VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21, SECTION 1

VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21, SECTION 1

Capital Sucks Blood, Where These Four Characters Go Wrong

Seven chapters walked, positions set out, accounts reckoned, the card looked at, the hide and hair turned over, the chains counted, the rule measured. Yet one thing, from beginning to end, has never been spoken to its face: capital itself, what in the end is it. Across this hundred years and more, four characters have been shouted loudest, shouted into the street, the classroom, the dinner table, everyone able to say them, saying them without needing to think. This section takes these four characters and sets them under the lamp, and looks at them clear, one character at a time.

One. Those four characters

Those four characters are: capital sucks blood. Follow these four characters first and draw a picture in your heart. What is drawn? Most likely a plump fellow in a top hat with a cigar in his teeth, reaching out a hand, drawing something out of the worker’s body. You have seen this picture, it is in the cartoons, in the textbooks, in the films, drawn for a hundred years and more.

Now take this picture away and leave only the four characters. Capital, sucks blood. See clear the bones of this sentence: it gives capital two characters, and one action. To suck is an action. And to do an action, one thing is needed: intent.

Two. Can capital have intent

Do a very dumb experiment. Set a piece of capital on the table. Set what? A stack of money, or a machine, or a sheet of paper written over with shares. Now stare at it, watch it for an hour. Will it move? Will it think? Will it decide whose blood to suck today?

It will not. It lies there, it has no eyes, no heart, no notion of its own, and if you do not touch it, it lies just so for a hundred years. The one stroke this section means to set is written right here, copy it down: capital is not a person. The capitalist is a person. These are two matters.

Three. Then, how did that pile of grain become capital

To see this layer through, one must see how capital comes to be. Its source is two characters only: accumulation. Look at a farmer, he worked the land a year, took in a hundred piculs of grain, his household ate and used eighty, and twenty were left. These twenty piculs of grain are the most primitive capital.

Now, look at what these twenty piculs of grain can become. He can eat it, and that is called consumption, capital to zero. He can hide it in the granary, and that is called storing, capital lying unmoved. He can lend it to a neighbor and take back a little more next year, and that is lending. He can trade it for an ox, an iron plow, a sack of good seed, and that is putting it into production. He can go partners with a neighbor and buy a waterwheel. He can also trade it into money and send a child to study. See clear: these twenty piculs of grain, not one of them changed, what changed is one notion in that farmer.

Four. Capital is that person’s intent, a hand reached out

Look once more over those several roads just now. He decides to eat it, and it vanishes. He decides to hide it, and it goes still. He decides to lend it out, and it begins to flow. He decides to trade it for plow and ox, and it begins to enlarge his strength. He decides to send a child to study, and it becomes a person’s future.

These twenty piculs of grain, from beginning to end, never put out a single notion. The one who put out the notion is that farmer. So this stroke of the section can be written one layer deeper: capital is passive, and the active one is the person. Any piece of capital, at any moment, what it becomes is because some one person made some one decision, and capital does not decide of itself what to become, capital is a person’s intent, a hand reached out. This layer was spoken once last semester, with another character, and that character is: wei. What a person makes is called wei, neutral, its good and ill resting on the hands.

Five. Those three characters of Laozi’s: know when to stop

There is a layer more crucial still, look at these three characters of Laozi’s.

Knowing when to stop escapes peril, runs the line in Laozi, the forty-fourth chapter of the Daodejing. To know where to stop is not to walk into the place of peril. Ask one line: who can know when to stop? Only a person can. Only a person will save, will decide not to spend this sum today, will think I must lay it by for a greater matter next, will judge now is not the time, wait a while. Can capital know when to stop? It cannot, for knowing when to stop needs first the knowing, and it knows nothing at all.

So that line shouted for a hundred years and more must be changed. To say capital is greedy is in truth that certain people are greedy, to say capital is without feeling is in truth that certain people are without feeling, to say capital runs out of control is in truth that certain people, in certain positions, did not hold to that stop. Capital is a mirror, and what it reflects is what the person holding it has in his heart.

Six. Yet, that blood is real

Speaking to here, stop, and say the words very slow. To say capital does not suck blood has not said one character that no one bled. Those matters in the nineteenth-century factories are real: sixteen hours a day, real, the five-year-old child down the shaft, real. Last semester spoke a whole chapter of it, and did not blur one character.

Then whose was the blood sucked? It was the people standing in that position, the ones who made that decision. What this section does is not to wipe this account away, on the contrary. See clear: to charge the account to capital is an account that can never be got back, for capital is not a person, you cannot go to it to settle, it will not own it, it cannot even hear. And to charge the account to the person who made the decision, the account then has an owner. Last semester nailed a line: capital is only a tool, the responsibility lies with the operating hand. It is not to let anyone off, it is to move the responsibility, off a thing with no ears, back onto the shoulders of a person.

Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next

This section took those four characters apart. Capital is not a person, the capitalist is a person, these are two matters, capital has no eyes, no heart, no notion of its own. Twenty piculs of grain a farmer had left over can be eaten, can be hidden, can be lent, can be traded for a plow, can send a child to study, and what changes is never those twenty piculs, it is one notion in that person. Capital is passive, the active one is the person, knowing when to stop escapes peril, only a person can know when to stop.

That blood is real, yet the account must be charged to a person, to the one who made the decision, and charged to a thing with no ears, that account can never be got back. Then, this thing capital, if it is not that mouth sucking blood, what in the end is it? It is a force, a force that can be roused up by people, like water, like wind, like electricity. Water flows of itself to the low place, and this force too flows of itself in one direction. Which way does it flow? The next section sees this matter clear.

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

Section 2  Where the Differential Is, There the Force Gathers