VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15
Who Makes the Value
Start at the canteen, with a bowl of rice already cooling on the tray. Ask the dumbest possible question of it: who made this? The gut answers before you finish asking, the farmer, obviously, the rice is his, he sweated a year in the paddy. And the gut is not wrong, exactly. It is only answering a question from a world that has nearly vanished, the world where the fish you caught you ate and the sandals you wove you wore. This chapter is about what happens to that answer when the world grows large. It is the chapter that lays the single hardest layer of the semester, and everything after it about the gap, the account, the sixty dollars, rests on the layer laid here.
The chapter asks a question that sounds simple to the point of being empty: where does the price of a thing grow from. It spends three sections making sure you feel why the answer is not simple at all, and it recruits two ancestors to do it, the Book of Changes and Sima Qian, and then it does something careful and rare with a third figure who is not an ancestor at all.
The first section walks alongside the bowl of rice. It counts the pairs of hands, the farmer with his year of sun and his feet gone white in the water, then the haulers, the road-layers, the fuel-drillers, the sorters, the ticket-writers, the account-checkers, the ones who watch for mold, the ones who wash the rice and watch the fire. Then it splits the gut’s answer cleanly in two. In the small setting, the man weaving sandals he will wear himself, the gut is right by every hair, the one who gives the strength and the one who gets the thing are the same person. Let the setting grow large, the same man carrying a hundred pairs to market, and the gut begins to fail, because how much the hundred pairs are worth is no longer his to say. His strength is still his strength, nothing there changed, but the thing his strength made now has to walk into a string of positions before it becomes a price. The Book of Changes closes the section, on the market held at the sun’s noon where people and goods gather and each gets his place, and the whole reading turns on one word the ancestors chose, each, not one. One person’s strength never reaches each gets his place.
The second section brings out Sima Qian and his sixteen characters, the tool the whole semester will keep reaching for: it waits on the farmer to be eaten, on the ranger to be brought out, on the craftsman to be made, on the trader to be moved along. The section takes them one relay at a time. The farmer turns soil, water, and sun, none of them edible, into grain, and stands first because a person must be alive before anything else, the same position Guanzi set with the full granaries five hundred years before. The ranger takes rather than grows, a dead thing lying motionless in the mountain for ages, and brings out the stock. The craftsman is the relay the section tells you to stop for, because a lump of ore can do nothing, cannot cook or plow or cut, until it is burned and forged and ground into a plow, made from unusable into usable. The trader moves it along, carrying the plow the three hundred li to the farmer who will never meet the smith, turning a dead thing in a shop into a living thing in a field. Pull any one relay and the price does not land. And the section makes you notice the thing that matters as much as the content: Sima Qian’s face carried no expression, he praised no relay and ran down none, he set the four positions out and handed down no verdict, twenty-one hundred years ago.
The third section is the hardest stroke, and it is worth reading twice. It sets two sentences on the table that feel like one sentence said twice. The worker made the product. The value of the product is created by the worker. It parts them. The first is about a pair of hands, a physical process you can stand in the workshop and watch, and not one character of it needs changing, it is simply true. The second is not about hands at all, it is about the account, about whom the number the machine finally sells for belongs to. Between them lie Sima Qian’s four relays. Then the section lays the famous sum over the seam: a hundred created in a day, forty taken in wage, sixty taken by someone, and shows that its very first step jumps from the hand to the account, crossing the four relays, leaving the ground underfoot empty.
Here the chapter does the careful, rare thing, and it is the thing to watch closest, because it is where the whole method of the volume is tested. The sum belongs to Mr. Marx, and the chapter neither curses him nor crowns him. It speaks his bound, not his right and wrong, and it is scrupulous to say this is no ranking, only a difference in the division of labor. It gives his merit in full and heavy, three points of it: he was the first to take the machine apart on the table, he put the material before the consciousness with a precision that matches Guanzi across twenty-four hundred years, and he fixed his eyes on the gap and never let go, a gap that is real. Then it locates the bound with the same steadiness. He saw the gap, which is real, and reckoned it entirely as the worker’s created-but-unreceived, which crosses the four relays, and this was not crookedness of heart but the one face visible from where he stood, in the nineteenth-century workshop with the sixteen-hour day and the child down the shaft, a face real to the point of blood. Sima Qian stood elsewhere, outside the whole money-making of all under heaven, cold-eyed. Not one cleverer than the other, two positions seeing two faces of one thing, set side by side. Set the position, hand down no verdict.
What you carry out of this chapter is a way of catching a certain kind of jump. Two sentences that sound identical can sit on opposite sides of a seam, one about hands and one about the account, and the most consequential argument of the last century lives in the half-inch between them. The chapter is careful to end without erasing anything. The gap is real, the sixty dollars is a hard fact, and the next chapter will not leave it as a rhetorical flourish. It will open a real account book and reckon the sixty out, item by item, and follow each dollar to where it actually went.
SECTIONS
Section 1 Where Does the Price of a Thing Grow From
Section 2 It Waits on the Farmer to Be Eaten, Value Handed Forward by Four Positions, Relay by Relay
Section 3 The Sum That Jumps Between Two Sentences
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.