VOLUME I, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 1
The steam engine roars, and capital ships fifty million idle hands to the battlefield. The first industrial revolution and the First World War.
The first industrial revolution began with the steam engine. There is a tale that Watt watched a kettle boil and the idea struck him. Enjoy the story, then set it down. The principle of steam driving a piston was already mature in China centuries before, the water-powered spinning frame and the piston bellows of the Song and Yuan, written down in the old technical books. After the age of great voyages, Eastern technique flowed into Europe by the hands of missionaries, merchants, missions. What Watt held was the right to improve, not the right to invent. The story is charming, and no one mentions the ancestors. I am not raising this to win an argument, and I am not raising it to take anything from Watt. I am raising it to set the position straight. The steam engine as a source of power was accumulated slowly by the human race across two or three thousand years. It was not one Western genius waking from a dream. Credit to the ancestors. I set that stance down first, and I will keep to it the whole way through this book. Once the steam engine took the stage, the spinning machine, the loom, the steam train, the steamship all followed.
One. England's enclosures drove the farmers off the land. Sheep eat men, the line in the history book, means the landlord fenced the farmers in with their villages and drove them to the cities so he could raise sheep and sell wool. The factories took in some of them. The rest, a great mass of farmers, had nowhere to go. One machine did the work of a hundred, and labor fell idle far faster than the factories could absorb it. The idle had no field to work and no shift to pick up, and the cities filled with jobless poor. These surplus hands could find no position in the order. This is the vacuum of position. A vacuum does not stay empty. Some other force always comes to fill it. The idle hands piled in the cities would have found their own way out, and the first instinct of a man with no food is to grab from the man beside him who has some. In Manchester in 1819 the idle workers gathered to demand bread and work, and the cavalry rode them down, dozens cut and trampled dead on the spot, remembered as Peterloo. In 1848 revolution ran across Europe, France, the German states, Austria, Hungary, Italy, workers and farmers and the jobless in the streets together, and the point of the blade aimed straight at their own nation's capitalists, landlords, nobles. Barricades in the streets of Paris. Crowds outside the palace in Berlin. Metternich fleeing Vienna in the night. This is how the idle hands find their own way out. They grab, and they grab from the rich beside them. The capitalist's house burned, the landlord's estate looted, the noble's vault cracked open.
Two. Capital saw this pattern. Capital is not stupid. The thing capital fears most is the idle hands turning the blade on capital itself. Give up a share of profit to seat the idle in the position vacuum? Capital will not. Capital's instinct is to chase profit, and that instinct will not let it take a loss like that. Crush the idle hands? You can crush them once, twice, but crush them eight times or ten and the regime falls. In 1848 every government in Europe broke out in a cold sweat, knowing that if this went on the whole capital order would be turned over. So capital moved the government to work a sinister trick. Gather the idle hands, form them into great armies, and lead them to grab from another country, another people, another continent. Hand them the uniform. Raise them a flag. Preach fight for the nation, fight for the people, fight for civilization. Turn the fury of the idle hands away from their own nation's capitalists and point it at foreigners. And to grab is to make war between nations. The scale goes from a street riot to a clash of great armies, and the count of the dead goes from hundreds and thousands to millions and tens of millions. Capital keeps counting cash in the rear while the idle hands destroy each other at the front. This trick is the most sinister link in the whole chain of the industrial revolution.
Three. Set one thing down here. The landlord enclosing by instinct, the industrialist building the factory by instinct, the financier making money by instinct, all of that is the instinct of capital doing its job, and it is not evil. Capital chases profit as naturally as the sky is high, it cares nothing for whether a man lives or dies, but it is not evil. Chapter 3 sets that position down. But capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield, that is not instinct. That is design. Capital will not carry the position vacuum the idle hands created, will not give up a share of profit to seat them, and instead pays to keep the army, the politician, the newspaper, the arms dealer, and shifts the position vacuum outward. Instinct carries no evil. Design carries responsibility. Keep those two apart. And name the operators. Britain's colonial office, France's financial oligarchs, Germany's arms combine, America's banking houses. These are not abstract names. They are specific operators. They write the reports, they fund the campaigns, they run the newspapers, they build the warships and the guns, they lobby in the parliament, they walk the corridors of the foreign ministry. In the naval race before the war, every battleship that slid into the water was a feast for the arms makers. The papers cried the German threat, the Anglo arrogance, the Slavic ambition, day after day, pulling the fury of the idle hands off their own nation's capitalists and onto the threat next door. Run that campaign long enough and the fury of the idle hands has an outlet. They no longer grab from their own capitalists. They go grab the foreigner.
Four. The powers of Europe used the steamship to carry great armies to Africa, Asia, the Americas, pouring out the surplus idle hands and the surplus output together. The opium wars, the colonizing of India, the carving up of Africa, all of it the same logic of position. If the nation's idle hands do not gather and grab outward, they turn back and grab the nation's own capitalists. So capital moves the government to ship them out, to destroy each other on someone else's land, or to turn that land into a colony. The harder this round of grabbing, the deeper the rift between the powers. Germany unified a step late, took a smaller share of colonies, piled its idle hands thicker at home, and felt the sharper pressure to shift them outward. Britain and France held more colonies, shifted more of the vacuum out, and stayed a little steadier. Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottomans all struggled at the edge, unable to shift the vacuum out fully, revolution ready to blow at home. Once the balance of position tips, the thicker the idle hands pile, the greater the strain of capital moving the government to shift them out. By 1914 the strain blew open. The shot at Sarajevo was only the fuse. The real root was the idle hands piled up inside Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and capital's refusal to seat that vacuum, and capital moving the government to shift that vacuum outward.
Five. The First World War ran more than four years. The idle hands the machines had replaced were gathered up, batch after batch, by the capital-moved governments, formed into great armies, shipped to the front. The farmers driven off by the enclosures. The textile workers cut from the mills. The railway men with no line left to build once the track was laid. The jobless washed back from the colonies. The people with no position to stand in put on the uniform and became soldiers. At the Somme, tens of thousands of casualties in one day. The whistle blew at half past seven and the idle hands climbed from the trenches and formed neat lines and walked toward the German positions. The machine gun opened, and the first row fell, and the second row fell, and the third row kept walking forward. In a single day the British took near sixty thousand casualties. The whole Somme ran more than four months, over a million casualties on both sides together. Verdun ran ten months, the ground turned to burnt earth, crater against crater, bodies stacked in layers. The word meat grinder came out of Verdun. The scholars count sixteen to twenty million dead, soldiers and civilians, and around twenty-one million wounded. Plague on top of that killed tens of millions more, the Spanish flu riding the troop ships around the world, fifty million to a hundred million dead. Add the whole round up, and the idle hands who fell to the position vacuum of this one industrial revolution, fifty million, is a figure that holds. That counts the direct battle dead and the plague the war carried together. It is not a quarrel over the exact number. It is laying the cost of the position vacuum out in the open.
Six. The ones who fell were all people the machines had replaced. The miners of Britain. The farmers of France. The textile workers of Germany. The serfs of Russia. The minority laborers of Austria-Hungary. The machine took their bowl in the factory. The capital-moved government gathered them up and sent them to the front. Rifles in hand, they charged the machine guns. The machine gun too was a child of the industrial revolution, hundreds of rounds a minute, and the flesh charging into it had no chance at all. Here the pattern closes its loop. The same industrial revolution, one end setting men idle, the other end harvesting the men it set idle. The machine replaced them in the factory, capital moved the government to gather them to the front, and the machine cut them down on the battlefield. The same industrial logic front and back. The same logic of capital. Among the dead of the First World War there were almost no nobles, almost no great capitalists, almost no arms dealers, almost no politicians. All of them idle hands. The arms dealer counted cash in the rear, the king gave orders in the palace, the general pushed markers over a map in the command post, and the ones who fell at the front were workers off the factory floor, farmers out of the field, miners up from the pit.
Seven. When the war ended, the Treaty of Versailles drew the map of Europe over again. Austria-Hungary dissolved. The Ottoman Empire dissolved. Germany was pressed to the ground and made to pay. Tsarist Russia collapsed into the Soviet Union. America turned from a debtor into a creditor. Britain and France, badly drained, held onto their colonies. The whole world order was reset. And out of the reset, a few oligarchs rose. American finance rode the war from debtor to creditor, the Morgan, Rockefeller, Du Pont houses filling their pockets in the war. British colonial capital kept its grip on the colonial system. The state capital of the newborn Soviet Union stepped onto the stage. Each house of capital found its new position. The bulk of the idle hands went down, and their names were not kept, not even their numbers. 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. This is the chain of positions of the first industrial revolution. The steam engine set a great mass of labor idle. The idle would have grabbed at the rich beside them. Capital, afraid of being grabbed, moved the government to ship them to the battlefield in great armies. Fifty million idle hands went down. The world order was reset. A few oligarchs rose. Every link is the pattern of positions turning on its own. And the one link, capital moving the government to gather them and grab outward, is design, not instinct.
Eight. Once that link is set down, it plays again when the next industrial revolution arrives. The second came, and it ran again, seventy million idle hands down, and the worst of it fell on China, a rich country with no power to resist, beyond words. That is the next section. The third came, and it ran again, the Cold War still killing the poor to this day. The same pattern of positions, the same capital design, played out three times over. And this script, the one the first three ran three times, cannot run the fourth. Chapter 1, Section 6 set it down. In the AI Stampede age the robots have taken the battlefield. The drone decides the field. AI generates the bombing 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 move the government to ship the idle hands to war in great armies? The army does not want them. The idle hands have lost even the position of dying for the flag. In the first three revolutions capital spent the idle hands through war and cleared the ground to keep turning. This time even the pressure valve of war has failed. The script cannot run, the idle hands pile up, capital chases profit to the end and eats its own root, and that is the dead end of capital that Chapter 1, Section 6 set down.
In the first three revolutions capital and the idle hands were a twisted symbiosis. Capital spent the idle hands through war, the idle hands fell on the battlefield, and capital kept turning. Twisted, but a symbiosis, and it held. A hundred million and more of the poor went down, but there were still people on the Earth. In the fourth revolution even that twisted symbiosis is gone. Capital replaces the idle hands through AI, the idle hands have no battlefield to go to, capital loses its market, and capital walks into its own dead end. The pattern of positions itself is leveling up. The first three were capital exploits the idle hands, but the species goes on. The fourth is capital makes the idle hands vanish through AI, and capital itself vanishes with them. That level-up belongs to the AI Stampede age alone.
The scholars of position who came before, Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, none of them saw this level-up. Their answers, the free market, the overthrow of capital, government intervention, all rest on the assumption that capital and people go on together for the long run. That assumption fails in the AI Stampede age. Each of them saw a real part, and each carried his own share of the work, and none of it is named here as wrongness, only as a boundary. What they reached was one corner of a pattern the ancestors had already laid down whole thousands of years before. A new study of position is needed, and its root is the ancestors, and it is raised again on the ground of the AI Stampede age. How it is raised, Volume VI lays out point by point.
The account of the first industrial revolution is written on the bones of fifty million idle hands. This account is not being handed to anyone to settle. The landlord enclosed by instinct, the industrialist built by instinct, capital chased profit by instinct, and instinct carries no evil. But capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield is design, and design carries responsibility. That design ran three times over, and a hundred million and more of the poor went down. The fourth time, the design cannot run. The next section is the second industrial revolution. The current comes on, seventy million idle hands go down, and China is beyond words. The same design, run a second time, the scale doubled, the horror doubled. Turn to the next section.
Or go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.