VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 30
Labor, in the end, how is it weighed
Start with a basket of apples. A hundred of them, five men, twenty each, and it is done, a schoolchild can do it, no one reckons it wrong. That is the whole point the chapter opens on, turned inside out. The thing you thought was hard, the dividing, is the easy part. The hard part sits before your hand ever touches the basket: how was it fixed that each should get twenty, and why should Cook Ding get more apples than the cook who changes his knife every year. The dividing is the fruit, the weighing is the cause. The last chapter left three ancestors all saying the divide must be right, and none of them settling the one thing underneath, so this chapter drives straight into it. Labor, in the end, how is it weighed.
Section one says why the weighing is so hard. Labor is not an apple you count or a plot of ground you lay a measure to. It has no shape, you cannot take it out and set it on the scale. It hides inside the result, tangled with the timber and the machine and the man who first drew the chair, and you cannot pick one man’s share out clean. And what it is worth will not hold still, it floats moment to moment with scarcity, the same craft dear in a village with one pot mender and cheap in a village where all can mend a pot, the man unchanged, the force unchanged, the worth turned over heaven to earth. Hard as all this is, man never gave up the weighing, because Xunzi already told it through: weigh not the labor, and the share cannot be fixed, and the group cannot form, and man falls back to the beast’s plight. Zhuangzi sets the first rule of the weighing: the priest at the sacrifice does not cross his vessels to cook in the cook’s stead. Different labor takes a different rule, and no one rule weighs all under heaven. So the pressure of the whole chapter presses onto one word, the weighing.
Section two lays the rules on the table, six of them, and it is worth naming them because you have lived your whole life under them without counting them. By time, the oldest, however long you stayed, but it lets the idler and the strainer draw the same. By the piece, which shows the idler up, but lets the fast and rough beat the slow and fine. By result, which drives at what you brought off and shows why Cook Ding is worth the price, but weighs thin the slow labor whose fruit shows only in ten or twenty years. By scarcity, the coldest, which asks not whether you are worn or good but only whether you can be swapped out, and marks the two men who alone can run the machine dear, and is the one rule least to be gone around. By charge, which weighs the load on the shoulder that shows its weight only when the line goes wrong, and gives the floor head his share though he makes not one chair. By contribution, which weighs the good you did the whole matter even when it was not made by your hands alone. Then the line the whole section is for: not one of the six weighs whole. Each catches some labor and lets other labor slip. So the real world never uses one alone, it props several together, one making up another’s hole, and your pay slip is that platter, its base wage line mostly time, its performance line result, the technician’s high wage scarcity, the floor head’s share charge, six rules weighing on one sheet at once.
Section three asks who props the rules, who fixes how much weight each rule should carry, and here two frames part. The first hands it to the price, and lets the market fix the share, countless buyers and sellers knocking out a number, quick and real and sparing no feeling, the coldest scarcity rule at work marking a price the same minute. But the price knows only the labor that can be carried to market and cried, and the mother minding the child at home has no market, so it cannot weigh her at all. The second hands it to man, a layer of assessors against a fixed standard, the old examinations and the title grading and the performance review, and it reaches into what the market cannot, the slow labor, the charge, the contribution hard to tell, and it can speak to feeling and see to those down on their luck. But what it assesses is man, and man looks wrong and leans and is swayed by ties and by the face above, so the rule is only as upright as the hand that holds it, and here that old line bites hardest, the rule is dead, the hand that holds the rule is alive. The two frames are not one right and one wrong, they make up each other, and the real world tangles them, the private factory taking its market price yet assessing whose office to lift by hand, the public unit grading by assessment yet unable to go around the market pull. And here the chapter makes its end of the term’s opening opposition. Capitalism against socialism, come down to the weighing of labor, is not a fight over whether to go by labor, both go by labor, it is a strife over whether to use the price more or the assessment more, a real question worth taking up forever, but a work of the hand about measure, not a war to the death. Mencius closes it: the great craftsman must teach by the compass and the square, there must be a rule and you cannot fix the share by one man’s likes, and yet the compass and the square are dead and the craftsman who holds them is alive.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to stop treating a word like distribution by labor as a slogan and open up the machine inside it, to find that its whole weight rests on one operation, the weighing, and then to lay the actual tools of that operation on the table and test each for what it catches and what it drops. What you carry out is two things you can use the same day. First, when a share of pay strikes you as unfair, you now know where to look, not at the dividing but at the weighing, and you can ask which of the six rules did the weighing here and what it let slip. Second, and larger for this term, the most famous quarrel of the last hundred years is defused in your hands. Walked all the way down to the ground, it is two rules for weighing labor and a question of how much to lean on each, and reasonable people can prop them differently forever without either being the enemy. The chapter twice comes round to the same steadying line, the rule is dead and the hand that holds it is alive, so that whether the weighing comes off is half in whether the rule is upright and half in whether the one holding it is clear and fair. And it leaves a stretch of labor standing that none of the six rules could reach, the mother’s bowl of rice, the old hand’s worth beyond price, the man down on his luck who counts still. Before it can face those, it must ask one thing more at the root, whether labor is even a thing that flows, whether it can move from one man to another and walk from one position to the next. That is the next chapter.
SECTIONS
Section 1, The hard thing is not the dividing, it is the weighing
Section 3, Two frames, one uses the price, one uses assessment
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1, The hard thing is not the dividing, it is the weighing