ABSTRACT
As the capitalist economies of the West have stagnated in the 1970s, Western scholars have been making great progress in research on Marxist thought. In Italy Umberto Melotti published a book in 1972 entitled Marx e il terzo mondo, a specialized study of Marx’s Asiatic mode of production. Most of the works on Marxist historical science published in China or the Soviet Union speak of five modes of production in the history of society, though a few distinguish six. The five modes are primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. The Asiatic state relied on the peasantry to support a large bureaucracy, and its bureaucracy was in fact an exploitative class just like the landlord and bourgeois classes of feudal and capitalist states. Given the low level of social productivity when primitive communalism collapsed, different geographical conditions throughout the world led to the emergence of dissimilar developmental paths: the Asiatic, the ancient Greek and Roman, and the Germanic.
