VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 1

VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 1

Where Does the Price of a Thing Grow From

The last chapter left a question at its end: the value of a thing, who in the end makes it. It will likely fly off the tongue, the worker makes it, of course. This section is in no hurry to answer. It does a dumber thing first: it takes some thing at random and walks a stretch of road alongside it, watching how it comes to be in the hand. Walk that stretch, then look back at the answer-off-the-tongue, and you will see the seam beneath it.

One. A bowl of rice, how far a road it walked

That bowl of rice from the canteen at noon today, carried out, ask one question: this bowl of rice, who made it? First there was the farmer. A year ago he put the seed down, set the seedlings, watched the water, cleared the weeds, guarded against the pests, and in autumn he cut it down, dried it, hulled it, bagged it. What he gave was strength, a year of the sun, a pair of feet gone white from soaking in the paddy. But with the farmer alone, this bowl of rice does not reach the mouth.

This sack of rice needs someone to haul it from the village to the town, from the town to the city, to load it, unload it, store it, keep it from damp, keep it from the rats. On the road there has to be a road, and the road was laid an inch at a time by the ones who lay roads. The truck has to have fuel, and the fuel was drawn up from thousands of meters underground by the ones who drill. In the city someone has to portion it out to the grain shops and canteens one by one, someone has to write the tickets, someone has to check the accounts, someone has to watch whether this batch of rice has gone moldy, whether it was cut with something else, and who to find when something goes wrong. At the canteen someone has to wash the rice, someone has to add the water, someone has to watch the fire under that pot. Only at the last is that bowl of rice lifted up. Count how many pairs of hands this bowl of rice walked through.

Two. The first answer the gut gives

Now the gut’s answer arrives. It says: value is made by the one who does the work, whoever gives the strength, the value is his to have made, the farmer sweated a whole year, the rice is his to have grown, and the value of this bowl of rice is his labor. This answer sounds firm, and sounds full of conscience, so do not refuse it yet, look first at the setting in which it is right.

A man goes up the hill and cuts vines, sits at his door, and weaves a pair of straw sandals. He weaves them himself, he wears them himself. The value of these straw sandals, is it his to have made? It is, he made it all the way through by himself, he gave the strength, he got the thing, and there was no second position in between. For tens of thousands of years, most of the time, humankind lived in exactly this setting: the fish you caught you ate, the clothes you sewed you wore, the one who gave the strength and the one who got the thing were the same person. In this setting the gut is not wrong by one hair.

Three. Let the setting grow large, and the gut fails

But let the setting grow large and this gut begins to fail. That man no longer wears the straw sandals himself, he has woven a hundred pairs and carried them to market to sell. Now the first question rises: these hundred pairs he wove, how much are they worth?

How much they are worth is not his to say alone. Whether anyone at the market wants straw sandals, whether others are selling them too, whether that year had more rainy days or more clear ones, whether the other houses’ sandals are dear or cheap, none of these things are in his hand. In his hand there is only his share of strength, and how much that share of strength is worth is settled by him together with a whole heap of other positions. See this turn clearly: the strength he gave is still the strength he gave, that has not changed, what has changed is that the thing his strength made has to walk into a string of positions before it becomes a price.

Four. At the sun’s noon a market, they trade and withdraw, each gets his place

The ancestors spoke this layer very early.

At the sun’s noon a market is held, it brings the people of all under heaven, it gathers the goods of all under heaven, they trade and withdraw, each gets his place, runs the line in the Book of Changes, in the Appended Words. The sun reaches its noon and the people come to market, the people from the four directions gather in, the goods from the four directions gather in, and only when people and goods have gathered to one place is there that market. Then four words: they trade and withdraw, only after the exchange do they leave. And the last four words matter most: each gets his place, each has gotten the share that is his to get.

Notice, the ancestors used each, not one. One person’s strength does not reach each gets his place, a group of positions has to gather in full before the goods can move and the price can settle down.

Five. The price is not brought by a thing itself

So this section sets a position here: the price of a thing is not brought by the thing itself. A lump of iron ore lies buried in the mountain a hundred million years, and it has no price by itself, someone has to find it, someone has to dig it out, someone has to smelt it, someone has to forge it, someone has to make it into an implement, someone has to send it to the person who can use it, and only then does it grow a price layer by layer. Price is a thing that grows only after this string of positions has been walked through.

Take the character make and weigh it again too. The farmer made the rice, this is not wrong, but did the farmer make the value of this bowl of rice? Between them lie dozens of positions, and miss any one of them and the rice is still in the sack, molding in the warehouse, or simply cannot be moved out of that village at all. Then, does it have a price?

Six. As for high and low in price, that rule gets picked up later

There is surely a question held in the chest now: then why is a diamond dearer than rice? The question is a good one, and a hard one, it asks about high and low in price, about the rule that sets high and low. That rule is called scarcity, and chapter twenty-four this semester picks it up for a whole chapter to measure with, not sparing a section.

This section does not touch high and low, it touches one thing only: where the price grows from. The answer is already on the table: not from one position, but from a string of positions. This line looks most ordinary, almost like an empty saying, yet it is the first brick of the hardest stroke this semester. Every argument about exploitation across that hundred years rests on it.

Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next

This section walked a stretch alongside a bowl of rice. It saw: when the one who gives the strength and the one who gets the thing are the same person, whom the value belongs to is plain at a glance, but that setting is nearly gone today. Anything in the hand today has behind it a string of positions, handed forward relay by relay. The price is not brought by a thing itself, it is a thing that grows only after a string of positions has been walked through. At the sun’s noon a market, they trade and withdraw, each gets his place, and the ancestors used each, not one.

Then this string of positions, how many relays does it have? What did each relay do? More than two thousand years ago a man finished speaking this whole matter in sixteen characters. He is Sima Qian, and he wrote it in the Records of the Grand Historian, in the Account of the Money-Makers. The next section asks him out, and lays those sixteen characters open one character at a time.

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

Section 2  It Waits on the Farmer to Be Eaten, Value Handed Forward by Four Positions, Relay by Relay