TAIMUR RAHMAN. THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF PAKISTAN. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012, 302 p.*

A peer-reviewed book is notable and interesting for several reasons. First, it is one of the few Pakistani books written with a clearly defined Marxist position. Secondly, it is an attempt to use the concept of the "Asian mode of production" (TSA) to explain the specifics of the development of capitalism in Asia. Third, the book provides insight into the stages of Pakistan's socio-economic evolution, including the last decades. Fourth, it makes it possible to compare the logic and results of analysis characteristic of the domestic Pakistani literature of the Soviet period with the approaches and results of consideration of the same problems abroad.

You should probably start with the author's biography. The short information on the cover of the book informs that Dr. T. Rahman is a Lecturer in Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Science (Management). This prestigious establishment is located in the main city of the country's largest province, Punjab. He defended his Master's and doctoral theses at the Universities of Sussex and London (London School of Oriental and African Studies). For the past 15 years, he has been associated with the workers ' movement and Marxist politics and has been the host of the popular musical group "Lal" ("Red").

The author's biography largely explains the original theoretical position and content of the book. Unfortunately, having no other information about him, we can only guess how he came to be attracted to Marxism and whether he was involved in politics before receiving his education in England. It is worth noting here that the communist ideology has always had a certain number of supporters in Pakistan. The country's Communist Party emerged from the Indian one shortly after the partition of colonial India in 1947.In 1954, it was banned, and in 1972, the ban was lifted, but the CCP's influence and activities remained subtle after that. Analysis of the historical, political and economic problems of Pakistan from the standpoint of neo-Marxism or using its elements occupied a considerable place in the main stream of Pakistani scientific literature, especially in the 1970s and 1980s (well-known works of such authors as X were published). Alavi, H. N. Gardezi, and some others), but it seems to be the first attempt to explicitly apply Marxist-Leninist teaching in Pakistani literature in English. At the same time, the book was published by the most prestigious publishing house in the country, which is a branch of a well-known British company.

Apparently, it is no accident that the monograph is distinguished by a high level of professionalism, which consists not only in a consistently drawn line of reasoning, but also in the skillful use of a huge array of scientific literature and sources (the bibliography contains about 1000 titles, including numerous works by Karl Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin, and other prominent representatives of Marxist thought).

Based on the materialist approach to the driving forces in history, the author considers the main elements of the analysis to be the mode of production and class contradictions. The analysis of both on the example of India, as he notes in the introduction, was carried out in a number of works of the 1980s and 1990s (Indian U. Patnaik, Englishman T. Baysrs, etc.). On the material of Pakistan, as Rahman believes, this remains to be done. According to the author, the question of the nature of the modern agrarian sphere attracts the closest attention of researchers of socio-economic problems of this country: whether it is already capitalist or still feudal. Meanwhile, the author considers the applicability of the category of "feudality" to pre-colonial relations in India and Pakistan to be unproven and bases his fundamental thesis on the belief

* Taimur Rahman. Class structure of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012. 302 p.

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Marx and Engels on the existence of TSA and the coincidence of its main characteristics with the "Jagirdari system" that prevailed in pre-colonial Mughal India (r. XV-XVII). Denying the existence of feudal relations in the traditional agriculture of Asian countries, T. Rahman puts forward a hypothesis about the special ways of their socio - economic transformation - "colonial capitalism" and postcolonial "Asian capitalism". At the same time, it expands the angle of view, covering the specifics of not only agricultural, but also industrial and other sectors of the economy.

The Pakistani author devoted the first chapter of his book, which is obviously based on a doctoral dissertation, to the ideas that have developed in world science and ideology about the Orient and Asian specifics. It identifies three chronological periods: 1) the time of forming opinions about the peculiarities of the political and economic system in China, India, Persia, and the Middle East in European thought of the XVII-XIX centuries; 2) the period of formation of materialist understanding in the works of Marx and Engels in the second half of the XIX century and their development of views on the Asian system; 3) the stage at which In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the discussion about the attitude to the anti-colonial struggle led to the rejection of the concept of TSA, which led to the further disappearance of the term from the lexicon of communist parties and Marxist intellectuals.

T. Rahman notes that the academic literature on these issues is astounding in volume, and makes a reservation that he could not cover it completely. At the same time, he skillfully identifies the main features associated with the selected periods. In the age of the European Enlightenment, most authors (S. Montesquieu, G. Hegel, G. Herder, etc.) saw in the East despotism in the political sphere and stagnation, immutability in the socio-economic one. A few voices in favor of legitimate despotism in Asia and its differences from tyranny (T. Hobbes, Voltaire, etc.) were drowned in the general mass of criticism of the Eastern order. Very early on, European thought was imbued with the conviction that there was no private ownership of land in Asian countries and that village communities played a major role (p.2-6).

Referring to the well-known works of Marx (articles for the New York Daily Tribune) on the situation in India and the results of British rule there, T. Rahman several times emphasizes his support for the anti-colonial uprising of 1857-1859, despite the conviction of the objectively beneficial effect of British intervention in the stagnant environment of Asian despotism. The author shows how Marx and Engels ' familiarization with their work on India and other Eastern countries led them to believe that there were special agrarian and political realities in Asia: the absence of private and predominant communal ownership of land, and the crucial role of the state as an organizer of large-scale public, primarily irrigation, works. At the same time, public works serve as the basis for the existence of the state, which extracts surplus value through land rent (p.14). This type of pre-capitalist management distinguishes it from the ancient (slave-owning) and feudal (feudal) types. As the Pakistani author points out, Marx was born in the late 1850s. I came to the conclusion that the peculiarities of the decomposition of the primitive community led to the emergence of various pre-capitalist methods of production, Asian, ancient and German (p. 10). At the same time, the author convincingly demonstrates that Marx did not abandon his views on TSA until the end of his life, not agreeing, for example, with the fact that feudalism was established in India, according to M. M. Kovalevsky (p.14-15).

Referring to the third period, T. Rahman emphasizes that Russian Marxists, in particular G. V. Plekhanov, were consistent supporters of the TSA. Lenin also agreed with this approach, considering Russia a country suffering from " Asian backwardness." After analyzing all Lenin's pre-revolutionary works from this point of view (they are available in English translation on the website http://marxists.org/), T. Rahman cites numerous quotations and individual phrases from them, which use the terms "Asian barbarism", "Asian police tyranny", "rough Asian forms" of land relations, "Asian way of life" At the same time, in a controversy with Plekhanov in 1902, Lenin did not agree with his characterization of the medieval period of Russia as "feudal-craft", noting the controversial application of "the term "feudalism" to our Middle Ages" (p. 24) In later Lenin's writings, more attention is paid to the "Europeanization" of Russia, as well as to overcoming the problem of the development of the Russian economy. "Asian backwardness" by the countries of the East. In his post-revolutionary articles and speeches, Lenin tried to avoid using the adjective "Asiatic", so as not to offend "Chinese and Indian comrades", and replaced it with "patriarchal" or "patriarchal-peasant" (p.27).

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Based on a number of generalizing works published in the West, mainly in England, on the discussion of TSA that began in 1925 in Soviet Russia and anthologies of articles by its main participants, T. Rahman identifies a large group of supporters of the concept (L. I. Magyar, M. D. Kokin, a number of Europeans who studied at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism) and its development. opponents, who became more numerous and stronger as the conference in Leningrad in 1931, which was crucial for discussion, approached. The positions of the adherents of the TSA theory were defeated there, after which both the communist parties and intellectual circles close to them in China, Japan and India stopped using this concept, having established themselves in the opinion that the linear process of socio-economic development is ubiquitous.economic development and adopting the terms "Asian slavery" and "Asian feudalism" (p. 36).

It concerns the author of the peer-reviewed work and post-war discussions around TSA. First, he notes the criticism of K. Wittvogel's theory of the "hydraulic society", which was sharpened by its obvious anti-Soviet orientation (the Soviet system was declared by a former German communist to be a manifestation of modern TSA) (p. 37), and then refers to the new interest in TSA on the part of French communists (M. Godelier et al.), whose journal "La Penséc" published a series of detailed theoretical articles in 1962-1964. The works of the TSA critic F. Hungarian did not go unnoticed by T. Rahman. Tekeis and groups of Soviet historians (both supporters and opponents of this concept) - M. A. Vitkin, L. A. Sedov, L. S. Vasiliev, L. V. Danilova, etc., available to him thanks to M. Sawer's book "Marxism and the Question of the Asian Mode of Production" published in The Hague in 1977 (Sawer, 1977).

The Pakistani Marxist took revenge on the important changes that occurred with the concept of TSA in the writings of this period. If earlier TSA was considered as one of the pre-capitalist methods, where public (irrigation) works played a constitutive role, then in the 1960s and 1970s Marxist theorists distinguished two types of TSA: one with the central place of public works organized by the class state, and the other without it (p. 40). Even more significantly, the Asian method was interpreted as existing not only in Asia, but also everywhere, including in pre-Antique Europe, representing a universal stage of transition from pre-class to class society. Of particular interest to us is the fact that T. Rahman refers the reader to discussions on TSA that took place in 1964 at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in 1965 at the Institute of Asian Peoples (now the Institute of Asian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and in other scientific institutions up to 1971. On the pages of the book there are many names familiar from the works of those years, and the author helps to learn the names of Soviet historians and get acquainted with their views in the first approximation, not only the above-mentioned book by M .. Sauer, but also a review article published in 2005 in the Journal of Contemporary Asia by three English authors under the significant title " The Asian Method of Production: the New Phoenix "[McFarlane, Cooper, Jaskis, 2005].

In the second chapter, the author proceeds to consider the pre-colonial and colonial history of India, defending the thesis of the dominance of TSA in the first of these periods in Mughal India. As evidence, he cites the existence of a system of subsistence farms, the absence of private ownership of land, the widespread use of irrigation works organized by the state, the absence of feudal lords and serfs, and the extraction of a mass of surplus product in the form of land rent (p. 53-67). Putting forward a theoretical position on the ascendancy of the TSA in India, the author defends the point of view of Marx and Engels from revision and doubt on the part of mainly Indian, as well as British Marxist authors or theorists close to them in the post-war period.

The most vulnerable is the thesis about the naturalness of the economy. Despite the fact that the well-known Indian historian I. Habib and a number of other specialists using the Marxist methodology, studying economic history under the Mughals, drew attention to the fairly widespread distribution of commodity-money relations, T. Rahman believes that the thesis of the naturalness of the economy as a whole is not disputed, since Marx saw it as a stronghold in the rural community, which it remained self-sufficient and, while supplying the city market with the goods necessary to pay rent in cash, it did not itself demand urban products. There was a strong synthesis of agriculture and handicrafts, which ensured the naturalness of the economy (p. 54-55).

The features of the class system in Mughal India are of cardinal importance for the author. He points out the well-known differences between the Indian Jagirdar (landlord,

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"master of the earth") from a European feudal lord. The landlord in India had the right not to own, but to use the land, or rather, the income from it, which he collected on behalf of the state. Marx, as Rahman points out, attached great importance to the differences between the forms of ownership and ownership. The Jagirdar landlord was also not a hereditary owner; jagirs were usually passed from one holder to another and often after a short period of 5-7 years. Unlike the feudal lord, the Jagirdar had no jurisdiction rights in their villages, but were granted to judges (qazis) appointed by the Mughal Court. Accordingly, the peasants were not in serfdom dependent on the feudal lords, being not free in relation to him, but to the community as a collective of land users who were obliged to pay rent, or tribute, to the state (p.62-63).

As the book shows, the theory of TSA in India has many adherents and critics. However, by the end of the 1980s, the intensity of the discussion between the two countries had faded. At the stage that the author calls postmodern, political and economic problems faded into the background, giving way to research on culture, ethnicity, religion, ecology, gender issues, etc. In Indian science, the school of Subaltern Studies ("research of subordinates", a view of history from below, from the position of ordinary people) headed by R. Guha became the leader. Interest in the study of methods of production and class struggle declined as a result of the ideological impact of the collapse of the USSR (p. 52, 98).

The "colonial capitalism" that the author of the book justifies in the same second chapter should not be understood, he warns, as a separate mode of production. Colonialism, which was associated with foreign domination and made it possible to forcibly withdraw income from the colony, was also characterized by the imposition of capitalism, and above all in the interests of the mother country and the European bourgeoisie. "Capitalist imperialism" transformed TSA, but in a conservative way, "grafting" pre-capitalist forms of exploitation to the capitalist goal of profit-making.

T. Rahman considers "colonial capitalism" as a special variant of capitalist formation. He proceeds from the fact that Lenin considered possible "innumerable" ways of transition from pre - capitalism to capitalism in the agrarian sphere, which was crucial for him at the stage of formation, and distinguished, as is well known, two main ones-the revolutionary-republican (France) and the Prussian (Junker) (p.68).

The imposition of capitalism from above by the colonialists in South Asia led to an even more conservative path of evolution than the Prussian one. T. Rahman does not consider the type of relations that emerged as a result of the symbiosis of colonial capitalism and TSA (Asian capitalism), unlike such authors as D. Banaji and X. Alavi, by a special method of production (p. 91). In his opinion, this is a transitional form from the Asian to the capitalist mode, which has some essential differences from others. Drawing on Marx and Engels, Rahman argues that they are connected with the fact that the Asian form of dependence of the individual on the community is the most durable, as a result of which the Asian community persists longer than the "Roman and German" ones and stubbornly resists change (p.92). Moreover, because of the inextricable ties within such a community, colonialism does not destroy it, but draws it entirely into the capitalist economic system. At the same time, the class of landowners created by the colonialists from former landlords retains its dominant position in the countryside under the new conditions, condemning the peasants to "patriarchal dependence" (p.93).

In view of the fact that a purely capitalist economy using wage labor is not widespread under colonial conditions, the entire agricultural sector is slowly being transformed from Asian to capitalist. It is accompanied by cataclysms in the form of uprisings, outbreaks of national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles, etc. While some classes struggle for the preservation of the pre-capitalist order, while others strive for their destruction and modernization (pp. 93-94).

Turning to the history of Pakistan in the third chapter, the author focuses primarily on class relations in the agricultural sphere. The impact of colonialism in the" Pakistani regions " of India takes place later than in most of its other regions, beginning only after the conquest of the Indus basin in the 1840s and the defeat of the Indian rebellion of 1857-1859.The agrarian policy of the colonialists in Punjab province was characterized by the greatest conservatism and pragmatism. Since the Punjabi land aristocracy helped the British suppress the uprising, an alliance was formed with it, and the land registration carried out by the colonialists in 1846-1863 secured them the rights of private property, at the same time

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by providing certain guarantees against the removal from the land of the top tenants, who eventually joined the ranks of peasant landowners (p. 102-103).

The regime of collecting land tax (rent), which was initially quite preferential, was replaced in 1887 by more stringent levies on landowners in monetary form and caused them to sell part of the land. The discontent of the traditional landowning class forced the colonialists to introduce legislation restricting the rights of alienation of land property, namely, a ban on its sale to members of non-agricultural castes (merchants, usurers, etc.) (p. 104). Thus, the author notes, in the Pakistani regions, as in other areas of colonial India, the British, like the Mughals, levied land rents and simultaneously introduced private land ownership, but on a limited scale, which prevented the expansion of the capitalist segment using wage labor. Commodity production on the basis of relations that do not encourage the employment of employees is, in his opinion, the economic basis of" Asian capitalism " (p.105).

An interesting aspect of the peer-reviewed research is the author's introduction of the category of "caste" into the analysis of class relations. Castes, as he notes, referring to the common Indian realities, played a constitutive role in the system of division of labor in rural economies, allowing it to exist through the exchange of products and services between representatives of agricultural and non-agricultural castes. Although castes are associated with a "Hindu class society", T. Rahman notes that no religious community in India has escaped the deep influence of caste differences. This fully applies to the Muslim community in the regions of modern Pakistan. The Hindu term " jati "(caste endogamous group) here sounds like " jat " or "zaat" and exists along with another designation of caste as "kaum" (the second meaning of this term is people, nation) (p.114, 116). The author gives a long list of agricultural (Zamindar) castes (podcasts) in present-day Pakistan, primarily in Punjab, and notes that non-farmers by origin are collectively called "Kammi" (p.116-117).

Combining class analysis of rural society in today's Pakistan with caste analysis, T. Rahman notes the characteristic features of social differentiation. It should be noted that its division into classes differs little from the one used in our literature at the time (Morozova, 1986; Pakistanskoe obshchestvo, 1987). Based, like the Russian authors, on the works of the leading expert on the agricultural issue in Pakistan, M. H. Khan, and a number of other researchers, the author of the book distinguishes five classes of agrarian society: landlords, rich peasants, middle and poor peasants, sharecropper tenants and agricultural labourers (p.121).

Landlords belong mainly to the high castes of the Saeds (who claim to be of Arab origin and trace their ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad), Rajputs (literally sons of kings), and Jats (an ethnocaste group of Punjabi farmers). The rich peasants are also mostly Rajputs and Jats. Middle-income and poor peasants belong to the agricultural caste, while representatives of the lower non-agricultural castes predominate among landless sharecroppers and hired agricultural labourers. Wage labor is not widely used in agricultural production in Pakistan, and this, in the author's opinion, is an essential distinguishing feature. Capitalism comes to the rural economy not through the creation of a labor market, but through the use of agricultural machinery, including fairly powerful tractors and other machines that are used in the fields of landlords and rich peasants. Only a small number of agricultural households (4-7%), according to the five agricultural censuses conducted between 1960 and 2000, used wage labor on a permanent basis (p.154). The percentage of temporary workers resorting to employment was higher (30-50% of households), but the main part of the labor force used in the agricultural sector was made up of unpaid family members. According to special surveys conducted in the late 1980s, wage expenditures did not exceed 4-6% of gross income (p. 155-156).

The process of mechanization of agriculture accelerated in the 1960s with the beginning of the "green revolution" - increasing the yield of land several times due to the use of improved seed varieties, increasing the volume of water for irrigation, mineral fertilizers and pesticides. As shown in the book, based on the author's independent calculations and data from other studies, new factors of production were most widely used in larger farms. This is shown even by the dynamics of installing not too expensive mechanical pumps for

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water rising in the fields. The main area of the "green revolution" was the central and eastern districts of Punjab, where the differentiation of the peasantry led, according to the author of the book, to the decomposition of the average peasant of the "Chayanov type" (p.143).

Large landlords have become essentially capitalist entrepreneurs in the course of the transformations of recent decades, and as a result, the size of the land they rent out and farmed by dependent tenants - the legacy of the former TSA-has decreased. If, according to the 1960 agricultural census, tenant farms accounted for 42%, then, according to the 2000 census, their share decreased to 14%, and the share of land they own fell from 39% to 12%. The share of owner-tenant farms has also decreased from 17% to 8% (area-from 23% to 15%) (p. 144).

At the same time, large owners, having turned into farmers in terms of their economic role, have not lost their traditional positions of dominance in rural areas. First of all, this applies to the southern regions of Pakistan-Sindh, the south of Punjab province and adjacent irrigated areas of Balochistan. Just as in the pre-colonial era the Jagirdar were the representatives of the supreme power in the field, in the present time their descendants have lost the tools that allow them to use the state for social domination (p.119-120). It is characteristic that we are talking not only about the symbolic superiority of land aristocrats, but also often about the actual non-economic coercion to work of curled and traditionally servile groups. Bonded labor is used both outside the agricultural sphere, for example, in primitive brick-firing factories, and in the farms of influential landowners who are not afraid to keep private prisons to intimidate and punish people who are traditionally dependent on them (p. 146-147).

A significant part of the rural economy (30-40%) is not directly related to agriculture. These are secondary-type activities - crafts, service delivery, and small-scale trade. Although the professional and caste composition in this sector largely coincide, it is here, as T. Rahman notes, that small forms of capitalist entrepreneurship and the exploitation of wage labor often occur (pp. 123-124).

The latter plot is developed in the fourth and final chapter of the book, which deals with relations in industry and other industrial sectors. Here the author highlights some well-known aspects of our literature - the spread of informal, unorganized employment of wage labor, the concentration of the main part of those employed in the manufacturing industry in small enterprises, which together (according to data for the 2000s) account for about a third of added value, while in large enterprises, which provide the rest of it only 17% of them work (p. 183-184).

In general, about three-quarters of wage-earners employed outside the rural economy work, according to statistics from 2007-2008, in institutions with fewer than 10 employees (p. 186). The author of the book considers the development of small business and the concentration of the bulk of hired labor in it to be a manifestation of the features of the current stage of transformation of TSA into capitalist. Cheap labor of the traditionally lower strata creates conditions for their efficient exploitation.

The repressive policy of the authorities against the organized working class also contributes to this. The suppression of resistance on the part of the workers reduces the price of their labour-power and makes it possible to exploit the whole mass of wage-labour at the lowest possible cost to capital. The author notes that the labor movement, which experienced a boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s and received certain opportunities for self-organization from the government of Z. A. Bhutto, "inclined to pursue a social democratic policy," was then brutally defeated by the military regime of M. Zia-ul-Haq and could not recover in the future. The degree of organization of the working class has been declining in recent decades. As of 1995, only 1,635 trade unions with 341,000 members were active in the top ten industries (industry, transport, banking, services, trade, etc.). By 2002, the number of trade unions had decreased by 25%, and their membership had dropped to 138,000. Accordingly, as the trade union coverage of workers and employees decreases, so does the strike movement: the working days lost due to strikes decreased from 63,000 in 1995 to 12,000 in 2002 (p. 224).

The dynamics of changes in the size of the industrial proletariat proper, i.e., those employed in manufacturing enterprises, are also very significant for the specific path of development of industrial capitalism in Pakistan. Judging by

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According to the Government Labor Bureau's data on reporting enterprises, the peak of the working class was in the 1970s (375,000 people). Then the number of employees employed at large enterprises began to decline along with a decrease in the number of reporting enterprises (up to 140 thousand in 2006). However, the number of registered firms after the 1970s steadily grew from 6 to 10 thousand; the category of working institutions also grew, although less to 8 thousand. The share of reporting enterprises in relation to registered and working enterprises has been constantly falling, so the author of the book has reason to assume that the number of the proletariat is actually significantly larger, but he does not attempt to explain the reasons for the statistical paradox, noting only that the data on employment most fully reflect information about state-owned enterprises. According to available statistics, organized wage labor in industry occupies an insignificant place in the total mass (about 50 million) of the economically active population, equal to only 2% of those employed outside agriculture (p. 203-208).

In conclusion, the author concludes that during the period of independence, the development of capitalism in Pakistan certainly accelerated. Colonialism, although it initiated this development, served as a brake, so Marxists and nationalist historians were more correct in their assessment of it than their liberal opponents (p. 227). But the long-standing features of TSA affect the peculiarities of the capitalist mode of production in Pakistan and other Asian countries. Among these features is the slow growth of large-scale capital (or, as the author puts it, large-scale capitalism) with a simultaneous wider spread of small-scale production and small-scale capitalism. The author sees the reasons for this, in particular, in the policy of the ruling circles, which curtailed the social democratic reforms of the 1970s and returned, especially since the early 1990s, to encouraging large private businesses. The latter, in turn, monopolized the key and most profitable industries, using such a tool inherited from the TSA as family-caste cohesion. According to the author of the book, TSA also played a role in the widespread use of small-scale capitalist and small-scale commodity production, because caste traditions are also strong there, which erode class solidarity (p.229).

Concluding the review of T. Rahman's book, I would like to make some general remarks. Without a doubt, the work done by him allows domestic specialists in Pakistan and other Eastern countries to pay attention to some of the subjects and topics of scientific research that most of them seem to have archived long ago. The Pakistani Marxist himself notes several times a serious decline in interest in the problems he develops (pp. 241-242). As a person who combines theorist and practitioner, he seems to be bitter about the narrow opportunities that the labor movement and left-wing politics have in Pakistan.

However, from a theoretical point of view, T. Rahman's book is of great interest. It helps to see some features of not only political, economic, and formation processes, but also socio-cultural, civilizational, and political realities. At the same time, it should be noted once again that, starting from one theoretical "stove" and relying largely on the same sources and literature, Soviet experts on Pakistan and other Asian countries, primarily South Asia, came to a number of similar conclusions and conclusions.

This fact has already been noted above in connection with the analysis of the class structure in the Pakistani countryside. No less striking is the similarity in the assessment of capitalism, which parasitizes pre-capitalist relations, and dualism in the form of parallel development of large and small capitalist structures, and finally, this also applies to the factor of caste, family-related clans. It is regrettable that the Pakistani author did not have the opportunity to get acquainted with most of the Oriental literature in Russian. However, he made more extensive use of the few books translated into English than other authors. In particular, he mentioned the work of A. I. Chicherov [Chicherov, 1971] as belonging to the school of supporters of the capitalist evolution of India interrupted by colonialism (p.71).

He also refers to my book [Belokrenitsky, 1991], although out of seven references to it, six relate to the period of agrarian evolution at the end of the XIX century (p.103-105), and one helps him describe the situation in the same area in the 1950s (p. 129). Meanwhile, my book postulates, among other things, the existence of a colonial-feudal synthesis, and discusses the problems of the conservative type of Pakistani capitalism. Rakhman preferred not to notice the concept of "great feudal land", which is widespread in Soviet literature, reflected in the book he quoted.

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formations" and the eastern variety of feudalism, as it offers an alternative view of the specifics of the pre-colonial system. Soviet studies on the caste-clan composition and the origin of the big bourgeoisie are probably more subtle and precise than in the reviewed book (Levin, 1970), although T. Rahman's book contains interesting clarifications and highlights the current stage of the formation of the class of Pakistani monopolists (pp. 217-219, 262). Our assessment of the policy of Z. A. Bhutto, who at first gave the workers ' movement a certain freedom of action, but then prepared the conditions for suppressing its activity, seems to be more balanced [Pakistan, 1991, pp. 70-71]. However, these remarks only highlight the fundamental similarity of approaches and conclusions of Russian and world (Western-eastern) academic science of a certain ideological direction.

The parallelism in the evolution of national scientific schools suggests that T. Rahman's work may be one of the first signs announcing the arrival of a new historiographical spring. For some time now, there has been a noticeable lack of a left flank in world politics, and the same thing is noticeable in theory. It is possible that in an updated form, the class approach, which takes into account such now obvious realities as corruption, the phenomenon of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the inefficiency of state monopolistic schemes, will return to the forefront of research on the East and beyond.

list of literature

Levin S. F. Formirovanie krupnoy bourzhuazii Pakistanii [Formation of the Large Bourgeoisie of Pakistan]. Moscow: Nauka, 1970.

Morozova M. Y. Sovremennaya pakistanskaya derevnya [Modern Pakistani village]. Features of socio-economic evolution, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1986.

The Pakistani Society. Economic Development and Social Structure, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1987.

Pakistan. Handbook / Ed. by Yu. V. Gankovsky, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1991.

Bclokrcnitsky V.Y. Capitalism in Pakistan: A History of Socioeconomic Development. New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1991.

Chichcrov A.I. Indian Economic Development in the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries: Outline History of Crafts and Trade. M., 1971.

McFarlanc В., Cooper S., Jaksic M. The Asiatic Mode of Production: A New Phoenix // Journal of Contemporary Asia. 2005. Vol. 35, N 3.

Sawcr M. Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.

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