VOLUME I, CHAPTER 3
Capital Is Not Evil. It Is an Instinct Doing Its Job.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Chapter 1 pulled the alarm to the dead end of capital, the collapse of human reproduction, a frozen world. Chapter 2 laid the script of the first three industrial revolutions beside it, close to a hundred forty million fallen on the battlefields. By the time you reach this page you have most likely gathered a ball of fire in your chest. Capital is vile. Capital gathered hundreds of millions and shipped them to the front. Capital chased profit until it spent the idle hands as cannon fodder. Capital is evil.
This chapter cuts across that in one stroke, and presses the fire back down.
Capital is not evil. It is an instinct doing its job.
This is one of the deepest turns of position in the whole of Justice Way, and one of the hardest to accept at first read, because it runs against the common sense of the last hundred years and more. Marx said capital is evil and must be overthrown, and generations grew up on that line. What this chapter sets down is the opposite. Capital does not stand in the position of evil or not evil at all, and the road of overthrowing capital does not go through.
Why does it not go through?
Because capital chasing profit, like water running downhill, like fire climbing upward, like the lion running down the antelope, is an instinct, is the way of things, and does not stand in the position of a moral verdict. Because the capitalist is not a small band of villains in top hats. If you have a single coin in savings, you are a capitalist, and to overthrow the capitalist is to overthrow everyone. Because capital is only a tool, like a hammer, like a knife, like a gun, and the real responsibility sits with the living hand that holds the tool. Put the knife on trial and shoot it, and the hand that held it goes looking for the next knife.
Hundreds of millions of the poor in the twentieth century fell on exactly this wrong prescription, overthrow capital. One purge after another, from the factory owner to the rich farmer, from the rich farmer to the middle farmer, until everyone lived in fear. The Khmer Rouge took a pair of glasses as the mark of the bourgeois, and the people who wore glasses were killed, and the overthrowing ran until only the stone age was left. Not because the people carrying it out were uniquely wicked. Because the prescription was wrong at the root, charging the responsibility to the tool.
So what is the road that does go through?
The ancestors set down the answer four thousand years ago. When the great flood covered the land, Gun walled the rivers to stop the water, and the more he walled it the higher it rose, until the dikes broke and drowned more people still. Yu opened the rivers instead, and let the water run by the lay of the land to the sea, and the land of China became ground you could farm, and the civilization stood. The instinct of water cannot be destroyed. It can only be channeled. The instinct of capital is the same. Not overthrow. Rein in the pace at which it turns, and guide its direction by its own nature.
The four sections of this chapter set that turn down layer by layer. The first, capital chasing profit is an instinct, and everyone is a capitalist. The second, capital does not care whether a man lives or dies, but it is not evil. The third, capital is only a tool, and the operator is the living person, and the responsibility is the operator's. Everyone is an operator. Everyone carries responsibility. You reading this book, and the one writing it. The fourth closes the chapter, rein in capital without destroying it, channel it, do not wall it, and names three root directions. The non-labor share returns to the public, which is to say the people. Rein in the operator without destroying the tool. Every person holds their own line, and no one torments.
Once this chapter is set down, the direction of Volume VI comes clear. Not overthrow anyone. Let this force called capital keep turning, but let the fruit of its turning flow back into the hands of the public, and let every living person carry their own share in their own position.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Chapter 3, Contents
Two. Capital does not care whether a man lives or dies, but it is not evil.
Four. Rein in capital without destroying it. Channel it, do not wall it.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.