ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION 27 as the individual is a member of this community that he regards himself as an owner or possessor. The integrating entity is distinct and superior to numerous real separate Communities. The individual then is proper-tyiess or property seems to be mediated for him by a grant made by the total entity represented by the ruler to the individual through the intermediary of the particular community. It is therefore self-evident that the surplus product belongs to the supreme entity. Marx summed up his exposition as follows. Oriental despotism therefore with its apparent legal absence of property is in fact, however, based on tribal or communal property, in most cases, created through a combination of menufacture and agriculture within the small community, which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains within itself all conditions of reproduction and surplus labour belongs to the higher community which ultimately appears as a person. This surplus labour is rendered both as tribute etc, and as common labour for the glory of the whole community, partly of the real despot, partly of the imaginary tribal entity, the god.1 During their correspondence with one another Marx and Engels had agreed that the absence of private property was the key to the Oriental world. In this formulation, Marx was influenced by James and J S Mill and ndore particularly by Richard Jones who maintained that the sovereign was the sole proprietor of land and enjoyed exclusive title to it.2 Consequently, there were no loci of power independent of the ruler who appropriated the surplus from direct producers in the form of rent/tax. This system of ownership, production relations and surplus appropriation was called the Asiatic Mode of Production. Distortions and Deviations The sources from which Marx had initially drawn his inspiration were coloured with shades of Euro-centrism. For instance, James Mill feared that the creation of "strong" private property rights in India would lead to the creation of an "unproductive and reactionary class of landed aristocrats".3 He desired that rent should be handed over to the state to serve in place of taxes—a frank expression of the hatred the industrial capitalist bears towards the landed proprietor, useless excrescence upon the general body of bourgeois production. Similar concerns and prejudices have pervaded the views of other liberals and utilitarians like J S Mill and Richard Jones as well as Popish missionaries. These biases have provoked strong reaction to damn AMP as a 'colonial fiction' meant to rationalise confiscation of native properties. To the extent that Marx had accepted these sources uncritically he has been criticised in some quarters as Euro-centric. At the same time AMP has been unpopular with Eastern communists