VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 10
The Serf, That Position Changes a Layer of Skin
Start with a person who now has what the slave never had, a name, a family, a faith, a little patch of his own ground, and who belongs to no one, and who still cannot leave. That is where this chapter begins, because the last chapter took the position bare to the bottom with the person written into the column of things, and this chapter looks at the first layer of skin it changes, the layer under which the chain truly vanishes and yet the person stays put.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section takes apart the reflex that files the serf into the feudal box, holding that serfdom is an economic institution and the feudal a political one, two things bound together by a later theoretical simplification and not by history, with three pieces of evidence, Japan that had the feudal without developed serfdom, an eastern European power that had developed serfdom under a centralized autocracy, and China that was centralized from the Qin yet ran personal dependence on a great scale in the buqu and the tenant, so that the hundred-year search for China’s feudal society yielded no conclusion because the question was framed wrong, and taking the two apart lets the answer float up. The mechanism of serfdom is one line, the receiving side no longer holds the person who sends the labor but holds his output once he is bound to the land, and on the surface this is an advance, the slave become a person with family and a kept share, all real, while the mechanism underneath has not moved. And this skin went on not from a kind heart but because it pays better, less trouble as the serf now feeds and breeds and bears illness himself while the landlord minds only the rent, more stable as the serf reproduces himself where slaves had to be refilled by war and trade, and most important it looks legitimate, the reason changed from the slave is not a person to tradition and protection and order and faith, softer and harder to knock down, and the landlord who collects with no guilt because his fathers did so is no villain, that position walked to its end needing not a bad man but a crowd who feel the thing was always meant to be this way.
The second section takes the two words less trouble apart to show that what was removed is risk, setting the slaveholder’s book who must feed his property through a drought or pour the price of a house into the water beside the landlord’s book whose rent is fixed dead when the harvest fails, so the risk of a bad year did not decrease by one fen but only changed which person carries it, and when a person does not carry a risk he will not think about it, the slaveholder mending channels and storing grain because the loss is his, the landlord reckoning only when the rent comes in. Rent in kind and labor rent both set the year’s risk on the serf, and China’s buqu and then tenant show the same, the tenant free in theory to leave but held in fact by having no ground, owing a debt, having a home, being unable to read, which is the rod this volume will use again, formal freedom and substantive freedom are two different things. And the account comes out the same across half a globe, the Qing tenant keeping under three parts in ten after rent and interest and levies, the European serf handing over almost the same proportion, different name and law and god and the same account, wherever wei is made into an institution a thing of similar form grows, closing on the tenant’s year that circles from borrowed seed in spring to a jar that reaches its bottom in winter, a circle that is itself the lock, and on this lock no iron, an account book.
The third section answers why he does not run with a thing exceedingly cheap and useful, hope, opening on the eastern European emancipation of the 1860s that freed more than half a country yet made the serf buy back his ground at one and a half to two times its value on a forty nine year installment, bound to the land and paying the old landlord throughout, so that a serf beginning at twenty five would pay till seventy four when the mean lifespan was something over thirty, gaining freedom in law while the fruit of his labor flowed for decades to the state and the bank and the former landlord, the chain no longer a bond in law but an account book, a thread the twelfth chapter will meet again as the thirty year mortgage. And still he signed, warm in the heart because this ground would at last carry his name and be his grandson’s in forty nine years, not deceived but willing, holding for the first time something to look forward to, for a person runs when he can see no way out and stays when he can see a little light that need only be his own, so that hope makes him bend his own back and lock himself in with no guard needed, the most important move in the volume. And the section guards the other end, that hope is not therefore a swindle, the serf’s warmth and his wish for his grandson real and respected, the one line being to see who gives the hope and on what terms and into whose hand the light finally falls, the same hope a fire to live through winter or a chain that needs no guard, wei again, neutral, good or bad turning on the hands.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When an arrangement frees a person in law while binding him in fact, do not let the freedom on the paper tell you the position has changed, and when a person will not run, look for the little light someone has given him and ask on whose terms it burns. What you carry away is the rod of formal against substantive freedom, and the line beneath this whole layer, that the stoutest lock is not made of iron but of account, and the least laborious guard is hope.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. No Longer Holding You the Person, Holding Your Output
SECTION 2. Move the Risk, From the Side That Receives to the Side That Sends
SECTION 3. Give a Little Hope, and Let Him Grind On by Himself
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. No Longer Holding You the Person, Holding Your Output