VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 28
Every man lives under distribution by labor
Start from the thing in your own hand, or your parents’ hand. A pay slip. Not a theory of it, the sheet itself, drawn on the fifteenth. Base wage, post wage, performance, overtime, a full attendance bonus. Read it top to bottom and there is not one line given for free. Under every line is pressed one word, and the word is labor. That is where this chapter begins, and from there it does a plain and stubborn thing: it walks the corners of a life, one by one, to find out whether there is any place, or any person, that slips free of that word. The last chapter drew away the false wall between two isms. This chapter puts its feet on the ground and counts how far the thing behind that wall actually reaches.
Section one stays with the pay slip and reads it all the way down. Even the lines that look unlike labor turn out to be labor underneath. The year end bonus is a whole year of labor gathered and settled at once, which is why you lose it if you leave at half a year. The insurances and the fund are cut and matched by the share of your wage, and your wage was set by labor in the first place, so the root is labor still. The little festival gift vanishes if you just joined or just gave notice, because what it goes by is whether you still count as one share of this labor. Then Cook Ding comes back, the cook whose knife lasted nineteen years and carved several thousand oxen with an edge keen as new. Put him in a meat plant and everyone agrees he should take more than the cook who changes a knife every year. The extra is his nineteen years of skill folded into money. And Cook Ding breaks open a layer that is easy to mistake: the rule weighs the worth of the labor, not the hardship of the labor. The cook who chops till the sweat runs may spend more force, yet take less. Cook Ding barely strains, goes along the seams, and his labor is the dearest. Distribution by labor is not distribution by suffering. The section ends by owning what it has not yet answered. The world is full of people who draw no wage. The student, the homemaker, the old man, the small trader, the busker. Are they outside the sheet. The woodcutter in the Book of Songs already asked the reverse of the whole question long ago: you neither sow nor reap, on what ground do you take three hundred sheaves. The front of the rule is that the one with labor gets. The reverse is that the one without should not.
Section two leaves the pay slip and walks. Into the school, where a report card is a rule with the same reasoning as a pay slip, one score behind each subject, effort in and score out, and the score turns into a ranking, a scholarship, a place, and at last a real pay slip of the days to come, a line that has run since you were six. Onto the field, where by labor is set the barest of all: one man takes ten million and one sits a whole season on the bench, not by hardship, since the man on the bench may train hardest, but by what the labor brings back, the goal at the instant, the win or loss of the game, weighed clean before tens of thousands with nowhere to hide. Into the hospital, where at last an exception seems to show, the emergency bed that saves you first and asks about money never. And here the chapter does its most important turn. Walk one step nearer. The patient at that instant is by need, but the doctor and the nurse who save him are by labor, drawn by grade and years and how the operation went. On one same bed, in one same instant, two ends stand two different words. By labor and by need are not two countries and not two institutions. They can live together, one at each end, on a single bed. That is the thing this whole term means to see clear. Then the strangest place, a community that pays not a cent, where strangers from all over build something anyone can use for free, and rank rises only by whether what you added is of use, whether the fault you mended was hard, whether others take up what you wrote. What is handed out there is not money but standing, and it is the cleanest place of all, because with no money to muddy it you cannot hide and cannot fake. Mozi pointed out this road more than two thousand years ago in the words honor the worthy: office holds no lasting honor, the common man is not forever low, have the ability and he is raised, lack it and he is set down. He drew the whole layer of birth away, and the community and his line, across two thousand years, tell one same thing.
Section three asks why, if it is everywhere, no one ever told you. Two layers. The first is that it is too ordinary, like the oxygen in the air you breathe from birth and learn of only from a book, a thing so daily it became the background, and no one points out the background. But ordinary alone does not cover it, because this was on purpose locked into one institution’s name for more than a hundred years. A hand moved. The painter of two opposed camps fears most a thing both sides have, because such a thing shows the line up. So he drags the straddling thing hard to one side and calls it that side’s alone, and the line comes out clean while the truth goes under the board. It is the common move of drawing camps, the same move as calling hardworking or thrift or filial piety the private virtue of one people when the people next door have it too. Confucius sets the stone at the bottom: when the name is not set right, the words do not run smooth, and the thing is not brought off. The name of distribution by labor was set wrong, and everything after it ran into a tangle, so that a man will not believe a private factory distributes by labor, because the board says otherwise. What this whole chapter does is set the name right, take away the label stuck on wrong, and let the thing show its own face, a reasoning of distribution held in common by all under heaven, following the man.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to count instead of to argue, to walk the corners one by one and let the plain cases speak, and then to fix a wrong name so the true words can run. What you carry out is two things. First, a fact you can check against your own life: you have lived under this rule since you were six, at your desk, on the field, at your job, and so has nearly everyone. Second, and larger, a wall gone. Once the name is set right, you need no longer take a side over your own pay slip. You are a person who put out force and wants that force counted, and so are the very people you were told to fight. The chapter also plants a seed it does not yet open. On that hospital bed, by need slipped in beside by labor, and the two lived together without trouble. That second word waits for the back half of the term. This chapter closes on the hardest question the counting turns up: labor is everywhere, but how is labor weighed. The next chapter goes to take that rule apart.
SECTIONS
Section 1, Start from one pay slip
Section 2, The school, the hospital, the field, and that community that pays no money
Section 3, So why has no one ever told you this
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.