VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 1
When the Granaries Are Full They Know Propriety, Matter First
The last two chapters set the word wei up steady. From this chapter on, the ancestors take the stage. The first of them, Guanzi. He is put at the very front, not because his name is the biggest, but because the several positions that later economics keeps going back to feel for, Guanzi had already set down more than two thousand years ago. This section begins with his most famous eight characters.
First, get to know the man and the book
The book called the Guanzi goes under the name of Guan Zhong. Guan Zhong died in 645 before the common era, minister to Duke Huan of Qi. But this book was not written by one man. It is a collection, edited together by many hands over several centuries, growing slowly into its present shape somewhere between the fourth and the first century before the common era.
For this one class, only one thing needs settling. The matter the book carries had been passed down in writing by the first century before the common era at the latest.
Guanzi does not talk about the things above form. He talks about governing a state. He talks finance, talks granaries, talks currency, talks population, talks about what material conditions it actually takes to hold a society in order.
And exactly because he talks about these, he can be set at the same table as the later political economy. Weigh that line. Guanzi and Aristotle are not on the same subject. Guanzi and Smith, and Marx, and Keynes, are on the same subject. Only he came about two thousand years earlier.
The eight characters
Guanzi, in the piece called Shepherding the People, says this line. When the granaries are full they know propriety, when clothing and food suffice they know honor and shame.
Take it a character at a time in plain speech. The granaries, the grain stores. Full, packed to the top. Only when the grain stores are packed does a person have room to mind propriety. Clothing and food suffice, the worn and the eaten are enough. Only when they are enough can a person tell apart what is honor and what is shame.
Fix this order and do not let it slip. Matter first, mind after.
It is not that a person has morals and then gets fed. It is that a person gets fed and then can speak of morals. A person three days without food, talk to him of propriety, and he cannot take it in, and this is not because he is bad, it is because his body will not let him. Guanzi did not curse him. Guanzi only set this order out clean.
Twenty four centuries later, someone in London set it out again
Marx, in 1859, said a thing built exactly the same way. The sense of it. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Read the two lines together. First the granaries, then propriety. First existence, then consciousness. The direction is one and the same.
This is not a resemblance. This is one position, felt out once each by two men more than twenty four centuries apart.
Then where is the difference. Guanzi set this position down and stopped there, at the observation of governance. He did not push it into a script of who replaces whom. Marx felt out the same position and walked one step further, pushed it into a progression of stages, a climb up rung by rung, and fitted the opposition of classes to it. The last chapter said it. That one step further may be exactly the place that did not come to stand steady. Position is only a difference in the division of work, and institutions coexist and live together to begin with. Force them into a staircase, then rank out who ought to be replaced by whom, and you have moralized position, made it into stages. Guanzi did not take that fork. What is said here is still Marx’s border, not his right and wrong. That he took this position and made it mathematical, made it theoretical, was the professional work of his trade, and the merit in it is heavy.
A name that gets skipped
Here is one thing worth stopping to think about.
The term historical materialism has been taught in the university textbooks for decades. And in the teaching of it, Guanzi is almost never named. The look of the thing is as if this insight were born in 1859, in the reading room of the British Museum in London.
It was not. In the state of Qi, before the common era, it had long since been written by a local official into a handbook for governing.
Mark this. This volume is not out to fight over who came first, and still less to rank one above the other. Position is only a difference in the division of work. This volume only wants to point at one dislocation. A position set out twenty seven centuries ago has been narrated as an invention of two hundred years ago. A dislocation is not a matter of higher and lower, but a dislocation ought to be set right.
Put the eight characters back in that house
Now set Guanzi’s line back down in the house of the master who could not cook, from the first chapter.
Why did that master have the free hours to keep accounts, to work the room, to go and speak at the gatherings in town, to talk philosophy, to mind propriety. Because his granaries were full. And his granaries were full because several hundred pairs of hands tilled his ground for him, washed his rice, laid his fire.
Why did the citizen of Athens have the free hours to sit and argue over what justice is. Because someone tilled his field, someone dug his mine, someone cooked his meal.
So propriety is a thing that grows on top of the granary. Philosophy grows on top of the granary. The whole tree of civilization grows on top of the granary.
This is the floor under that line from the last volume. The economy is a tree grown out of culture. But turn the line over and look once more, and both ends are true. Culture grows on top of the economy, and the economy, in turn, grows out of culture. They are each other’s root, each other’s branch.
The kindest layer in this line
The kindest thing about Guanzi’s eight characters is not that they are exact. It is that they do not curse anyone.
Think a moment. A man has stolen something. The person standing far off slaps one word on him at a glance. Thief. And once slapped, it is done.
Guanzi does not look at it that way. Guanzi asks one thing first. His granary, is it full or not.
This is not letting the one who stole off the hook. Stolen is stolen, and what has to be dealt with still has to be dealt with. But Guanzi moved his eye off the man and onto the granary gone empty underneath him.
That one move is walking in close, looking down into what is under him. From far off, he is a thief. Walk in close, and under him is a hungry person, and an empty store.
A ruler who can only slap on labels can only ever go and catch thieves one by one. A ruler who has seen that empty store knows what there is to go and do.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section brought Guanzi out, and set up two things.
The first. Matter first, mind after. Full granaries and then propriety, enough clothing and food and then honor and shame. This position the ancestors set down in the state of Qi before the common era, and twenty four centuries later someone in London set it down again, in the very same direction. One position, two men each feeling out a corner of it, and this is a difference in the division of work, not a difference of higher and lower.
The second, the pair of eyes Guanzi hands over. See a person do a thing, and before you rush to slap on a label, go and look at the store underneath him.
Then to make the granaries full, how do they get full. What is the state to do. The line Guanzi says next is a short one, only a few characters, and with them he hangs the very life of a regime on the belly of the common people.
The next section is about, first make the people rich.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 2. First Make the People Rich, the Regime Hangs on the People’s Belly