VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 3
The Sum That Jumps Between Two Sentences
This section is the hardest stroke this semester. We have to crouch down and look clear at a place, a place that thousands upon thousands of people have walked across for over a hundred years, their feet never pausing, because it looks solid. This section does not quarrel, does not curse, does not take a stand. It does one thing only: it sets two sentences side by side on the table and looks clear at what lies between them.
One. Two sentences, set on the table
Look at these two sentences. The first: the worker made the product. The second: the value of the product is created by the worker. As you read them, does it not feel that these two are the same sentence, only said a different way? Almost everyone reads them so, and has read them so for over a hundred years. Now part them, and look at them one at a time.
Two. The first sentence is about a pair of hands
The worker made the product. This sentence is about a thing you can see. A steel plate enters the workshop, is stamped, welded, ground, sprayed, assembled, and four hours later it becomes a machine. The one doing this is the worker’s hands. This sentence is true, it is a physical process, and standing in the workshop you can see it with your eyes. This sentence, not one character of it needs changing.
Three. The second sentence is not about hands, it is about the account
The value of the product is created by the worker. Listen closely to this sentence. The word product in this sentence, is it still the machine in the workshop? It is not, this sentence is not about that machine, it is about the value of that machine. What is value? The last section just said it: price is a thing that lands only after four relays.
So the second sentence is not about what a pair of hands is doing, it is about whom the number that machine finally sells for belongs to. Do you see it? The first sentence is about a physical process, the second is about the belonging of value. One is a matter of the hands, the other a matter of the account.
Four. That sum jumps between these two sentences
Over a hundred years ago there was a sum, and it went like this: the worker created a hundred in value in a day, the worker took only forty in wage in a day, and the sixty in between was taken by someone. This sum has great force, force enough to have driven the whole world for over a hundred years. But crouch down and look at the first step of this sum.
The worker created a hundred in value in a day. This step, how was it crossed? It was crossed from the worker made this machine in a day, one step over to the hundred of this machine is created by the worker, from the hand, over to the account. Between these two sentences lie Sima Qian’s four relays: the lump of ore the ranger took from the mountain, the furnace the upstream steel mill built ten years ago, the person who drew the blueprint for this machine, the road that carried it three hundred li, whether the market takes it and how much it is willing to pay. That step was crossed, and the stretch underfoot is empty.
Five. What is to be spoken is the bound, not the right and wrong
Speaking to here, the words have to be set clear, and set slowly. The sum just pried open is the one Mr. Marx left behind. What is spoken here is his bound, not his right and wrong, this volume hands down no verdict on his right and wrong, it only points out that his category was set a little late, and a little narrow, and this is no matter of higher and lower, it is a difference in the division of labor.
Mr. Marx’s merit is heavy, remember three points. The first, he was the first to take this machine apart and set it on the table, and before him no one had done this. The second, he put the material before the consciousness, and this position is set with great precision, twenty-four hundred years apart from Guanzi, setting one and the same position. The third, he was the first to fix his eyes on that gap and never let go, and that gap is real, between what a worker makes in a day and carries home in a day there really is a stretch, and before him no one had fixed his eyes on it so hard. These three merits no one can take away.
Six. Where his bound lies
Then where does the bound lie? The bound lies on that very step. He saw that gap, and this is real. He reckoned that gap entirely as the part the worker created and did not receive, and this step crossed over Sima Qian’s four relays. This is not that his heart was crooked, this is the one face seen from the position where he stood.
He stood in the nineteenth-century workshop, and before his eyes were the black masses of machines, the sixteen-hour workday, the five-year-old child down the shaft, and the face he saw was real, real to the point of blood. He did not stand in the position Sima Qian once stood in: Sima Qian stood twenty-one hundred years ago, stood outside the whole money-making of all under heaven, watching with a cold eye as the farmer, the ranger, the craftsman, the trader handed forward relay by relay. This is not one being cleverer than the other, this is two positions seeing two faces of one and the same thing. What this volume does is only to set these two positions side by side. Set the position, hand down no verdict.
Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next chapter
This section crouched down and looked clear at that place. The worker made the product, this sentence is true, it is about a pair of hands, a physical process. The value of the product is created by the worker, this sentence is about the account, the belonging of value. From the first sentence to the second, between them lie four relays, and to cross that step is to leave the ground empty. Every argument about exploitation across that hundred years rests on this step.
Now notice, only that this step was crossed over empty has been said, and not one character has been said that the gap does not exist. The gap does exist, it is a hard fact: the worker makes a hundred in a day and carries home forty in a day. Then, the sixty that is left, where did it go? The next chapter does not speak reason, does not speak doctrine, does not speak stance, it does a very dumb thing: it opens the account book of a company and reckons that sixty out for you to see, item by item.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.