VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 3
Four Institutions, One Map
The last two sections looked at a master who could not cook, and got it straight that the economy is not money but is how a crowd of people get one another settled. So the ways of settling, how many are there. Many people learned one line by heart when they were small. Primitive society, slave society, feudal society, capital society, one stretch after another, climbing up. The whole map this section sets out looks nothing like that line.
Draw that line out first
The shape of that line is long familiar. Mankind is first in a primitive society, laboring together and sharing together. Then comes the slave society, one part of the people turned into the property of another part. Then further on, the feudal society, the farmer bound to the land. Then further on, the capital society, the worker gone into the factory. And further on, so it is said, the climb goes on, up to taking by labor, and at the last, up to taking by need.
That line is drawn very neat. It has one enormous advantage. It is easy to memorize, easy to test, easy to teach. One stretch and then another, the front stretch dying before the next is born, like the joints of a bamboo. But the thing this volume asks is this. The front stretch, did it really die.
Lift your eyes off the textbook and look out the window a moment. Did the slave society really end. Today, in certain mine pits, there are people locked to the bottom by a debt who never in a lifetime come up. On certain fishing boats there are people not let ashore for a year. In certain workshops the passport is taken, the wage is held back, the person cannot leave. These are not figures of speech. These are things going on right now. The chain has not vanished. It has only moved somewhere else, moved into the places you cannot see.
Look once at the people right in front of you
Someone will say, that is somewhere else, it has nothing to do with here. Then look at this one, right in front of you.
A man, thirty years old, signs for a thirty year loan on a house. From the day he signs, for the ten thousand days and more ahead, a large piece of the wage that comes in each month is drawn off, on its own, first. He dares not quit. He dares not fall ill. He dares not cross his boss, because that money cannot break for one month. He has pledged the self of his next thirty years, in advance.
So ask, where is the lock. There is no chain, no bond paper, no overseer. He signed the contract himself, the pen was in his own hand, and that day he was glad, he even stood his friends a meal. The last line of the section before rises up again here. He has sat down into the slave’s position, only this time no one pushed him in. He walked in himself, and he walked in smiling.
The slave knows he is a slave. The bondsman knows he is a bondsman. This one does not know. He calls himself an owner. And that is the thing this volume keeps its eye on from end to end. The position has not vanished. It has only changed a layer of skin, changed into something you cannot recognize. The skin gets finer and finer, and the finer it gets, the harder it is to know.
So it is not four stages, it is four elements
The whole map this volume sets up runs this way. The ways of settling people, there are four.
Enslavement is taking in what another person cedes. Capital is putting money to breed money, setting goods to move on their own. Taking by labor is, as much as you put in, so much you take. Taking by need is, as much as you need, so much you take, with no one asking what you put in.
Here is the line that matters. These four are not four stretches strung along one line of time. They are four elements, alive at once in every society today, alive at once in every single person.
If you doubt it, take one day and count them out.
Take one ordinary person’s day and find all four in it
Seven in the morning, he gets up, dresses his three year old, feeds the child, takes the child to nursery. Did the child do any work. No. Did the child pay him. No. The child needs, and he gives. This is taking by need. In this man there is a stretch of communism, alive right now.
Nine to six, he is at the company. He draws pay by his rank. One more project done is one more bonus. The year end review sets how much his raise will be. This is taking by labor, a measure of labor for a measure of gain. In this man there is a stretch of socialism, alive right now.
There is also a little put by in his account, a little pension, sitting there, growing a little interest each year. That money he has not touched, and it moves on its own. This is capital. This man too is a small capitalist.
Home in the evening, he opens his phone, and that thing takes two hours at a swipe and will not let him stop. He got not one coin for it. His attention, he ceded it, down to the last of it. Add the thirty year loan. This is enslavement.
Twenty four hours in a day, and four institutions have each turned over once in this one man. In the morning he is a communist, in the daytime a socialist, in his account a capitalist, in the evening a slave. These four are not four stages of his life. They are four positions inside one of his days.
So the unit is not the person, it is the relation
This carries out the most important handling in the whole volume.
Do not ask, which class does this person belong to. Ask, standing in this stretch of relation, which way does the check run.
The same middle manager at a company, over his reports, is in the master’s position. The loan pressing on him, that is the slave’s position. The same mother, correcting her child, is in the master’s position. The child cries and she has to get up, that is the slave’s position. Inside one day a person switches back and forth among four or five positions, in and out, and never once stops.
To take a whole person and slap on one label and stuff him into one class looks satisfying, and it covers over the very thing that matters most. What there is to look at, truly, is this: in each stretch of relation, the direction of the check, its strength, and whether it runs even or lopsided.
In the Book of Rites, in the piece called the Doctrine of the Mean, there is a line that says the sense of this whole map about as clean as it can be said. All things grow together and do not harm one another. The ways run together and do not collide. The four institutions are the same. They are not lined up waiting to take the shift from one another. They run alongside one another.
Marx, where the merit lies and where the border lies
That line of stages, Marx set it up. To Marx this volume owes a debt first of all, and names it.
He was the first to take the machine of the economy apart and lay it out on the table. He put matter ahead of mind, and that position he set exactly right, and on that point this volume stands wholly at his side. He was also the first to fix on that ceding relation and not let it go. He saw, on the ordinary person, the heaviest lock of all. These are heavy debts we owe him. Not many people in history could do what he did.
Then where is the border. The border is that he took the four elements and lined them up on one line of time. He walked one step further. He set coexistence out as succession, set the parallel out as a before and an after, and fitted a whole script to it of who replaces whom. That one step further may be exactly the place that did not come to stand steady.
Mark this well. What is said here is his border, not his right and wrong. This volume from end to end does not sit in judgment on him as right or wrong. It only points out that his category was set a little late, and drawn a little narrow. This is not a ranking of higher and lower. It is a difference in the division of the work. The second semester will come back to stand in front of him again, and lay out that equation of value once more, one stroke at a time.
What this chapter set up, and the turn to the next chapter
This chapter is walked through. The three sections together set up the first layer of ground for this volume.
The first section, the master who could not cook. The check runs both ways. Between positions there is only a difference in the division of work.
The second section, the economy is not money. The economy is getting a crowd of people settled with one another.
The third section, this whole map. The four institutions are not four stages. They are four elements, turning at once today in every society and in every person, and not one of them has taken the place of another.
Then how does a person take the bare fact of grabbing more and say it into a thing that is only right. Who is it that stands above the division of work and pastes on, by main force, a layer of high and low, noble and base. That pasted-on layer has had its name spoken twice already, and has not yet been met head on.
The next chapter is about this one word. It is the root of this whole volume. Wei.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.