VOLUME I, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 3
The computer arrives, and capital ships the poor to local wars that have not stopped. The third industrial revolution and the Cold War.
The chain of the first industrial revolution was the steam engine setting men idle. The First World War, fifty million down. The chain of the second was electricity and the combustion engine setting men idle. The Second World War, seventy million down. Each time the same capital design, shipping the idle hands to the battlefield in great armies. When the third industrial revolution came, how did capital run it? First set one thing straight. The script of the third revolution changed. But the pattern of position underneath did not.
One. The third industrial revolution began with the computer. In 1946 the University of Pennsylvania built ENIAC, the first general electronic computer, thirty tons, a hundred seventy square meters, eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, running a ballistic calculation in thirty seconds, thousands of times faster than the fastest human. Then the decades. The transistor at Bell Labs in 1947. The integrated circuit in 1958. The microprocessor, Intel's 4004, in 1971. The personal computer, the Altair in 1975, the Apple I in 1976, the IBM PC in 1981. The internet going commercial in the 1990s. The smartphone, the iPhone, in 2007. Mobile internet through the 2010s. Big data, cloud, algorithms, 5G from 2010 to 2020. Each one set more labor idle. The typist idle, replaced by the computer. The file clerk idle, replaced by the database. The human calculator idle, replaced by the machine. The draftsman idle, replaced by CAD. The librarian idle, replaced by the search engine. The bank teller idle, replaced by the ATM and online banking. The shop clerk idle, replaced by e-commerce. The middleman idle, replaced by the online platform. The traditional reporter idle, replaced by internet media. The labor the third revolution replaced reached from physical work into mind work. That was new, absent from the first two.
Two. Set one thing down. The position vacuum of the third revolution was larger than the first two. But it did not blow into a total war the way the first two did. Why? Three layers. Layer one, the nuclear weapon. At the end of the Second World War America dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands died, but the larger thing was that the nuclear weapon made a clash of great armies unworkable. Two nuclear powers in a full war means both finished together. Capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield, run to a total war between nuclear states, means mutual destruction. Capital is not stupid. Capital knows it would be finished too. So through the Cold War from 1945 to 1991 capital adjusted the script. Not the total war. The proxy war. Layer two, the rise of transnational capital. After the Second World War capital was no longer bound tight to the nation-state as it was in the nineteenth century. American capital reached its investment across the whole world through the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, the multinational corporation. The object of capital's profit-chasing shifted from seize the territory to seize the market. Capital no longer needed a total war to grab colonies, economic penetration, technology export, financial control were enough. Layer three, the way the idle hands were seated changed. After the Second World War the Western capitalist nations, America, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, built the welfare state, unemployment insurance, health care, pensions, public schooling. These seated part of the position vacuum. It did not pile and blow as it did in the Depression of 1929. The Soviet bloc ran the planned economy and forced the idle hands into state enterprises, the vacuum absorbed by the state by force. China ran another road, from the founding in 1949 to the opening in 1978 and the market transition after, taking a vast mass of idle hands first into the collective economy and then in stages into the market economy. Through the whole second half of the twentieth century the world's position vacuum was partly seated by one system or another. So no total war on the scale of the first two.
Three. But the pattern of position itself did not change. Capital still moved the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield. Only the scale was smaller, the range narrower, the target different. This is the local war. The Korean War, 1950 to 1953, three million dead, mostly the farmers and workers and townspeople of the north and south of the peninsula. America shipped its idle hands over, many of them young men born in the Depression and now in their early twenties. China took the Korean front as the integration of the new state, sending two million four hundred thousand volunteers, a hundred ninety thousand casualties. The Vietnam War, 1955 to 1975, three to four million dead, mostly the farmers and townspeople of the north and south. America shipped over the young of the sixties, the postwar boom generation, sent to Vietnam by the draft, fifty-eight thousand American soldiers dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, millions carrying the wound in the mind. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989, one to two million Afghans dead, fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers dead. The Iran-Iraq war, 1980 to 1988, a million dead. The first Gulf War, 1990 to 1991, around a hundred thousand dead. The Yugoslav wars, 1991 to 2001, a hundred forty thousand dead. The Rwandan genocide, 1994, eight hundred thousand to a million dead, mostly Tutsi slaughtered by Hutu. The second Gulf War, 2003 to 2011, half a million to a million Iraqis dead. The Afghan war, 2001 to 2021, over a hundred seventy thousand dead. The Syrian civil war, 2011 to now, half a million dead. The Yemen civil war, 2014 to now, over two hundred thousand dead. Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Israel and Palestine, the Gaza war of 2023 over forty thousand dead, the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 to now. Add the local wars together, a rough count over fifteen to twenty million dead. The ones who fell were still the idle hands, farmers, workers, the urban poor. Capital kept growing.
Four. Through the Cold War the profit of the military-industrial complex, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, ran higher than in the Second World War, because the Cold War produced arms for fifty years, far longer than the six years of the second war. Set down one line on America's military-industrial-intelligence complex. In 1961 President Eisenhower gave his farewell. He had been a soldier his whole life, a five-star general, supreme allied commander in the Second World War. On leaving he warned the American people to guard against the military-industrial complex gaining an influence it should not have. That is the pattern of position his words set down. Eisenhower saw it clearly. American arms capital and the government had bound deep, and arms capital could move the government to make war, sustain war, widen war. Through the Cold War America moved through conflict after conflict across the world, Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and behind each was the profit instinct of the complex. The complex is not evil. It is an instinct doing its job, chasing profit. But that instinct running its course kept shipping American idle hands, the poor, the minorities, the sons of veterans, to the local fronts. This is the specific route of capital moving the government to ship men to war through the Cold War, more hidden than the first two wars, but the pattern of position unchanged. The Soviet side ran the same road. The Soviet complex shipped Soviet idle hands to the Afghan front from 1979 to 1989. A great mass of Soviet veterans came home into the Afghan syndrome, the wound in the mind, the drink, the suicide. The cost of those idle hands helped bring the Soviet Union itself down in 1991. The Cold War was not one side winning and one side losing. The Cold War was capital earning on both sides, and the idle hands dying on both sides.
Five. China ran a different road. After the founding of the new state, China chose a road of seating its own idle hands at home. After the Korean War China did not enter other local wars on any large scale, apart from the limited border clash with India in 1962 and the limited counterstrike with Vietnam in 1979. China took its vast mass of idle hands, four hundred million and more farmers, and seated them through one arrangement after another. The fifties, land reform and collectivization, the idle hands seated by the collective economy. The sixties, the down-to-the-countryside movement and the third-line construction, the idle urban young guided to the countryside and the west. The seventies, the great push in industry and agriculture. From the eighties, the opening, the idle hands guided into private enterprise, township firms, urbanization. From the nineties, entry into the WTO, the idle hands guided into the global manufacturing chain as the world's factory. From the 2000s, the great push in infrastructure, high-speed rail, highways, bridges, airports, cities, taking in hundreds of millions of migrant workers. From the 2010s, the internet and platform economy, tens of millions in flexible work, delivery, e-commerce. From the 2020s, new energy and high-end manufacturing and AI, the idle hands guided toward high-value industry. Through the whole process China did not run the old script of moving the government to ship the idle hands out to grab. China ran seat the idle hands at home, through infrastructure, industrialization, urbanization, manufacturing, digesting the position vacuum within its own borders. That road was China's alone in the second half of the twentieth century.
Six. Set one thing down here. The road China ran is the on-the-ground carrying, in the twentieth century, of a position Chinese civilization set down thousands of years ago. The ancestors said it. Take from the people within measure, and use it with restraint. The idle hands are to be seated, not spent. The people are the root, the state second, the ruler light. The position vacuum takes the people as its root. Govern a great state as you would cook a small fish. Adjust the system with a light hand, lay it out ahead of time. The widowed, the orphaned, the alone, the disabled, all shall be provided for. Every position is to be seated. The road China ran through the second half of the twentieth century, digesting hundreds of millions of idle hands at home, not shifting them outward, is the landing of these ancestral patterns of position. Not because China's leaders were uniquely clever, though clever they were. Because a position Chinese civilization set down thousands of years ago rose again on the ground of the twentieth century. I only set it out again in plain words. The root is the ancestors. The carrying was done by the leaders, the workers, the farmers, the scholars, the soldiers of twentieth-century China, all of them together seating that position vacuum. And one thing I have to admit, and I will not skip it. China paid a very heavy price on this road. The violence of the land-reform years. The disaster of the great leap, the three hard years of 1959 to 1961, millions to tens of millions starved, the scholars far apart. The ten years of turmoil, direct dead in the hundreds of thousands to a million, hundreds of millions touched. The layoff wave at the start of the opening, tens of millions of state-enterprise workers out of work, digested at home. The hardship of the migrant worker through urbanization, a hundred million and more away from home for years, the left-behind children, the left-behind elders, the split families. The road China ran was not glorious, not romantic, not easy. But on that road China did not ship tens of millions to another country's battlefield to destroy each other.
Seven. From the end of the Second World War to 2026, of the tens of millions dead on the world's battlefields, the share who were Chinese soldiers is very small. China did not run the old script of shipping the idle hands out to grab. China carried the cost mainly at home, digesting the position vacuum itself. Was that choice right? History will answer. But from the angle of how the position vacuum gets seated, the road China ran is another possibility, not the old script of the first three revolutions. Return to the chain of the third revolution. The computer set a great mass of labor idle, mind workers among them. The position vacuum was vast but partly seated by one system or another, the welfare state, the planned economy, the opening. No total war blew, but dozens of local wars did. Fifteen to twenty million of the poor went down in the local wars. Capital kept growing, the complex and the transnational capital above all. The same pattern of position, capital moving the government to ship the idle hands to the battlefield, ran a third time. Smaller than the first two, but running long, and it has not stopped. And the fourth revolution, the AI Stampede, can this script 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 a local front? Even the local front does not need the living. The Russia-Ukraine war from 2022 has already shown the world, the drone decides the field. AI generates the bombing target on its own. The Israel-Gaza war of 2023 to 2024, the AI systems already generating the kill lists on their own. In the next ten years every military power is building unmanned combat systems. The robot soldier, the drone swarm, the AI command, the autonomous platform will take the battlefield. Capital wants to move the government to ship the idle hands to war, and it cannot move them. The army does not want them. The robot is cheaper and more precise. The idle hands stand there, and the first three times each at least held the position of being spent on the battlefield. This time even that position is gone.
Eight. This is the root difference between the fourth revolution and the first three. The first three, position vacuum, capital moves the government to ship them to the battlefield, the idle hands fall, the world order is reset, capital keeps growing. The fourth, position vacuum, capital wants to ship them to the battlefield but the battlefield no longer needs the living, the idle hands pile up with no outlet at all, capital loses its market, capital walks into its own dead end, the world freezes. The script the first three ran will not run. The pattern of position itself is leveling up. The first three revolutions ran capital exploits the idle hands, but the species goes on. A hundred twenty million of the poor fell on the battlefields of three revolutions, but there were still billions on the Earth, and capital kept drawing blood, and the thing it drew from was still there. The fourth revolution runs 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 all rest on the assumption that capital and people go on together for the long run. That assumption fails in the AI Stampede age. A new study of position is needed. Its root is the ancestral all under heaven is shared, set down thousands of years ago, and it is raised on the ground of the AI Stampede age. How it is raised, Volume VI lays out.
The account of the third industrial revolution is written on the bones of fifteen to twenty million of the poor, most of them the civilians of the local wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine. Add it to the first two. The first, fifty million. The second, seventy million. The third, fifteen to twenty million. Three revolutions, and the design of capital moving the government to ship men to the battlefield put a hundred thirty-five million of the poor down. All of them idle hands, farmers, workers, the urban poor, minorities, immigrants, the sons of veterans. Capital came out of each war stronger, the oligarchs richer. The pattern of position of three revolutions ran and ran and did not change. The fourth revolution, the AI Stampede, the same pattern cannot run. The robots take the battlefield, and the idle hands have no position of being spent. 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. The next section sets it down, the pattern of position is not a conspiracy, it is the mechanism itself. Three revolutions, one chain, the fourth a level-up, not some bad man pulling strings behind the curtain but the mechanism itself turning. See the mechanism clearly, and you see where the way out is. 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.