VOLUME I, CHAPTER 2
This is not the first time. The script the first three industrial revolutions ran.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs. If the weight is heavy, put the book down and tell someone you trust. You matter more than any argument in here.
Chapter 1 pulled the alarm all the way to the dead end of capital, the collapse of human reproduction, a frozen world. You closed it cold, and one question is sitting in your chest. Will the AI Stampede really go all the way there? Is there really no way out for the human race?
This chapter does not comfort you. I will not comfort you here, because a comfort you cannot believe is worse than none. This chapter pours a colder bucket of water. Because this script is not new. The human race has already run it three times, and every time it ended in a mountain of corpses and a river of blood. History is not dead. History is a live rehearsal. The thing you are afraid of, your great-grandfather watched it happen. Your grandfather watched it happen. Your father watched it happen. With their own eyes.
Three times, the same chain of positions, word for word. The machine roars. Great masses of labor fall idle. The idle would have turned and grabbed at the rich beside them. Capital, afraid of being grabbed, moves the government to gather the idle hands, hand out the uniforms, raise the flag, preach fight for the nation, form them into great armies, and ship them to a battlefield on someone else's land to destroy each other. Tens of millions fall. The world order is reset. A handful of oligarchs stand up out of the rubble, counting cash. This script ran from the 1800s to today. Three times.
Round one. The steam engine roars.
The enclosures fenced the farmers in with their villages and drove them into the cities. The sheep ate the men. One machine did the work of a hundred, and the idle piled up in the streets of Europe. Capital shipped them to the battlefield of the First World War. At the Somme, the whistle blew at half past seven in the morning, and the young men climbed out of the trenches and walked in neat lines toward the machine guns. The first row fell. The second row fell. The third row was still walking forward. In one day the British took near sixty thousand casualties. The Verdun meat grinder ran for ten months, the whole ground turned to burnt earth, crater against crater, bodies stacked in layers. Count in the Spanish flu that rode the troop ships, and fifty million idle hands went down. Near Verdun there is an ossuary holding a hundred thirty thousand nameless bones, and you cannot tell the French from the German, the worker from the farmer. Among the dead there were almost no nobles, no great capitalists, no arms dealers, no politicians. All of them workers off the factory floor, farmers out of the field, miners up from the pit.
Round two. The current comes on.
The assembly line turned the worker into a single-step part, and the Great Depression threw tens of millions into the street, and in Weimar Germany the money fell so far you pushed a wheelbarrow of it to buy one loaf of bread. Capital backed the Nazis, backed militarist Japan, and told the jobless young men their fury should point at the Jew, the Slav, the Chinese. Seventy million died in the Second World War, more than double the first. The gas at Auschwitz was made by IG Farben, capital shipping men to the front with one hand and selling the poison with the other. The worst of it fell on China, a rich country with no power to resist, and it was beyond words. Eighteen to thirty-five million dead, the overwhelming majority civilians. The Nanjing Massacre, three hundred thousand killed in six weeks. Unit 731, live human beings used in germ-warfare experiments. The kill-all burn-all loot-all policy that turned the North China plain to ash. The Henan famine of 1942, three million starved. From Manchuria to Guangzhou, not one inch of ground went untouched by fire. Japan wanted to take China's position, and eight years could not take it. Kill a hundred thousand and there are still hundreds of millions standing. Burn one city and there are still a thousand cities. This is the true miracle of the history of Chinese civilization, held by the bones of tens of millions.
Round three. The computer takes the stage.
The position vacuum was bigger than the first two, but the nuclear weapon stopped the two superpowers from fighting a total war head-on, because a total war meant both sides finished together. Capital is not stupid. Capital switched to the proxy war. Korea, three million. Vietnam, three to four million. Afghanistan, over a million. The Iran-Iraq war, a million. Rwanda, near a million slaughtered in six weeks. Iraq, hundreds of thousands to a million. Syria, half a million. Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, still dying now. Dozens of local wars that have not stopped, fifteen to twenty million of the poor going down and down. The Cold War ran fifty years, and the profit of the military-industrial complex ran higher than the Second World War, because this time the production cycle was far longer.
Three rounds together, close to a hundred forty million fallen on the battlefields.
A hundred forty million. Every one of them idle labor. Farmers, workers, miners, the urban poor, minorities, immigrants, the sons of veterans. And how many capitalists died? The Krupp family is still here. The Rockefeller family is still here. The Morgan family is still here. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, still here. A hundred forty million of the poor go down, and capital comes out of each war stronger, the oligarchs come out of each war richer. The same capital design, run three times, each time crueler, each time killing more.
The four sections of this chapter take the script apart and lay it out. See clearly the pattern the first three ran, and you see the mechanism itself turning. You see that the hundred forty million did not fall by accident and did not fall by conspiracy. They fell because the mechanism itself stacks up. See that stacking clearly, and the next question comes on its own. Is capital evil? Chapter 3 answers it. Capital is not evil. It is an instinct doing its job.
And the sharpest part, the one that should run the cold down your spine, is saved for the end.
Each of the first three times, the system only moved after the big war was fought and the blood had run enough. A hundred forty million lives, the price of three adjustments that came too late. By that old script, the fourth industrial revolution is when billions of idle hands go to the battlefield.
But this time the robots have taken the battlefield.
The drone decides the outcome. AI generates the kill list on its own. The robot soldier is cheaper than a man, more precise than a man, and it does not break and run. Capital wants to gather billions of idle hands and ship them to war, and the army does not want them. Not even the position of dying for the flag is left this time.
The script the first three ran will not run the fourth time.
That forces a dead end, and it forces the one chance at life. The first three could adjust after the rivers of blood. This one cannot. This one has to adjust the system before the great war, because there will be no great war to release the pressure. There will only be billions of people piled in the position vacuum, and a world that eats its own root and freezes over.
There is no second chance.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Chapter 2, Contents
One. The steam engine roars, and capital ships fifty million idle hands to the battlefield.
Three. The computer arrives, and capital ships the poor to local wars that have not stopped.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
One. The steam engine roars, and capital ships fifty million idle hands to the battlefield.