VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21
Capital Is Not a Person, It Is a Force
Start with four characters you can say without thinking, because you have heard them in the street, the classroom, the dinner table, for a hundred years and more: capital sucks blood. Seven chapters have set out positions and reckoned accounts and looked at the card and turned over the hide and hair and counted the chains and measured the rule, and never once spoken capital itself to its face. This chapter does. It takes the loudest four characters of the century, sets them under the lamp, and looks at them one character at a time, and then it does the harder thing, it says what capital actually is once the sucking mouth is taken away, and it does all this without wiping away one drop of the blood that was real.
The first section takes the four characters apart on the bones. Capital sucks blood gives capital two characters and one action, and to suck is an action, and an action needs intent. So the section does a dumb experiment, sets a stack of money or a machine or a share certificate on the table and watches it for an hour, and it does not move, does not think, does not decide whose blood to suck, having no eyes and no heart and no notion of its own. Capital is not a person, the capitalist is a person, these are two matters. Then it shows how a thing becomes capital, through accumulation, the farmer’s twenty piculs left after the year, which can be eaten to zero or hidden unmoved or lent or traded for a plow and ox or turned to money to send a child to study, and not one of the twenty piculs changes, what changes is one notion in the farmer. Capital is passive and the active one is the person, a hand reached out from a person’s intent, and this is last semester’s wei, what a person makes, neutral, its good and ill on the hands. Laozi sharpens it with knowing when to stop escapes peril, and only a person can know when to stop, only a person saves and judges wait a while, so capital greedy is in truth certain people greedy, capital out of control is certain people in certain positions who did not hold the stop, capital a mirror reflecting what the one holding it has in his heart. And then the section stops and says slowly that none of this has said no one bled, the sixteen-hour day and the child down the shaft were real, and the point is not to wipe the account away but to charge it where it can be collected, for charged to capital it can never be got back, capital having no ears to hear and no self to own it, and charged to the person who made the decision it has an owner at last, the responsibility moved off a thing with no ears back onto the shoulders of a person.
The second section answers the objection the first raises, that a thing lying unmoved cannot have built railways and factories and cities. It shows the force by starting small: one person’s twenty piculs can trade for an ox but cannot build a road or a factory for a thousand, and a great matter has one road only, to gather the little in ten million hands into one. The billions to build a modern factory come from the wage-earner’s monthly deposit and the old person’s saved pension, one person’s thousand doing nothing and ten million people’s thousand lighting a city, and the word to hold is gather, the first and most crucial thing this force does. And not money only, a single car gathers several hundred thousand people who will never meet, across cities and countries and tongues, their hands combined into one car, with ore from one continent and copper from another and oil from farther still. Then the crucial question, who is the chief commander of this gathering, and the answer that there is no room of clever people with a vast chart, no one commands it at all, and the thing that sounds absurd is simply true. Water flows to the low place with no one commanding it, because of a differential, and this force gathers of itself because of a differential too, called return, money flowing where return is high and people going where the wage and future are good and stock hauled where the price can be paid, no one commanding, the differential drawing them over, and capital has no good and evil any more than it has eyes, it knows only the differential as water knows only high and low. And precisely because it knows no good and evil it gathers wrong: build the highest differential in the wrong spot, let the honest maker earn nothing and the price-churner earn enough in a month, and the force runs to the wrong place not off by a cent, not hesitating, not doubting, not saying this is not right, for it cannot know right, and the gathering-wrong is never its fault but the fault of the hands that built the differential there.
The third section looks at what the force made after gathering, and it names the two mistakes it means to avoid, puffing that gives all good to one doctrine and disowning that strikes the merit off at the sight of cost, and it does one thing only, sets out numbers. Lifespan, around thirty for thousands of years and seventy and more today, and three or four children of every ten not living to five before, meaning nearly every mother had buried a child, dropped to a single digit of every hundred now. And it insists the number did not change of itself, it was the force gathered and turned toward vaccines and antibiotics and obstetrics and running water. Eating full, famine the ordinary state turned rare, nine in ten below extreme poverty dropped below one in ten, a thing never before in human history. Reading, one in ten literate before and more than eight in ten now, a book once costing more than an ox and now a few dollars, the machine in the pocket holding more than the largest royal library, and that you can read this page the fruit of the change. Strength, a switch rousing the force of a thousand strong men, and distance, a life once bounded by a few dozen li now crossing the earth in a day and speaking across it in a second. Then it sets all of this onto one ordinary person, the clean water at the tap that was once a luxury that could kill, the refrigerator no king of two centuries past could fill, the anesthesia and antibiotics against an appendicitis once fatal, the machine that shows a face a thousand li off, the famine and the dying children and the fatal toothache you will most likely never meet, this taken-for-granted the force’s greatest merit. And it ends by asking Sima Qian to set the numbers in their place, propriety is born of having and falls away in the wanting, the same position as Guanzi’s full granaries knowing propriety, set a second time, the numbers not a hymn to anyone but the base board on which all decency and cultivation and ease of a person tread. One thing not to be disowned honestly: this force in two hundred years made what humankind did not make in thousands. And one thing not to be hidden: looking at this one face only is incomplete, for the force that loosened an old bind of thousands of years loosened other things too, and the next chapter goes to that old bind and to what people fell into once it was loosed.
What you carry out of this chapter is the correction the whole book has been walking toward on this one word. Capital is not a person and cannot suck, cannot be greedy, cannot know when to stop, cannot decide anything at all, it is a force like water and wind and electricity, roused by people and flowing to the differential people build, and everything it does, good and ill alike, traces back to whose hand roused it and toward what. This is not a defense of anyone and not an attack on anyone, it is the moving of a whole century’s praise and blame off a thing with no ears and back onto the people who hold it. And the chapter is scrupulous to the end that the merit and the blood are both real, that the force made the numbers and left the man with his tap of clean water, and that the account for the blood was always a person’s account, never the tool’s. The next chapter turns to the cost, to the old bind loosed and what fell through the opening.
SECTIONS
Section 1 Capital Sucks Blood, Where These Four Characters Go Wrong
Section 2 Where the Differential Is, There the Force Gathers
Section 3 This Force, What It Made in Two Hundred Years
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1 Capital Sucks Blood, Where These Four Characters Go Wrong