VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 40
Four Elements, Not Four Stages
Half past six on the edge of town, a roller door goes up, a saw turns, and the smell of sawdust comes out. That is where this chapter starts. Not from a definition, from a morning. A shop that makes chairs, twenty-odd people, ten million in flow across a year. The first semester did not open from what is slavery, it opened from a master who could not cook and the cook who held his three meals. This chapter keeps that habit. Before it speaks of fitting the four together, before it speaks of the check and balance, it does one plainer thing first. It sets the four in front of your eyes at once, so you see with your own eyes that they are all really there.
The first section walks into that shop for one morning. Four million of the ten goes out in wages, and that is the rule measuring what is put in. A young man came new last month, his hands green, his month-end number the smallest in the shop, and no one cried unfair, because the rule hangs plain on the wall and everyone can run the sum himself. Then turn the book a few pages on. The three months the woman on the line rests for her child, the sum for the old hand laid up in hospital, the pension that reaches the retired worker who has not come a single day this year, none of these the wage sheet can reach, and all are paid with a straight back. That is the rule measuring what is needed, on the same account, a few pages apart. The man who clocks off and cannot sleep, still running next month’s numbers, carries the risk, and that is the third rule. And if there is a contract that forbids a man three years to go elsewhere, a debt that comes down the moment he lifts his foot, that is the shadow of the wall, the fourth. Four things, one day, one room, one account, and none waited on another. The first thing to see is that they are really there, not in a book, not in some other era.
The second section unties a knot carried in from childhood, the queue. First a slave society, then feudal, then capitalist, then socialist and communist, one taking the place of the next. The section owns first what is real in that line, for the weight there is no light one. Change is real. Slavery turned from the open face to the dark. Need spread from one house and clan to a city and a country. A hundred years ago a worker who broke his leg got through the months on what the family scraped and a soft master’s few coins, and today he has work-injury cover and a sum that does not ask his strength. Yet push the lens back further and the ever-normal granary and the charity granary did the same one thing long ago, asking only whether there was rice in his house. So the section asks the line one question. On it, what is it that moves? What moves is the proportion and the form, not the being or not being. The one step too many is reading before-and-after as taking-the-place-of. Cross that step and three things follow. A time label gets pasted on each, backward at the front and advanced at the back. Slavery is taken to belong to the past and to vanish of itself, so it changes skin and stands unseen. And a ranking of seats gets set, the one at the back lifted to the highest. The section walks back to the era of the Salt and Iron debate and looks close, and finds forced service, wage, stake, and relief, all four present under one sky. To Mister Marx it owns the merit heavy, he was the first to take that machine apart and set it on the table, and he put matter before mind as Guanzi did two thousand four hundred years apart. It points the edge and only the edge, no right or wrong. The one step too many was lining coexistence at once into a going-forward step by step.
The third section lays the four rules out one at a time and names what each measures: what is put in, what is needed, risk, the forced hand. Then it swaps their positions to see what comes. Take the wage sheet to measure a three-month baby and he earns zero milk. Take the rule of need to measure those who put out strength and the stock drops inside three months. Take the rule of risk to measure the seeing of a doctor and the cost this once is a person, for a life has no next run. Set force to prop the other three and the hands still move but the heart is gone. Four wrong fits, four costs. It borrows Confucius, not in that position do not plan its business, to set a position for the rules too. Each rule in its own position is a good rule, out of that position it turns bad. Then it nails two lines. This is not blending the four into one pot. It borrows Yanzi and the broth, water and fire and salt and plum all go in and only then have the fish and meat their taste, and take water to blend water and who will drink it, and Confucius, the gentleman harmonizes and does not merely agree, so harmony is not rubbing out the different but letting the different each keep its position and be at peace. And this is not ranking the four. The door is no higher than the window, and the rule of need is not to be lifted quietly to the peak, for a way of sharing answers how to share but cannot answer whether there is anything to share.
Here is the method, and here is what stays. The method is the one this whole book keeps. Set the position first, pass no judgment. The four rules have no ranking of seats. Need may not be lifted quietly to the highest and last and best, and capital may not be called a needed evil or slavery a born wickedness. What stays from this chapter is the first stroke of the whole picture and a way of looking to go with it. The four are not four stages, they are four elements. The four rules measure four different things, no one can stand in for another, no one is higher than another. The coexistence and the common growth of the twelve chapters to come, and the soil under all of it, grow out of this one account. The next chapter walks a step nearer, moving the lens from the shop to one person, to see these four rules take turns measuring him from light to dark in a single day.
SECTIONS
One, A Day in One Workshop: Four Running at Once
Two, Stages Are a Queue, Elements Run at Once
Three, Four Rules Measure Four Different Things
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.