VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 16
Where Did That Gap Flow
Begin with a number you were handed and told to be angry about. A worker makes a hundred in a day and carries home forty, and someone took the sixty in between. The number is real, and the anger is not unreasonable, and the last chapter granted the gap without hedging a single character. So this chapter does not argue that the gap is unreal. It does something duller and far harder to argue with: it opens the account book of an ordinary chair company and follows the sixty dollars, entry by entry, to see where each dollar actually went. That is the whole chapter, a bookkeeping, and by the end the two most useful characters of the semester have changed shape in your hand, and one share of money has appeared that no bookkeeping can assign to anyone at all.
The first section sets the company up plainly so the numbers are easy to hold. Ten million comes in, four million goes straight to a hundred workers in wages, and six million is left, the sum everyone assumes fell into the boss’s pocket. Then it turns the pages. The stock upstream, four million, feeding the tree-fellers and steel-rollers and paint-mixers, and this is Sima Qian’s ranger-relay handed into the hand. Plant and machines, one million, and here the last semester’s wei returns, a machine and a plant are wei, accumulated and made and left by those before, and to use them is to pay a share for them. Moving the goods, two hundred thousand, Sima Qian’s trader-relay, the share that takes a chair from dead to living. Tax, two hundred thousand, and the section makes it concrete, the highway the chairs ride, the classroom, the hospital, the pension, the lamp over your head. Put back into tomorrow, three hundred thousand, the life of the company, without which it is gone in two years. Five accounts turned, and of the six million, five million seven hundred thousand is already gone, and not one cent of it into the boss’s pocket.
The second section turns the last two pages and then does the real work of the chapter. The interest, one hundred fifty thousand, is the page almost no one has ever reckoned, and the section walks the money to its end: the bank lent what tens of millions of ordinary people deposited, and the interest flows back to their deposits and their pensions, the sixth account being, in truth, a river running back to the common person. The last page is the boss, and what lands in his hand is a hundred fifty thousand out of ten million, earned this year, and possibly a negative number next year, while the wages and the stock money and the tax and the interest all still get paid, because the one on the last page is the one who eats the loss. Then the section carries the two characters under the lamp. Exploitation is a verdict, and the instant a verdict leaves the mouth the argument ends and no one turns the seven pages anymore, which is precisely the thing this volume guards against, the label that makes people stop looking, the same label pasted from far off onto the old woman who guarded her dead beloved’s money. So it hands you the line to write down: exploitation is a moral verdict, distribution is a fact of position. A verdict is one line, a fact is page after page.
But the second section refuses to close clean, and inserts a restless question that opens the third. The seven accounts were tidy, every dollar found a position and every position a person who gave strength. Yet the punch press is three times faster than ten years ago, and the line lets a hundred do what three hundred once did, and that extra share has no position on the book to claim it, belongs to no worker in the room today. Whom does it belong to?
The third section goes to Sichuan to find out, to Li Bing and the weir at Dujiangyan, built around 256 BC and still watering the Chengdu plain twenty-two hundred years on. The cold question is put: Li Bing farmed not a single mu and touched not one grain of all those harvests, so whose labor’s gain are they? The farmers’ labor is the farmers’, but the neighboring place with no weir, same strength and same hands, reaps less, and that difference is the fruit of one thought of a man dead twenty-two hundred years. Then the harder question: why parting and not damming, why that exact spot, and the honest answer is that it cannot be traced, that Li Bing could not explain his own one thought any more than Yu the Great could explain channeling over his father’s damming. A person cannot explain his own one thought, so a person gives it a source, heaven, a dream, the River Chart, a temple, a Lord of the River, and the section names these too as wei, set by people, not superstition but a clear-eyed act: the ancestors knew no one person can shoulder that thought, and no one person is fit to swallow its fruit alone. Carried back to the economy, the machine is three times faster because someone stood on the shoulders of someone who stood on the shoulders of the one who beat out the first plow, and the extra output flowed down a long river from the ancestors to today, belonging to no one person’s labor. The section names it: gain not of labor, and it belongs to the public, which is to say the spirits, which is to say no private person at all.
And here the chapter lifts a line from last semester and finishes it. Last semester said the starting point of humankind is not selfishness but sharing, and only half was spoken, and the other half lands now: gain not of labor belongs to the public. The founding line is clean. Your labor is yours and no one can take it, but the machine’s threefold speed and the weir’s twenty-three centuries and the whole river from the ancestors down, that share is neither your labor nor his, and no one may swallow it alone. The hundred-year argument about the gap had one side calling it the worker’s and one side calling it capital’s, and the ancestors shook their heads from two thousand years off and said there is a share that is no one’s.
What you carry out of this chapter is a bookkeeping habit and a boundary. The habit: when someone hands you a gap and a verdict in the same breath, turn the pages before you accept the verdict, because a verdict ends the turning and the turning is where the truth is. The boundary: distinguish your labor, which is wholly yours, from the gain not of labor, which is wholly no one’s, and refuse the two frames that fought for a century over a share that belonged to neither of them. The chapter closes by turning back to the workshop and the hundred workers, and asking whether they truly hold no card, and the next chapter answers with a cook whose knife has run nineteen years with an edge like a fresh whetting, the moment he lays hand on it, the position turns over.
SECTIONS
Section 1 Open a Company’s Account Book, Seven Accounts
Section 2 Exploitation Is a Moral Verdict, Distribution Is a Fact of Position
Section 3 That One Share, No One May Swallow Alone
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.