28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST from the beginning of the debate after the First World War. In the periodisation outlined in the Preface, Marx has implied that AMP represents a less civilised stage than slavery (antiquity) and serfdom (feudalism). This has often played into the hands of nationalist elements inspired by revivalist predilections who characterised Marxism as an alien doctrine meant to downgrade native culture and civilisations. World communist movement had to take note of national sensitivities in the Third World countries regardless of methodological correctness or its empirical results. It is not uncommon to come across speculative chauvinistic claims that buds and germs of capitalism would have grown independently into capitalism but for the blighting impact of Western imperalism. Sifting the grain from the chaff in history is therefore difficult. Political exigencies have assumed greater significance with the emergence of Socialist Soviet Union which had to play a leading role in the world communist movement. Political exigencies associated with revolutionary preoccupations have sometimes blurred historical perspectives and realities. Lenin rarely recognised AMP. In his lecture delivered at Sverdlov University in 1919, Lenin did not refer to AMP as a stage in social change though, while taking down notes from Marx-Engels correspondence, he had acknowledged the absence of private property under AMP. Stalin had no use for AMP, though Mad'iar who worked in the Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern had underlined the relevance of AMP to China. In fact, the period 1925-1931 witnessed a lively debate on AMP in the Soviet Union. The debate was getting muffled during 1931-1934 when echoes of Trotskyite distortions were heard in the AMP debate especially while formulating a revolutionary strategy for the colonies and semi-colonies.4 AMP began to get eclipsed in Soviet literature around 1934, and this eclipse lasted for about three decades. References to AMP were also removed from the History of CPSU and Fundamentals of Marxism Leninism. The debate on AMP was however reopened by Eugene Varga in 1964. But soon it got entangled in the heated exchanges following the Sino-Soviet rift. AMP was used as a handle to characterise Chinese socialist experiments as "barrack communism" and to launch a tirade against Maoism.5 Disentangling AMP from the slanderous and acrimonious exchanges and restoring the debate back to methodological and empirical questions will take some time. The geographical theorising represented by Karl A Wittfogel was a malicious attempt to malign the Soviet and Chinese communism as despotic regimes rooted in AMP. In his earlier writings, Marx mentioned that state irrigation works were a characteristic feature of Asiatic society. He never regarded public works as an intrinsic part of AMP. But the "irrigation hypothesis" of Wittfogel was inclined to dub all governments having an enlarged public sector as despotic.6 In fact, this was a veiled attack on Soviet communism as despotic. As Arnold