VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 1
A Worker Quits, a Capitalist Runs
Last semester we walked the oldest position of all and closed on a single line: the one who takes the constraint is the slave, the one who lays the constraint is the master. This semester we change the room. We walk into the factory, into the company, into the place most of you will go to work someday, and we look at the institution called capital. The first section does the plainest and most important thing there is: it sets the worker and the capitalist back into the shape they actually have.
One. Two sentences, spoken for a hundred years
Listen first to two sentences you have heard already. You heard them in a classroom, you saw them online, you heard an elder say them across the dinner table. The first: a worker quits, and the factory runs on. The second: a capitalist runs off, and the factory falls down. Set the two side by side and a conclusion always follows behind them: so the factory cannot do without the capitalist, the capitalist is the master, the worker is the slave.
The conclusion goes down smooth, so smooth you almost never stop to ask a single question. But the rule of this volume is that wherever the ground is smooth you stop, you crouch down, and you look at what has been packed underneath. Under those two sentences something is packed, and it was never said out loud, yet the whole conclusion rests on it. It takes the worker as one, and it takes the capitalist as one, one against one, set on the two pans of a scale, weighed to see which is heavier. Once the scale is out, the weighing has begun. But the real structure of these positions is not one against one at all.
Two. Give the grain back
A factory worth the name has hundreds of people standing inside it, thousands, the big ones tens of thousands, and every one of them stands in a worker position. The decision core of that same factory is usually no more than a few dozen, and the ones who have actually staked their own hides on this factory, who slap down the last card, may be one or two. Tens of thousands against tens: this is the real grain of these two positions.
Give that grain back and the two sentences have to be read again. A worker quits, the factory of course stands, because tens of thousands stand beside him, he goes, and tomorrow another person steps into that spot. A capitalist runs off, the factory of course falls, because there were only ever a few, one goes, and for now no one can step up into that spot.
There is no higher here, no lower, no one who matters more. It states one thing only, one thing the structure of the positions decides all by itself: the many position can be replaced, the few position cannot. That is all. Those two sentences, spoken for a hundred years, prove only one thing in the end: the capitalist position is scarce.
Three. Scarce is not high
But scarce is not high. A diamond is scarce, a bowl of rice is not scarce, does that make the diamond nobler than the rice? Go three days without rice and a person cannot walk, go thirty years without a diamond and a person lives just fine. That rice is plentiful does not make rice lowly either. It is only plentiful.
Scarce is a fact about quantity. Noble is a layer the human heart lays on top. These two things have been pasted together for thousands of years, pasted so long that everyone takes them for one thing. Laozi broke this layer open long ago.
Do not prize goods hard to get, and the people will not turn to theft, so runs the line in Laozi, the third chapter of the Daodejing. Notice his word. To prize, here, is not a description, it is a doing. The thing is not prized in itself, a person prizes it, a person is the one who adds that prizing on. Hard to get is its fact. Prized is added on.
Hold this layer, we will use it many more times this semester. That the capitalist position is scarce is a fact. Whether to add, on top of that scarcity, a further layer of high and low, noble and base, that is the human hand at work. This volume does not add it.
Four. Then what is the capitalist position doing
Once the high and low are set aside, the question turns clean: what is the capitalist position actually doing? A factory is not opened by scattering money on the ground. Someone has to think: what product, where the market is, where the raw stock comes in, which machine to buy, how the process runs, how many lines, how many shifts, how the orders are taken, how the goods ship, how the money comes in, how the profit divides, who eats the loss, which way to head over the next ten years. This whole business of thinking, deciding, organizing, adjusting is the work done in that position. It too is labor, a labor of the mind at work.
This labor has three marks. The first, coordinating, twisting the several strands of people, money, goods, information, time, and risk into one thing that can turn. The second, bearing, once the person in this position thinks wrong, the damage is not his alone, a whole year of labor from hundreds, from thousands, is voided along with it. The third, facing the market, the thing made is handed at last to the market to be priced, and if the market does not take it, all the coordinating and bearing before it goes to zero.
Coordinating, bearing, facing the market, these three together are the concrete labor of the capitalist position. This labor is not higher than the worker’s concrete labor, and not lower, it is only different. So in this volume the three characters that spell capitalist get restored to a neutral name: the designer of the business operation.
Five. How can man live in a group, the answer is, the divide
The ancestors set this out once already, more than two thousand years ago.
How can man form a group, asked Xunzi, in the Regulations of a King. And he answered himself with a single character: the divide. This divide is the division of labor, it is position. A man’s strength is no match for an ox, he cannot outrun a horse, yet a man can put ox and horse both to use, and what he leans on is this divide. Some farm, some make implements, some run trade, some keep the accounts, some hold the deciding, each in his own position, and only so can a group of people do what no one person can do.
When Xunzi spoke of this divide, he raised no layer of high and low over the character. What he spoke of was that a group of people, in order to live, has no choice but to part the positions out, and once the positions are parted, the strength can gather. A modern factory is one large specimen of that line of his: the designing, the executing, the purchasing, the running of the market, the reckoning, the bearing of risk, tens of thousands of people parted across dozens of kinds of position, and only then does the factory come alive. Pull any one kind out and it does not live.
Six. Positions differ only in the division of labor
Here the first meaning set down last semester lifts its head again inside the first section of this one. Last semester it was said: positions differ only in the division of labor, no right, no wrong, no upright, no crooked, no high, no low, no noble, no base. That slaveholder who could not cook held his life in the hands of his cook, and the cook, carrying that one pot, held his own days in the hands of the master, the two positions bitten into each other, neither able to work loose.
The worker and the capitalist are the same set of jaws. The worker hands over his time and his skill and takes back a wage he can reckon clean in advance, and when the company loses he need not repay it. The capitalist hands over his accumulation and his sleep and takes back a return no one can reckon, one that may come and may not, and when the company loses he repays it all. One asks for the steady, one bets on the shifting. One hands over the present, one stakes his whole hide.
Who is high? Who is low? The question was asked wrong. There is only one right way to ask it: these two positions, what locks each of them, and whom does each of them lock. This semester, across thirteen chapters, will take this set of jaws and, section by section, pry it open to look.
Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next
This section did one thing only: it took the worker and the capitalist down off the scale. They are not two people on the two pans of a scale, they are two kinds of position, tens against tens of thousands, the many replaceable, the few not. This is only a fact about the structure of positions, it is no proof of high and low. Scarce is not high, hard to get is its fact, prized is added on.
The capitalist position does three things, coordinating, bearing, facing the market, it is the designer of the business operation. The worker position does the executing and the producing. Two kinds of labor, both of them labor, differing only in the division. This layer is the bedrock of the chapter.
But there is a word we have not touched, not one character of it. It is the word shouted loudest around the institution of capital across the last hundred years: exploitation. It points at a real thing: between what a worker makes in a day and the wage he carries home in a day, there is a gap. The gap is real, no one can deny it. The next section is in no hurry to curse it and no hurry to defend it. It does one thing only, it carries this gap back onto the table and reckons it out item by item: where, exactly, does this gap grow from. And to reckon it clean, we have to answer an earlier question first: the value of a thing, who in the end makes it.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.