On the Mode of Production: Feudalism or Despotism?

When, in 1961, the issue of a land reform was being publicly debated, no Iranian political party or tendency doubted the claim that productive relations in Iranian agriculture were characteristically feudal. In fact, both the Marxist and the non-Marxist Iranian intellectuals and educated elite had for a long time discussed the country’s history — and its recent history in particular — with reference to such familiar Western terms and concepts as ‘feudalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘liberal’, ‘proletarian’ and so on. The same is also true of many modern — i.e. ‘analytical’ — works on Iran written by Western (including Russian) academics and journalists. 1 Both groups have suffered from the fact that their analytical concepts and models have been borrowed, and applied, directly from the European context; and that they have begun, and usually ended, their analyses with a greater understanding of European, rather than Iranian, history. This does not mean that European history and social science are of no use in a serious analysis of Iran’s history, sociology or political economy; it simply means that here — as in every other analytical context — we should dispense with the pragmatic benefits of intellectual complacency, and take the trouble of looking for models and theories which may result in genuine additions to our knowledge of the world. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.