VOLUME I, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 2
The current comes on, and capital ships seventy million idle hands to the battlefield. China beyond words. The second industrial revolution and the Second World War.
The First World War was over, and the bones of fifty million idle hands lay under the burnt earth of Verdun. You might think the account was settled, that it would not come again. It came again. And it came harder. Capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield, that design, spent fifty million lives the first time it ran. The second time it ran, it spent seventy million. China took the worst of that round, a rich country with no power to resist, and it was beyond words.
One. The chain of the first industrial revolution began with the steam engine setting men idle. The second changed the source of power, to electricity and the combustion engine. The electric light, the telephone, the telegraph, the electric motor, the automobile, the airplane, the assembly line, all at once. Edison's bulb in 1879, Benz's engine in 1885, the Wright brothers in 1903, Ford's line in 1913. In some thirty years the whole way of making things was turned over. Where was electricity crueler than steam? Steam burned coal, needed a boiler, needed a drive belt, and one engine could sit in only one place, so the labor it could replace was limited. Electricity runs down a wire, and the wire runs into any corner, and every workstation gets its own motor. The combustion engine bolts onto a car, a truck, a tractor, a plane, and moves. Ford's line cut auto assembly from twelve hours to an hour and a half, and a worker who once needed a hundred skills now needed one. Drop the skill bar and the worker becomes easy to replace. Easy to replace, and the wage gets pressed down. Press the wage down and the profit climbs. Profit climbs, expansion runs faster, and more people out of the field and the small workshop get pulled into the factory and trained into single-step replaceable parts. And harder still, agriculture went mechanical too. Tractors, harvesters, fertilizer, pesticide, all at once. By the 1920s an American farmer fed several times the people he fed in 1880. The countryside emptied into the cities, and the factory line kept turning workers into replaceable parts. The position vacuum ran several times larger than the first revolution. The idle hands piled thicker, and capital's fear of being grabbed pulled tighter.
Two. In 1929 Wall Street crashed, and the Great Depression came. American unemployment climbed to twenty-five percent. Industrial output was cut in half. The breadlines ran for blocks. German unemployment climbed to thirty percent, and Weimar money fell so far you pushed a wheelbarrow of it for one loaf. The position vacuum piled thicker than ever, tens of millions of idle hands drifting the streets with no work and no food, the fury aimed straight at their own nation's capitalists and government. The script of 1848 was about to play again. The thing capital feared most, the idle hands turning the blade on capital, was happening in front of its eyes. And so the design of capital moving the government ran a second time, more systematic, more thorough, more shameless than the first. Germany ran it furthest. Capital backed the Nazi party into power. Hitler in power gave capital its answer at once, organizing the idle hands. The storm troopers, the SS, the army, layer by layer taking the jobless young men into the uniform. Put on the uniform and the idle hand had a position. With a position the fury had an outlet. And the outlet pointed where? At the Jew, the Slav, the Frenchman and the Englishman, the international communist plot. The papers cried living space for the German, the shame of Versailles, the Jewish-capital conspiracy, day after day, pulling the fury of the idle hands entirely off Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben, the nation's own great capital. Krupp steel, Thyssen coal and steel, IG Farben chemicals, these German giants filled their pockets in the war. The gas of the Auschwitz camps was made by IG Farben. Capital moved the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield with one hand, and sold the arms and the poison with the other. One closed loop.
Three. Japan ran the same road in a different robe. Since the Meiji Restoration Japanese capital had been chasing, and by the 1920s it hit the wall, not enough resource at home, not enough market, the idle hands piled thick. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda, the combines joined with the military and formed the idle hands into the imperial army and pointed it at China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific. The Mukden Incident in 1931. The Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. Pearl Harbor in 1941. Every step the same logic of position. If the nation's idle hands do not grab outward, they turn back and grab the nation's own combines. The combines moved the government to ship them out, to destroy each other on another's land, or to seize that land. In the imperial army were the second and third sons of the fishing villages of Hokkaido, the eldest keeping the family land and the younger sons with no field and no ground, fit only to soldier. These idle hands changed the robe for a uniform and were shipped by the capital-moved government onto the soil of China to slaughter Chinese farmers. America and Britain ran it a touch gentler, but the same in essence. Roosevelt's New Deal was called relief, and in essence it organized the idle hands, the conservation corps, the works administration, the valley authority, sending the jobless young to build the roads and the dams. That eased the vacuum for a time and did not ship them straight to the front. What truly cleared America's idle hands was entering the war in 1941. Sixteen million young Americans put on the uniform. The whole of industry turned to arms. Warships slid into the water like dumplings into a pot. The bombers flew wave on wave at Germany and Japan. When the war ended America's unemployment was solved, because the idle hands were in the uniform, or in the arms plant, or in the burnt earth of a second Verdun. Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, the American military-industrial complex grew from the Second World War straight through to today. President Eisenhower warned of that complex by name in his farewell.
Four. The Soviet Union ran another road, the same logic of position. Stalin's five-year plans forced the whole idle farm population into industry. The collective farms pinned the farmers to the land, heavy industry drew the idle city population into the plants. That seated the idle hands for a time and did not ship them straight to the front. But when Hitler came, twenty-seven million Soviets went down, most of them farm-born soldiers of the Red Army, destroyed by the capital-moved German army, the Krupp tanks, the IG Farben munitions, the Thyssen steel, in the rubble of Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kursk. By 1939 the strain blew open a second time. The German army crossed the Polish border, the blitz swept Europe. In 1941 Japan struck Pearl Harbor and the Pacific war broke open. It ran to 1945. The whole Earth was turned over. The dead ran to more than double the first war. The scholars count seventy to eighty-five million dead, soldiers and civilians, over a hundred million wounded. Seventy million is the figure that holds, seventy million idle hands shipped by capital-moved governments to the battlefield or dead in the disasters the battlefield carried. The Soviet Union, twenty-seven million. China, eighteen to thirty-five million, the scholars far apart, laid out below. Germany, eight million. Poland, six million. Japan, three million. France, six hundred thousand. Britain, four hundred fifty thousand. America, four hundred ten thousand. The ones who fell were still the people the machines had replaced. The worker squeezed off the line. The farmer squeezed off the land by the tractor. The jobless young thrown to the street by the Depression. In the German army, the jobless workers the storm troopers took in. In the Red Army, the young off the collective farms. In the imperial army, the second and third sons of the Hokkaido fishing villages. In the American ranks, the Midwest farm boys the Depression shook loose. Capital moved the government to put these idle hands in the uniform and destroy each other. When Hitler shot himself in the bunker, the streets of Berlin were stacked with the bodies of boys of the home guard. Under the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two hundred thousand civilians turned to ash in an instant, most of them ordinary townspeople the war economy had already squeezed breathless.
Five. This is the chain of the second industrial revolution. Electricity and the combustion engine set more men idle. The Depression drove the idle hands to the street. Capital backed the Nazis, militarist Japan, the New Deal, Soviet industrialization, and organized the idle hands. Shipped them to the battlefield in great armies. Seventy million idle hands went down. The world order was reset. A few oligarchs rose. Crueler than the first, more than double the dead. The same design of capital moving the government to shift the position vacuum outward, run a second time, run more thoroughly. And here I have to stop and set down the most painful line of the whole volume, and I will set it down slowly, because it is my own people. China, beyond words. Of the seventy million dead of the Second World War, China alone was eighteen to thirty-five million. The scholars are far apart. Authoritative work inside China takes thirty-five million, counting wounded and direct war dead. Sober international estimates take fifteen to twenty million direct dead. Take any figure, and China was among the nations that lost the most in the Second World War, second only to the Soviet Union, and by some estimates above it. Why did China lose so many? Set one position straight first. China then was not a poor country. In the early nineteenth century China's output was a third of the whole world's, the largest economy on Earth. The high age of the Qing left a very thick foundation, rich in goods, vast in people, its silk and porcelain and tea sold across the world, and no European noble could host without a set of Chinese porcelain in the house. China's farm output, its handicraft capacity, its internal trade, crushed any single nation of Europe in 1800. This is a rich country and a well-fed people.
Six. But China missed the first industrial revolution. The steam engine, the spinning frame, the railway, the steamship, the hard currency of the industrial age, China caught none of it. Why not? The full answer would take a volume. In short, three layers. One, the Qing closed the country and shut the industrial technique of the world outside the gate. Two, the imperial examination pulled every reading man into the eight-legged essay, and no one turned to mechanical engineering. Three, China's old small-farm economy was too stable, self-sufficient, with no inner drive toward an industrial revolution. Three layers stacked, and China went from first in the world in 1800 to pinned to the ground by the industrialized Western powers by 1900. A rich country and a well-fed people with no power to resist. That position is a deep pain. You have money, you have people, you have goods, but you have no modern industry, no modern army, no modern organization of the state. Japan after the Meiji Restoration ran the West's hundred-year industrial road in thirty years, then turned and hit you. The Western powers used the steamship to carry opium to your door, your emperor ordered it stopped, and they blew open your gate with warships. The Opium War lost in 1840. The Old Summer Palace burned by the British and French in 1860. The northern fleet wiped out at the 1894 war with Japan. The eight-nation army in Beijing in 1900. Full war of resistance from the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. In a hundred years China was beaten from first in the world to the sick man of Asia. The war of resistance ran eight years, fourteen if counted from 1931, and China's losses are beyond the reach of 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 waste. The Henan famine of 1942, three million starved, in part from a grain levy driven too hard for the war and in part from the enemy blockade. Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou driven straight through by the Ichigo offensive. From Manchuria to Guangzhou, from the coast to the interior, not one inch of ground went untouched by fire.
Seven. And the most painful position is this. China then had no capital able to move the government and ship the idle hands out to grab. China was not short of idle hands. In the 1930s China had four hundred million and more people, idle hands beyond counting. But China had not finished industrializing. No steel capacity. No great-army capacity. No navy, no air force, no armor. Japanese capital could move the Japanese government to ship Japanese idle hands out to grab China. Chinese capital had no such power, and could only watch its own land grabbed and its own people slaughtered. This pattern of position is cruel to the bone. The same position vacuum of the same industrial revolution, and the industrialized nation can shift it outward, onto China, and the nation that did not industrialize can only take it inward, the position vacuum of the industrialized nations landing on its own head. China was the final catch-basin of the position vacuum. The fury of Japan's idle hands shifted onto China. The fury of Europe's idle hands shifted onto China. The position vacuum of every industrialized nation landed at the end on a China that had not industrialized. A rich country and a well-fed people with no power to resist, beyond words. Once that position is set down, the true shape of the attempt to seize China's place across the history of Chinese civilization comes clear. Japan tried for eight years, from 1937 to 1945, to take China's place, and in the end could not. This is the true miracle of the history of Chinese civilization. How did the miracle come? Not because China was strong then, China was weak past description. It came because the foundation of Chinese civilization is too thick, the sheer mass of four hundred million people, the toughness of five thousand years, the root nature of tens of millions who would rather die than yield the place. The Japanese found this place could not be taken however they tried. Kill a hundred thousand and there are still hundreds of millions. Slaughter one city and there are still a thousand cities. Destroy one cultural center, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Changsha, Chongqing all bombed, and there are still others. The mass of Chinese civilization ran far past the appetite of Japanese militarism. That position is already set down in Volume V, in the chapter on seizing place and colony, and this chapter only touches it once.
Eight. With China told, return to the whole pattern of the Second World War. When the war ended the world order was reset again, more thoroughly than after the first. Europe was smashed. Britain fell from world master to America's junior, its colonies going independent one after another, India in 1947, Ghana in 1957, Kenya in 1963. France, badly drained, lost Vietnam and Algeria. Germany was split in two. Japan was occupied by America and its constitution rewritten. The Soviet Union rose and held Eastern Europe. America became the unquestioned master of the Western world, the dollar took the pound's place as the world's money, the Bretton Woods system was built. The Communist Party founded the People's Republic in 1949, ending a hundred years of humiliation and beginning a new search for position. A few oligarchs rose. The American military-industrial complex, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, grew from the Second World War onward. American finance, Morgan, Rockefeller, Goldman, took the financial arteries of the whole Western world in hand through the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, dollar supremacy. German capital, Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben, broken up after the war, soon changed names, ThyssenKrupp, BASF, Bayer, and stepped back into the old positions. The Japanese combines, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, dissolved by America after the war, regrouped at once as the keiretsu, and by the 1980s Japanese firms stood again at the top of the world economy. Was capital the loser? No. Capital was the winner. The seventy million of the second war and the fifty million of the first, a hundred twenty million, all idle hands, farmers, workers, miners, the jobless young of the street. How many capitalists died? The Krupp family was still there after the war. The Rockefeller family, still there. The Morgan family, still there. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, still there. Two world wars, more than a hundred million of the poor down, and capital came out of each stronger.
The account of the second industrial revolution is written on the bones of seventy million idle hands. Of them, eighteen to thirty-five million were Chinese. A rich country and a well-fed people with no power to resist, beyond words. Every Chinese should set one thing down in the heart. This place of Chinese civilization was held by the bones of tens of millions. Japan tried to take the place and failed, and that is the true miracle of the history of Chinese civilization. The miracle did not fall from the sky. It was bought with thirty million lives.
The same design of capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield has now run twice with success. The first revolution, fifty million down. The second, seventy million down. The third came, the Cold War ran fifty years, and the local wars are still killing the poor. That is the next section. And the fourth revolution, the AI Stampede, can this design still start? Chapter 1, Section 6 set it down. The robots have taken the battlefield, and not even the living soldier is needed. Capital wants to move the government to ship the idle hands to war? The army does not want them. The script the first three ran will not run this time. But the position vacuum keeps piling, billions facing the vacuum. The script cannot run, the idle hands pile up, capital chases profit to the end and eats its own root, the dead end of capital from Chapter 1, Section 6.
In the first three revolutions China was the catch-basin of the position vacuum, beyond words. In the fourth, China ran a different road. The white-cabbage-price of Chinese manufacturing, BYD, Xiaomi, DJI, Huawei, Haier, Midea, CATL, returning the non-labor share straight to the consuming public of the world through low prices, without running the old script of capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to war. Is that new road a way out? How does it land? Volume VI lays it out point by point. This chapter only plants the seed. The next section is the third industrial revolution, the computer, the Cold War, the local wars. The third start of the same pattern of position. The poor keep going down, and it has not stopped. 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.
Three. The computer arrives, and capital ships the poor to local wars that have not stopped.