The General and the Particular in the Trajectories of Humanity’s Evolution
The concrete, the immediate, is always particular—this is virtually a truism. To stop there would make it impossible to understand the history of humanity.[XXXVIII] This seems—at the phenomenal level—as if it were composed of a succession of particular trajectories and evolutions, without any connections with each other, except by chance.
Each of these successions can only be explained by particular causalities and sequences of events. This method reinforces the tendency towards ‘culturalisms’, that is, the idea that each ‘people’ is identified by the specifics of its ‘culture’, which are mostly ‘transhistoric’, in the sense that they persist in spite of change.Marx is, for me, the key thinker on research into the general, as it goes beyond the particular. Of course the general cannot be announced a priori through reflection and idealized reasoning about the essence of phenomena (as Hegel and Auguste Comte would do). It must be inferred from analysis of concrete facts. In such conditions it is clear that there is no ‘absolute’ guarantee that the proposed induction will be definitive, or even accurate. But such research is obligatory: it cannot be avoided.
When you analyse the particular you will discover how the general makes itself felt through forms of the particular. That is how I read Marx.
With this in mind, I have proposed a reading of historical materialism based on the general succession of three important stages in the evolution of human societies: the community stage, the tributary stage and the capitalist stage (potentially overtaken by communism). And I have tried, within this framework, to see in the diversity of the societies at the tributary stage (as in the previous community stage), the particular forms of expression of the general requirements that define each of these stages (see my book Class and Nation).
The proposition goes against the tradition of a banal opposition between the ‘‘European path’’ (that of the famous five stages—primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism, which was not an invention of Stalin but the dominant view in Europe before and after Marx) and the Asian path (or, rather, dead end). The hydraulic thesis, as proposed by Wittfogel, then seemed to me overly infantile and mistaken, based on Eurocentric prejudices. My proposition also goes against another tradition, produced by vulgar Marxism, that of the universality of the five stages.With this also in mind, I proposed looking at the contradictions within the large family of the tributary societies as expressions of a general requirement to go beyond the basic principles of the organisation of a tributary social system by the invention of those that define capitalist modernity (and, beyond, the possibility of socialism/communism). Capitalism was not destined to be Europe’s exclusive invention. It was also in the process of developing in the tributary countries of the East, particularly in China, as we shall see later. In my early critique of Eurocentrism, I brought up this very question, which had been ejected from the dominant debate by the discourse on the ‘‘European exception’’.
However, once capitalism was constituted in its historic form, that is, starting from Europe, its worldwide expansion through conquest and the submission of other societies to the requirements of its polarising reproduction put an end to the possibility of ‘‘another path’’ for the capitalist development of humanity (the ‘‘Chinese path’’ for example). This expansion destroyed the impact and importance of the variations of local capitalisms and involved them all in the dichotomy of the contrast between the dominant capitalist/imperialist centres with the dominated capitalist peripheries, which defines the polarisation peculiar to historical capitalism (European in origin).
I am therefore now proposing a reading of the ‘‘two paths’’ (that of Mediter- ranean/Europe and that of the Chinese world), which is not that of the opposition five stages/Asian dead end, but is based on another analytical principle that contrasts the full-blown forms of the tributary mode in the Chinese world with the peripheral forms of this same mode in the Mediterranean/European region. The full-blown form is visibly strong and stable from its beginnings, while the peripheral forms have always been fragile, resulting in the failure of the successive attempts by the imperial centre to levy tribute, in contrast to its success in the Chinese empire.
6.2