VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14
Two Positions, Set Straight First
Start with a sentence you have already heard, probably more than once, and probably from someone you trusted. A worker quits and the factory runs on. A capitalist runs off and the factory falls down. Two clean sentences, and behind them a conclusion always waits: so the capitalist is the master and the worker is the slave. It goes down so easily that you do not stop. This chapter is about the not-stopping. It is the first chapter of the semester, and its whole job is to lay bedrock, which means it does not argue with that conclusion so much as crouch under it and look at what is holding it up.
What is holding it up turns out to be three things, and the chapter spends one section prying each of them loose. A scale, in the first section. A picture, in the second. An equals sign, in the third. Take all three away and what remains is the line the whole chapter was built to set down: the institution of capital is a structure of positions, not one person pressing down on another. From that line the rest of the semester grows, so it is worth walking the three sections slowly.
The first section takes the worker and the capitalist off the scale. The two sentences about quitting and running off only feel like a weighing because someone set the two figures on two pans, one against one. Give the real grain back and the picture changes: tens of thousands of people stand in worker positions inside a real factory, and a few dozen, sometimes one or two, stand in the position that stakes its own hide. Tens of thousands against tens. Now the two sentences read differently. A worker quits and the spot is filled by tomorrow, because there were tens of thousands. A capitalist runs off and the spot stays empty, because there were only ever a few. This proves nothing about high and low. It proves one word only: the capitalist position is scarce. And the section will not let scarce slide into high. A diamond is scarce and a bowl of rice is not, but go three days without rice and you cannot walk, go thirty years without a diamond and you are fine. Laozi is brought in here, on the line about not prizing goods hard to get, and the reading turns on a single character: to prize is not a description the thing carries, it is a doing the human hand adds on. Hard to get is the fact. Prized is added. The chapter keeps the fact and refuses the adding. Then it turns the capitalist position over and asks what it actually does, and answers with three marks, coordinating, bearing, facing the market, and gives the position a neutral name to carry through the volume: the designer of the business operation. Xunzi closes the section, on how man forms a group, answered with one character, the divide. A factory is that line made large, tens of thousands parted across dozens of positions so the strength can gather.
The second section takes the picture down, the one where the capitalist sits upstairs and the workers stand below. Hold that picture up to a phone on the table and it fails, because it drew the inside of one factory and never drew the outside. The phone was made by no one capitalist’s workers. It came down a supply chain of dozens of nodes, each node its own team with its own capitalist and its own workers, handed forward relay by relay. On a chain there is no upstairs and no down, only positions bitten front to back into each other. The Zuo Commentary gives the harder image, the cheek and the jaw leaning on each other, the lip gone and the teeth going cold, and the constraint that ran both ways last semester lifts its head again: not one node pressing another, but nodes leaning lip to teeth, living and dying together. The section then redraws a second wrong line in the old picture, the equals sign between worker and bodily labor. A programmer in a clean office writing code is a worker, organized into a process, living by one skill, paid by the month, not bearing the whole risk. Mencius is read here, the line about laboring with the mind and laboring with the strength, and the reading takes only the front half, two kinds of labor, not two ranks. The definition the section hands you to keep is plain: worker points at a position, not an occupation, not a collar, not grime on the hands.
The third section takes the last thing down, the equals sign between the institution of capital and the market economy. The ID card stands for a person but is not the person, it has pressed a living person flat into a card, and saying capital straight out as the market does the same, pressing a whole structure of positions into one procedure within it. The section calls back everything the market does not do, the coordinating, the laboring, the accumulating, the reinvesting, the iterating, all of it people in their positions, and leaves the market with the one thing it does, finding a price at the end for what was already made. Confucius is brought in, on worrying over the uneven share rather than scarcity, and the character that matters is worry, which only a person can do, the rule dead and the one who measures with it alive. The chapter closes its bedrock with the line it was built for, and points ahead to the word it has carefully not touched: exploitation, and the gap it names, real and undeniable, waiting to be carried onto the table and reckoned.
The method here is the method of the whole volume, and it is worth naming because you will feel it work. Wherever the ground is smooth, stop. The chapter never tells you the two-sentence conclusion is wrong. It gives the grain back, takes the picture down, pries the equals sign open, and lets you see for yourself that the weighing was set up before the thinking began. What you carry out of this chapter is not an opinion about capitalists. It is a way of asking. Not who is high and who is low, which was the wrong question, but what locks each position and whom each position locks. That question is the set of jaws the whole semester will pry open, and this chapter is the hand that sets it in front of you.
SECTIONS
Section 1 A Worker Quits, a Capitalist Runs
Section 2 That Picture of Upstairs and Down Is Drawn Wrong
Section 3 The Institution of Capital Is Not the Market Economy
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.