ABSTRACT
The Asiatic mode of production (AMP) appears at the head of the sequence of socioeconomic formations listed in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—“Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production”. As Karl Marx observes in a footnote in the Critique, certain “Asiatic, particularly Indian, forms” of “primitive communal property” were the origins of “various prototypes of Roman and Germanic private property”. The society of village communities—the AMP—thus preceded the ancient mode of production but was no longer the starting point of all civilized peoples, being preceded in turn, as Marx and Friedrich Engels came to realize after reading Morgan, by true primitive society. Although Lewis Morgan proved that there existed prior to the village community an even more primitive social formation based on clans, his discovery in no way brought into question the scientific validity of the AMP as a distinct epoch in the history of socieconomic formations.
