-colonial revolution and/or capitalist state formation (China, India, Indonesia, North and South Korea etc).

Although we have to recognise that the global capitalist transition began in Western Europe, the form it took there in its classical phase should not be elevated to a norm. The early phase of the global transition set the conditions for later phases but did not determine their form; in fact the early establishment of capitalist nations in Western Europe made it quite impossible that other countries would be able to follow the same course. When we look at the history of bourgeois revolutions from our current vantage point, we can probably say that the normal form of capitalist transition was a state capitalist one led from above or on occasion by an intellectual middle class claiming to rule on behalf of the people. This sort of redefinition of bourgeois revolution is a crucial component of a universalist historical materialism as it allows us to step back from accounts of the capitalist transition based on the European experience (important as they are) and see the bigger global picture, just as the tributary mode of production allows us to step back from the narrow confines of the European feudal model.

5. Conclusion: Marxist universalism and East Asian history

In conclusion, this paper will look briefly at how the three theories outlined above might in future be applied to East Asian history. First, uneven and combined development has real potential for helping us to understand the process of state formation during the first millennium of the common era in Northeast Asia. This period saw the formation of a whole series of states on the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago, emerging out of earlier tribal formations43) in a complex interactive process with the neighbouring

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Chinese civilisation,44) and among the emerging states themselves, that involved diplomatic, religious, commercial and colonial contact. The new state formations participated in a sort of tributary catch up development process which saw repeated cases of leapfrogging and combinations of earlier tribal social forms (tribal councils, village communities) with Chinese technologies of tributary rule (bureaucratic ranks, Chinese writing system, Confucian/Legalist ideologies, Buddhism etc) and new forms of class domination (slavery, state taxation and corvee, aristocratic and monastic estates ).45) The different ways in which these processes of uneven and combined development were worked out historically on the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago were responsible for creating very different social formations in the two regions. These different forms of precapitalist society in Japan and Korea can also be understood as excellent examples of the different sorts of social formations that can result from struggles over surplus identified by John Haldon within the framework of the tributary mode of production. The Chosn state (13921910) would lie very much at the centralised, bureau-

43) In addition to the Kogury, Paekche, Silla and Kaya states that formed on the peninsula in 2nd5th centuries, archaeologists now believe that a whole series of states or proto-states were formed on the Japanese archipelago during roughly the same period in close interaction with the peninsular states. There is speculation that the area may even have formed a maritime interaction sphere not unlike that of the ancient Aegean some centuries before. See Tikhonov (1998); Barnes (2001); Pai (2000). 44) Which had itself coalesced into a centralised bureaucratic state a few centuries earlier after a period of interactive state formation and development known as the Warring States period. 45) The state of Silla was, for example, the latest developer on the peninsula, but by 668 CE had conquered the other states to form a unitary state that would last until the early 10th century.

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cratic end of the spectrum, while the Japanese Shogunates (Kamakura, Muromachi, Tokugawa 11851868) provide East Asian examples of decentralisation and militarisation that could at points rival medieval European feudalism. The Northeast Asian social formations of the two millennia prior to the rise of capitalism should not be understood as immutable types, but were instead the sites of ongoing historical processes taking place within the constraints set by the logic of coercive surplus appropriation. This sort of understanding should help us to move away from Eurocentric approaches that emphasise the failure of East Asian countries to develop capitalism independently. It is an approach that should encourage us to ask questions like, What were the social and economic mechanisms that facilitated the compromise between aristocratic and bureaucratic tendencies within the ruling classes of precapitalist China and Korea?; Why did the introduction of bureaucratic technologies from China to the Japanese islands not produce a centralised tributary state and how did this relate to Japans position within the precapitalist international relations of Northeast Asia?; and How were increasingly sophisticated forms of commerce and industry integrated with the tributary state in East Asia? Moving forward to the advent of capitalism and the modern period, we must also be careful to put East Asian history firmly within its inter-societal context and to seek to understand the processes of uneven and combined development and revolution from above that produced todays capitalist states of Japan, China and North and South Korea. In the case of Japan, Allinson and Anievas have recently sought to approach the Meiji Restoration as a passive revolution emerging under world-historical conditions of the uneven and combined process of development generalized through the rise of capitalist world economy (Allinson and Anievas, 2010). Another recent article, by Kevin Gray, conceptualises Chinas transition since the 1970s to mixed

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private/state capitalism as a form of passive revolution (Gray, 2010). To my knowledge, there has been no thorough account of the process of bourgeois revolution from above in the two Koreas, but in broad terms it could be argued that the Korean peninsula has experienced three phases in its transition to becoming two independent centres of capital accumulation. First, the failed passive revolution of the weakened and beleaguered Chosn state and enlightenment intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century; then semi-state capitalist colonial industrialisation under Japanese rule from 1910-1945; and finally the dual passive revolutions of Kim Il Sung and Park Chung-hee which were able to establish two successful (state) capitalist states on the peninsula, with support from their respective imperialist backers, the USSR and the USA.46) What I hope Ive been able to show in the preceding discussion is that the Marxist tradition (or perhaps traditions) does have within itself the resources to overcome its own Eurocentrism and, at the same time, many of the other tendencies associated with Stalinist Marxism, such as inevitablism, stageism and a mechanical understanding of determination. However, the future of historical materialism and its ability to make sense of human history depend not on creating abstract historical schemes from the theoretical tools I have outlined above but on their application to the actual history of East Asia and the rest of the world. This does not necessarily mean that Marxist historians have to start form scratch, but they may have to come to existing research from a different angle or ask rather different questions about historical periods and transitions, such as those suggested above. I would like to conclude by re-emphasising the centrality of the post46) On the formation of the North Korean state and North Korean state capitalism see: Kim Ha-young (2005); Miller (2006).

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capitalist horizon to Marxist historiography. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that a truly universalist human history is not possible without recognising the delimited nature of the capitalist mode of production, nor without recognising how the rise of capitalism has served to divide as well as integrate. As I stated at the very start of this article, one of the purposes of historical materialism must be to historicise capitalism, and fundamentally to make us realise that far from being the only way in which societies have been organised, it represents only the briefest period albeit the most productive and destructive of human history. But the same goes for our attitude toward the potential for future change in the mode of production of our society. If capitalism is the ultimate horizon then we can all too easily end up with a teleological narrative of the rise and perfection of the capitalist system, as Neo-Smithian economic historians tend to do. Just as easily, historiography can fall into debates over which form of capitalist development was or is preferable: colonial or national development; state-led or private capital, and so on. Or, as in the case of postcolonialism and postnationalism, some of the critical tools of Marxist history are retained but are blunted by the hollowing out of their emancipatory content. Acknowledging (and preferably fighting for) the possibility of a postcapitalist/communist future is necessary to our understanding of the past in the same way that our understanding of the precapitalist past is necessary to our explanation of capitalism. Any such postcapitalist future would, as Trotsky was keen to point out,47) have to move rapidly beyond the bounds of nation states and socio-economic unevenness to realise the universal nature of human history in
47) The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet (Trotsky, 1969: 279).

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its fullest possible sense with a new form of globally integrated and equitable society.
(Received 21 January 2010, Revised 4 February 2010, Accepted 17 April 2010)

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