VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1
Economy, a Tree Grown Out of Culture
Start at the lowest, most ordinary place there is. A man is asleep, and the house around him is already awake. Someone has lit his fire. Someone has hauled his water. Someone has washed his rice, pressed his clothes, and set his breakfast on the table. He cannot do a single one of these things. He has never cooked one meal in his life. By the law of his time he is the master of that house, and the people in it are counted among his property, in with the ox and the horse and the field. That is where this chapter begins, and it begins there on purpose. It wants you down at the root of the tree before it says one word about the branches.
This chapter lays the ground for the whole volume, and it does it in three moves.
The first section walks you into that master’s house and makes you look twice. Look once, and you see a man who owns everyone around him. Look at the one who cooks, and you see that every mouthful the master ever swallows passes first through that cook’s hands. His stomach, his sleep, his life, one whole set of them, is handed across each day into the hands of a person he owns. So the check runs both ways. The master holds the cook’s bond, and the cook holds the master’s life. The usual telling of slavery tells one direction, the one that runs top down. This volume tells two, and warns you that if you miss the second, everything built below will come out crooked. It also asks you to take off a pair of glasses, the glasses of pity, because through them you only ever see a pitiable person below and a hateful one above, and the positions go invisible. Underneath the pity are two living men, each locked by something, each locking someone. Xunzi gave the reason a name twenty three centuries ago. Man can group, and what lets him group is fen, the dividing of the work. Between one position and another there is a difference of function, not of rank. The rank is pasted on afterward, and the name of the pasted-on layer is wei.
The second section takes the tool that nearly everyone mistakes for the thing itself, and peels it off. Ask most people what the economy is, and they answer money. But in the master’s house not one coin ever moved, and a whole economy ran there without a seam, tight as a drum. Money is a coat the economy wears. It is not its bones. The word economy, in the old writings, meant to order the age and carry the people through, which is to say, how a crowd of people get one another settled. Who plants, who cooks, who shares, who eats first, who keeps the old, who tends the sick. The ancestors set this ahead of the sacrifice to heaven, food first, goods second, the rites third, because a crowd with empty bellies cannot make the sacrifice at all. Xunzi brought the whole of it down to a handful of words. Nourish what people want, supply what people seek. Money, for its part, is wei, a tool, neutral in itself. Put it to work and it is a fine tool. Let it turn and put you to work, and you have sat down into the slave’s position without anyone laying a hand on you.
The third section sets out the map, and the map is the point of the chapter. Many readers learned one line by heart when they were small. Primitive, slave, feudal, capital, one stage dying and the next born, like the joints of a bamboo. This volume takes that line down. The four ways of settling people, enslavement, capital, taking by labor, taking by need, are not four stages strung along time. They are four elements, alive at once in every society and in every single person. Take one ordinary day and count them. A man feeds his small child, who did no work and paid nothing, and there is communism, taking by need. He draws pay by his rank at the company, and there is socialism, taking by labor. His pension grows its quiet interest, and there is capital. He gives two hours of his evening to a screen for nothing, and carries a thirty year loan he signed himself, smiling, and there is enslavement. So the unit to analyze is never the person and never the class. It is the relation, and in each relation, the direction of the check, its strength, whether it runs even or lopsided. The section closes by naming its debt to Marx, who first laid the economic machine on the table and put matter before mind, and by marking his border, that he lined the four elements up as stages in time. The debt is named plainly, the border is named plainly, and no verdict is passed on the man.
That is the method this chapter hands you. Stop asking which kind of person someone is. Start asking, in this one relation, right now, which way is the check running, and how hard. What you carry out of the chapter is a way of seeing that does not flatter you and does not let you off. You will not be able to look at the man asleep in the waking house, or at the man smiling over his thirty year loan, in quite the same way again. You will have, instead of a label to slap on people, a pair of questions to ask about the position they are standing in, and about the one you are standing in yourself.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Slaveholder Who Could Not Cook
SECTION 2. Economy Is Not Money, It Is How People Settle One Another
SECTION 3. Four Institutions, One Map
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.