VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 2

VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 2

That Picture of Upstairs and Down Is Drawn Wrong

The last section took the worker and the capitalist down off the scale. This section takes another picture down too. You carry this picture in your head: one factory, the capitalist seated upstairs, the thousands of workers standing below, one up, one down, one against many, the line between them drawn clean. A hundred years ago this picture could perhaps still be drawn. Look at the world today by holding it up, and you see nothing at all.

One. That phone in your hand, how many capitalists stand behind it

Take the phone out, set it on the table, and ask one question: this phone, whose worker made it, which capitalist’s? You cannot say, because it was not made by any one capitalist’s worker.

Behind it there are the ones who mined the ore, the ones who smelted the metal, the ones who made the glass, the ones who made the screen, the ones who made the chip, the ones who made the battery, the ones who made the shell, the ones who made the lens, the ones who wrote the system, the ones who assembled it, the ones who made the packaging, the ones who hauled the freight, the ones who ran the wholesale, the ones who opened the storefront, the ones who did the after-sale, the ones who did the recycling. Dozens of links, and every link is its own separate company, and inside every company there is its own capitalist and its own workers.

So behind this phone there is not one capitalist plus a few thousand workers. There are dozens of capitalist teams plus hundreds of thousands of workers, handing it forward one relay at a time. This thing handed forward relay after relay has a name: the supply chain.

Two. On the chain there is no upstairs, and no down

Lay the chain out and that picture of upstairs and down falls apart on its own. Where does it fall? It falls because it only drew the inside of one factory and never drew the outside. On a supply chain every node is a small team: the capitalist at this node does the coordinating and the bearing, the worker at this node does the executing and the producing, and when it is done, the thing is handed to the next node.

The whole chain turns not because some one capitalist slapped the table, and not because some one worker pulled especially hard, but because every node does its own stretch well, and then the market strings these nodes together stretch by stretch. Miss any one stretch and the chain breaks.

So on this chain, who is upstairs, who is down? Is the company that makes the chip upstairs from the company that makes the screen? And the one that makes the screen, is it upstairs from the one that makes the shell? There is no upstairs, and no down, only stretch after stretch, positions bitten front to back into each other.

Three. The jaw and the cheek lean on each other, the lip gone, the teeth go cold

The ancestors spoke of this, and spoke it harder than that.

The cheekbone and the jaw lean on each other, the lip gone, the teeth go cold, runs the line in the Zuo Commentary, in the fifth year of Duke Xi. The cheek and the jaw are stuck together, neither can leave the other, and if the lips are gone, the teeth take the cold. The line was speaking of two states, but the position it speaks is one and the same. Every node on the chain is bitten front and back by the two beside it: the stretch in front fails to hand over a sound part, and this stretch stops work, the stretch behind cannot take the finished goods, and this stretch backs up. At that point the capitalist at this node goes down first, and the workers under his hand fall into unemployment behind him.

The constraint runs both ways, a line set once last semester, and today it lifts its head again in a different place. It is not this node pressing down on that node, it is this node and that node leaning lip to teeth, bitten into each other, living together and dying together. The survival of the whole chain leans on every position doing its own position well.

Four. The two characters for worker do not equal bodily labor

That picture has a second place drawn wrong. In that picture the people standing below are each of them grimed to the hands, each doing a repeated bodily motion, and the two characters for worker get an equals sign drawn to bodily labor. In the nineteenth century this equals sign could still just about be drawn, for the worker of that time really was mostly the person standing before a machine repeating a motion.

Today this equals sign has to be redrawn. A programmer sits in an office tower, dressed clean, writes a few hundred lines of code in a day. What is his position in this structure? He is organized into a production process, he brings a single professional skill to bear, he draws a wage by the month, what he makes belongs to the company, and when the company loses he does not repay it. This is a worker position.

The designers, the accountants, the ones who run operations, the ones who chase sales, the ones who take the customer-service calls, the ones who make the content, the great majority of people sitting in office towers, their position in this structure is worker.

Five. Some labor with the mind, some with the strength

Then the question comes: what they do is plainly mental labor, how is that still worker? Because mental labor does not equal capitalist. Mencius spoke a line, and that line has been misread for two thousand years.

Some labor with the mind, some labor with the strength, runs the line in Mencius, in the Duke Wen of Teng. Some move the mind, some move the strength, and what Mencius set out was a division of labor. Those who came after read high and low into it, read noble and base, read it into the mind-mover manages, the strength-giver is managed. This volume does not read it that way. It reads only the front half: some labor with the mind, some with the strength, these are two kinds of labor, not two ranks.

And among the mind-movers today there are two kinds. One is the mind-moving that does those three things, the coordinating, the bearing, the facing of the market, and that is the capitalist position. The other is the mind-moving that does the executing, the producing, the handing over of work on instruction, and that is the worker position. The same moving of the mind, and the positions differ.

Six. In this volume, worker points at a position

So take this definition into your notebook. The worker this volume speaks of points not at an occupation, not at an industry, not at the color of the collar, not at whether there is grime on the hands, it points at a position. Whoever is organized into a production process, whoever eats by a single professional skill, whoever is paid according to work, whoever does not bear the whole capital risk, whether he does bodily work or mental work, whether he sits in the workshop or sits in the office tower, the position he stands in is worker.

Put this definition back and the real shape of the pair, worker and capitalist, comes out. It is not blue collar against white collar, not poor against rich, not the oppressed against the oppressor, it is the organized and the organizer, two positions and nothing more. Two positions each doing their own labor, each ceding their own thing, each taking their own share of return.

Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next

This section took the upstairs-and-down picture down. Anything in your hands today has behind it not one factory but a supply chain of dozens of nodes, and every node on that chain has its own capitalist and its own worker, and every node is bitten front and back, the cheek and the jaw leaning on each other, the lip gone and the teeth going cold, no one able to press down on anyone else in a general way. The two characters for worker no longer equal bodily labor either, they point at a position: organized into a process, living by one skill, paid according to work, not bearing the whole risk, the code writers, the designers, the accountants, all standing in that position.

The last section took these two positions down off the scale, this section took them down off the upstairs and the down. One thing still presses on them, an equals sign. Across this hundred years many have drawn an equals sign straight from the institution of capital to the market economy, as if the institution of capital were simply a mechanism for setting prices, its core the market and nothing else besides. The next section pries this equals sign open too and looks: is the market the whole of this institution, or one procedure within it.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

Section 3  The Institution of Capital Is Not the Market Economy