Tributary Mode of Production
Description
Josh Holroyd:
“The concept of a tributary or “tribute paying” mode of production first appears in a 1974 paper, entitled Modes of Production and Social Formations, by the Egyptian academic, Samir Amin. In this paper, Amin defines the tributary mode as “juxtaposing the persistence of the village community and that of a social and political apparatus exploiting the latter in the form of exacting tribute”.
On the face of it, this could be taken simply as a re-branding of the Asiatic mode of production, which is also characterised by the existence of village communes, supporting a powerful state apparatus by their surplus product, usually appropriated as tax. However, Amin goes further: “this tribute-paying mode of production is the most common and most general form characterizing pre-capitalist class formations; we propose to distinguish between the early forms, and the advanced forms such as the feudal mode of production in which the village community loses the eminent domain of the land to the benefit of the feudal lords, the community persisting as a community of families.”
According to Amin, where communal property relations are dissolved by the private ownership of land, what occurs is not the advent of a new mode of production but rather the development of a more advanced form of tributary society: in Europe, feudalism. Confusingly, Amin continues to refer to both feudal and tributary “modes”, whilst at the same time treating feudalism as merely a more advanced expression of the latter, more general mode of production.
Amin also hypothesized the existence of “peripheral” modes such as the slave mode and the petty commodity mode of production, both of which were referred to by Marx, but he emphasises that, in the main, the tributary mode is dominant and the others are present as secondary forms within it.
For Amin, the tributary mode, which includes the feudal mode of production, is characterised by the following key elements:
- “a significant development of productive forces – i.e., a sedentary agriculture which can ensure more than mere survival, a substantial and reliable surplus, non-agricultural (artisanal) activities using technical know-how and various tools (except machines)”;
- “developed unproductive activities corresponding to the size of this surplus”;
- “a division into social classes based on this economic foundation”; and
- “a developed state that goes beyond the confines of village existence”.[4]
These criteria are to be found in almost every class society in history, with only Amin’s “except machines” in parenthesis excluding industrial capitalist societies. In short, if you have a state but no machines, you have a tributary society.
Later, in the 1980s, Amin inverted his own conception, claiming that in fact European feudalism was not a more advanced form of the tributary mode of production, but rather an “uncompleted [sic]”, “primitive” and undeveloped form of it, “marked by feudal fragmentation and a dispersal of power” and an “unfinished degree” of ideological expression in the form of a state religion. Amin explains, “The primitive feudal form evolves gradually towards the advanced tributary form”. Therefore, for Amin, any further categorisation of pre-capitalist societies is only a comparison between more or less “developed” tributary forms, with the level of development determined by the concentration of “power”, expressed ideologically in the form of a state religion.” (https://www.marxist.com/marxism-the-state-and-the-tributary-mode-of-production.htm)
Discussion
Wolf
“The same concept was later used by the American anthropologist, Eric Wolf, in his 1982 book, Europe and the People Without History. Wolf puts forward three modes of production: a capitalist mode, a tributary mode, and a “kin-ordered mode” (where kinship relations predominate as opposed to class relations, i.e. “primitive communist” or “gentile” society".
Wolf’s justification for such a radical re-jigging of Marx’s notion of modes of production is simple: “Since we want to deal with the spread of the capitalist mode and its impact on world areas where social labor was allocated differently, we shall construct only those modes that permit us to exhibit this encounter in the most parsimonious manner. For this purpose we shall define but three: a capitalist mode, a tributary mode, and a kin-ordered mode. No argument is presented here to the effect that this trinity exhausts all the possibilities. For other problems and issues it may be useful to construct other modes drawing further distinctions, or to group together differently the distinctions drawn here.”
Wolf defines his tributary mode as follows:
- "These states represent a mode of production in which the primary producer, whether cultivator or herdsman, is allowed access to the means of production, while tribute is exacted from him by political or military means."
Considering that in any society the producers must be able to “access” the means of production, whether they belong to them or not, what therefore distinguishes the tributary from the capitalist mode of production is that under the former the surplus is taken by force as opposed to exchange.
Wolf then goes on to hypothesise two different “polar situations” for the tributary mode: “one in which power is concentrated strongly in the hands of a ruling elite standing at the apex of the power system; and another in which power is held largely by local overlords and the rule at the apex is fragile and weak. These two situations define a continuum of power distributions.” “Power system” is not defined but the way it is used suggests that Wolf here means state, political power.
Wolf continues: “In broad terms, the two situations we have depicted correspond to the Marxian concepts of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and the ‘feudal mode of production’. These are usually treated as enduring and unchanging opposites. One term is usually ascribed to Europe, the other to Asia. The preceding exposition should make clear, however, that we are dealing rather with variable outcomes of the competition between classes of nonproducers for power at the top. To the extent that these variable outcomes are all anchored in mechanisms exerting ‘other than economic pressure,’ they exhibit a family resemblance to each other.” Amin’s link between the feudal and tributary modes is therefore retained and the apparent differences between the two are explained as the result of “a continuum of power relations”, seemingly at the level of the state, arising from the success of one wing of the same ruling class over the other, or even one wing of the state over the other, depending on one’s interpretation of “competition between nonproducers for power at the top”.
No differences at the base of these societies, at the level of the village or manor, whether they be of property ownership or relations of exploitation, are accounted for in Wolf’s schema; mere “access” to the means of production is sufficient. All that is required is the taking of “tribute” by force, regardless of how and by whom this tribute is produced. Therefore, any agricultural society that possesses a state must be tributary as all it requires is a direct producer and an armed ‘extractor’.
Haldon
A very similar approach is taken up by John Haldon, a British Byzantine historian, in his 1993 book, The State and the Tributary Mode. As the title suggests, the main thrust of this book is an application of the tributary mode concept to a number of pre-capitalist societies and a discussion of the role of the state in these societies.
For Haldon, the tributary and feudal modes are one and the same; “tributary” is just a more universal way of expressing the basis of feudal society, devoid of its specifically European connotations. As Haldon explains, “'feudalism' (I will continue to employ the traditional term for the moment) can be understood as the basic and universal pre-capitalist mode of production in class societies. It coexists with other modes, of course, but the set of economic relationships which marks it out has tended historically to be dominant.”
The above-mentioned “economic relationships” are set out in the following propositions:
- “that the extraction of rent, in the political economy sense of feudal rent, under whatever institutional or organizational guise it appears (whether tax, rent or tribute) is fundamental;
- “that the extraction of feudal rent as the general form of exploitation of pre-capitalist autarkic peasantries does not depend on those peasantries being tenants of a landlord in a legalistic sense, but that non-economic coercion is the basis for appropriation of surplus by a ruling class or its agents; and
- “that the relationship between rulers and ruled is exploitative and contradictory in respect of control over the means of production.”
Haldon goes on to argue that, in all pre-capitalist societies, the bulk of the agricultural surplus was produced by peasants and appropriated by someone else, either a state functionary or a private landlord. Therefore, these societies were all dominated by the same “set of economic relationships”. Any important differences between them or change within them over time can and should (for Haldon) be explained by reference to the struggle over the surplus between the “ruling class” of the state, and its agents/local lords.
However, there are two apparent exceptions to this rule: “Slavery may well have dominated relations of production at times in the late Roman republican period and the early Principate (chiefly based in Italy) and in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC (in certain city-states)”. In these societies, the dominant mode of production was the exploitation of slaves who, being part of the means of production themselves, do not fall under the rubric of peasants in possession of their own means of production. From the above presentations of the theory a clear pattern emerges: For a society to be tributary, what is required is the presence of peasant producers and armed exploiters, which essentially amounts to any pre-industrial society, where the vast majority of the population worked the land. Marx’s categories of Asiatic, slave, and feudal modes of production are thus dissolved into a general pre-capitalist “mode”, notwithstanding Haldon’s minor slave exception.” (https://www.marxist.com/marxism-the-state-and-the-tributary-mode-of-production.htm)
More information
A critique from a more traditional marxist point of view: https://www.marxist.com/marxism-the-state-and-the-tributary-mode-of-production.htm
Bibiography
- Article/Chapter: The Tributary Mode of Production and Justifying Ideologies. Evaluating the Wolf-Trigger Hypothesis. By Robert M. Rosenswig (DOI:10.5744/florida/9780813054308.003.0007)
"In his definition of the tributary mode of production, Eric Wolf proposes that those societies that extract economic surplus through political means generate religious models of the cosmos where supernatural beings provide a metaphor of tribute relations in the human world. As Wolf puts it, “…public power is thus transformed into a problem of private morality." This is a classic Marxist assertion that religion creates false consciousness and motivates people to act against their material interests. Rather than assuming this proposition is correct, anthropological data can be employed to assess it. This chapter evaluates whether a society’s mode of production corresponds to beliefs about the structure of the cosmos using ethnographic data from the eHRAF World Cultures database. Do societies where tribute is extracted by political means have similar justifying ideologies? Conversely, do societies where surplus extraction occurs through kin relations lack such justifying ideologies? My goal is to evaluate Wolf’s intuitively logical proposition with anthropological data. The implications of this evaluation are at the heart of a materialist understanding of causation by empirically evaluating whether material conditions influence ideational beliefs."