VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 26
Live Capital, Live Economy, and That Boundary
Start with a breath that has been gathering across two chapters, the wall of chapter twenty-four and the three moves of chapter twenty-five, and the question they leave, are the wall-builders bad people. This is the last chapter of the semester, and it opens by facing that breath, then turns to the thing it truly means to speak, that one and the same piece of capital can be dead or alive, and it ends by setting to the very center the deepest stroke of the whole volume, the boundary between the economy and politics. It holds the volume’s method to the end, walk close and look, set out the position, hand down no verdict, and having set out to here it has judged no one and will not begin.
The first section presses the breath down. That person who ringed the village well, walk close and look under him, and what he had in his heart was most likely not I would harm people but here is a gap, I do not take it another will, perhaps a sick relative waiting on money, perhaps everyone else already ringing, perhaps a mended well-mouth he felt he could charge for. The chasing of gain is instinct and the work of the position, to be rich the temper of human nature unlearned yet wanted by all, and reaching a hand to make a scarcity is the same position as water flowing to the low place. Yet not to judge him is not to stop looking at the wall, the wall standing there one fact and who builds it another, and cursing the person leaves the gap so a second comes to build, cursing done in one line where seeing the position takes chapter by chapter. And it gives the two roads already walked, fill the gap in as the Henan folk did by making the thing no longer scarce so the wall no one pushed is of itself useless, and where the wall is built by a decree it does not go to the economy to govern but wants another position to draw the boundary, the matter of volume four. Then it turns to the chapter’s eye, a sum of ten million that cannot be called alive or dead by its number, the difference being not how much but how used, and sets out three deaths. Hoarded dead, the number shrinking unmoved but worse the old woman who guarded her money and died of a healable illness, the money never once alive because it was never a dose of medicine, what she guarded being her departed love, not one character laughing at her. Turning empty, money left the real making to turn on the hair layer over layer, the books growing while not one grain or plow or better day is made, a machine burning empty loud and hot driving no shaft, 2008 the end of it with the numbers gone in a night and a long wound left on the hide. And the third named to open the next section, the guest made host, the man of sixty still chasing customers whose every hour and thought and sleep serve the growing number until he is no longer the money’s master but its watchman, the one who takes the constraint the slave.
The second section speaks the way of living through Master Zeng’s fourteen characters, the kind man grows the self by wealth, the unkind man grows wealth by the self, the same three characters wealth and self and grow with the order turned once, the key on grow and the question of who grows. Grows wealth by the self, the man staking body and time and sleep and knees and the family evenings, not failing to toil but toiling to make the number large, the third death, the person become soil and money the sprout, the number at the end very large and the person very small. Grows the self by wealth, money spent to run a factory whose hundreds send their children to study, to learn a long-wanted craft, to heal a mother, to mend a road, the money spent and the number smaller yet something grown out, the days of hundreds and a craft and a mother who can walk and a road come through, that character grow. And it joins the line to chapter sixteen and Li Bing’s weir, the money and stone and cages all spent with nothing on the books yet twenty-three centuries of rice grown out, growing the self by wealth never growing only one self but the selves of many, the same position as that one share no one may swallow alone and gain not of labor belongs to the public, the hand that makes capital live being the one that scatters it out and not the one that gathers it in. Then it gathers the whole semester, scarcity the board and born scarcity the squares Heaven drew and made scarcity a few lines drawn on the board, the board dead, the rule dead reading only the number, capital most of all dead with no eyes or heart, the thirteen chapters gathered into one line, the whole game from board to piece all dead and the alive only the person seated before the board.
The third section digs the pit both roads reached, the cost of the two frames and the three moves of scarcity both bottoming in one place never yet faced, and sets Confucius to the center, not in that position one does not plan that position’s governing, saved from the reading of deference into a reading of position, one position’s matters stirred to confusion when you reach in and your own then done by no one, both ends falling. The economy’s position governs three matters, make the thing by the farmer and ranger and craftsman relays, send it to the hand that needs it most by the trader, read the degree exact by the rule, and doing these three well is its virtue. The politics position governs three others, fix the direction the differential-blind force cannot fix itself, draw the boundary of what may and may not go onto the rule like the mother’s breakfast and the years-long bond, and take up those who fell like the forty-year-old weaver the machine unhoused without sending him onward, the gap taken up not by the heartless force but by people and a whole set of arrangements. And crossing the line runs two directions that are one error, money reaching into politics to buy the decree and the paper and build its wall because contending in the economy cent by cent is wearying while one decree makes only you able to sell overnight, and the hand reaching into the economy to set by force what the rule read and point the road a person would find, one looking too loose and one too tight yet both a person in one position doing another’s matters. The deepest stroke lands, the economy is not politics, not unrelated but pasted like cheek and jaw, the lip gone the teeth cold, the constraint two-way and the positions differing only in the division of labor, neither higher, all the costs and walls and pain of the semester bottoming in one line, one side crossed the line, and where exactly the boundary falls left honestly to volumes four and five, this volume able only to point it clear. Then it looks back over the thirteen chapters walked and closes on the last line, that the gap divided all semester was divided in that first account by labor, the one who did more or better or harder taking more, distribution by labor said by many to be another institution’s way of dividing yet running every day in this capitalist chair factory, and asks whether it is another institution or has always lived in this one workshop, the next semester going to a larger scene to ask whether any one person in this world can escape those two characters, by labor.
What you carry out of this chapter, and out of the semester, is a single discipline turned on money and on yourself. Capital is dead and only the player is alive, so a sum is neither alive nor dead by its number but by whether it grows the self or grows the self of many or merely grows itself while the person shrinks, and the test of a living use is whether something grew out where the number went down. And the boundary is the deepest thing the volume leaves you, that the economy and politics are two positions and the whole century’s worth of walls and costs trace not to a bad kind of person but to one position reaching into the other, the fixing of exactly where the line falls handed on to the volumes still ahead. The chapter closes by handing the next semester its question, whether anyone escapes distribution by labor, and whether the thing called another institution has been living in this workshop all along.
SECTIONS
Section 1 The Three Deaths of Capital: Hoarded Dead, Turning Empty, the Guest Made Host
Section 2 The Kind Man Grows the Self by Wealth, the Board Is Dead, the Player Is Alive
Section 3 Not in That Position, One Does Not Plan Its Governing, the Economy Is Not Politics
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1 The Three Deaths of Capital: Hoarded Dead, Turning Empty, the Guest Made Host