ABSTRACT
In the theory of the modes of production, the index of the transformation of one historical period into another is given by the changes in the relations of social production in a given epoch; these relations characterize the economic formation of the society as a whole. The social organization of labor, of production, and of the economy as a whole is brought out in history in the Asiatic mode of production; in this condition, production is socialized, but only in a partial and defective way. The social substance of the Asiatic mode of production and of all subsequent modes of production of bourgeois and civil society is constituted of these social relations of equal exchange and of the antisocial relations of alienation of the surplus. The Asiatic mode of production was propounded as a theory during the period 1925-1931, in reference to the Chinese revolution, its causes, consequences of the defeat, and to its aftermath, by Soviet and Hungarian theoreticians.
