VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 1
The Four Systems, at Bottom, All Settle People (Part One)
The last chapter did education, and moved culture back to its proper place. This chapter is about the economy. And to talk about the economy, you first have to climb out of a pit. Stand at the ordinary angle and look at the economy, and what you see is a quarrel, a fight that has gone on for more than a hundred years and has not stopped to this day, is capitalism better or socialism, is communism right or wrong. What this chapter means to do is look down from a higher and more fundamental place. See it clearly, and you will see a thing that in the middle of that quarrel you could never see, that those systems fighting each other to the death, once their names are peeled off, are all, underneath, doing the same one thing. Settling people. This section looks at the first three of them, slavery, socialism, and capital.
The first to look at is slavery.
The word slavery sounds the heaviest, the most unbearable. Say slave, and what rises in your mind is chains, whips, a person driven like a beast of burden. In your very heart, there is only one thing you feel for it. Hatred. And rightly so. But this section asks you to press that hatred down for a moment, cool it, and go look at a thing that inside the hatred you cannot see.
Look at that slave society, and peel off the skin of chains and whips, and what is the thing underneath doing? It pens a great mass of people onto one plot of land. It gives them a place to be, the slave-master's estate, his fields, his workshops. It gives them a mouthful of food, does not let them starve, because a starved slave does no work. It gives them a way to live, up at dawn to work, down at dusk to rest, work, eat, sleep, and bring the next generation into the world.
Look at this coldly, and the function at the very bottom of it, what is it? It settled people. It took a crowd of people who might otherwise have scattered in the wilderness, might have starved or frozen, might have killed one another over a mouthful of food, and it gathered them in, gave them a place to be, gave them food, kept them alive, and let them raise a next generation. Were the means vile? Vile to the utmost. But underneath, it is the same as the systems that come after it. Settling people.
To have you see this is not to clear slavery's name. The skin of slavery, the chains, the whips, the treating of a person as a beast, the stripping away of every last shred of a person's dignity, is the thing in this world most fit to be thrown on the trash heap. Not one word here is said in its favor. What you must see clearly is another, more important thing. That slavery, the thing itself, can change its skin.
You think that when slave society passed, slavery vanished? It did not. It only took off that most glaring skin, the plain chains and the plain whips, and put on a new skin you cannot recognize, and it walks among the crowd of today, locking a great mass of people still.
Think about it and you will see. A thing that wears a skin everyone strikes at cannot last in this world. Chains and whips are too glaring, everyone who sees them strikes, so it has to shed that skin. But its core, the locking of people, the wringing of people, it cannot bear to give up, so what does it do? It changes skin. It puts on a new skin that is decent, that everyone finds agreeable to look at, that even the people being locked feel is only right and proper, and it hides that core away inside. And so it can go on staying in this world, go on locking people, and no one strikes at it anymore. The more decently a thing changes its skin, the more you have to watch whether, under the skin, the core is still locking people. Is there still slavery today? There is. Where? Locking people how? The sections below will point them out to you, one at a time.
For this one, hold this. Slavery, peeled to the very bottom, is also doing the work of settling people, but by the most vile, the least human means. Its means deserve hatred, deserve the trash heap, but it did not truly vanish, it changed its skin, and it is still here. To look at it from a height is to recognize the new skin it changed into, so that the people it still has locked can be recognized, and let out.
Look next at the second, socialism.
Socialism is the very opposite of slavery. Slavery pens people up and drives them to work with a whip. What socialism speaks of is distribution according to labor. What you put in, you take out. Put in more, take out more, put in less, take out less, put in nothing, take out nothing. Do not take it for the signboard some country hangs up, or the words on some flag. Set those down. Distribution according to labor, peeled to the plainest, is a law older than any system there is.
Go and look at a pride of lions. The prey is brought down, and who eats first, takes the biggest mouthful? The lead lion, the one who put in the most, the fiercest. Put in more, take more, and this is not something the lions decided in a meeting. This is life's own law. Go and look at an ant hill, a hive of bees. Whoever works has his position in the group, and his share.
Human beings, from the earliest tribes, lived this way. They hunted together, and of the meat carried home, the ones who put in the most got the most. Later there were fields, and whoever plowed the harder and the more, reaped the more. Later still there were factories, a day of work for a day's wage, more work more pay. All the way to today, you go to work, and the effort you put in, the time you spent, the responsibility you carried, turns into that wage at the end of the month, still the same. Distribution according to labor was not invented by any system. It is a law at the level of life itself, one that lived all the way from the lion pride, the ant hill, the earliest human tribe, to today. Every person on this earth who is willing to put in his labor for his food lives under this law, whether he admits it or not.
And what is this law doing? It is settling people, placing each person, according to the effort he puts in, on the share that effort earns. It gives the person willing to work a fairness, that you put in your effort, so you should have your share, and no one else may take it from you for nothing. And it gives the whole society a thing to aim at, that if you want to take out more, you put in more, and this road is open to everyone.
Where does it differ from slavery? It differs in dignity. Slavery is that no matter how much you put in, all you are worth is one barely-life-sustaining mouthful, and the rest is taken from you, and you have no choice, you are locked. Distribution according to labor is that the effort you put in earns your own gain, and that gain is yours, and how much you put in is for you to say, and you are free. It is the same settling of people, but slavery settles a person as a beast, and distribution according to labor settles a person as a free man who, for his effort, gets a fair return.
Do not think small of this one difference of dignity. The same sweat, the same day's work, one man locked and driven by a whip, who at the end of it gets back only a mouthful to keep him alive, is a slave. Another man who works of his own will, who says himself how much he does, whose gain at the end truly belongs to him, is a free man. The effort put in may be exactly the same, but one lives like a beast and one lives like a person. What lies between them is that one word, dignity. The most precious thing about distribution according to labor is not only that it gives you your gain. It is that, in giving it, it treats you as a free person with dignity. It does not lock you, does not drive you, it only recognizes the effort you put in and gives you the share you are due.
The ancestors long ago spoke the heart of this law right through. Confucius said, do not worry that there is too little, worry that it is shared unfairly. And Zhu Xi, glossing that line, said that this fair sharing does not mean everyone gets exactly the same, it means each gets his due, that every person gets the share that is his. According to the effort you put in, the share you are due, this is the plainest fairness of distribution according to labor.
Look next at the third, capital.
The word capital takes the most cursing today. Say capital, and how many people grind their teeth, the capitalists exploit, capital is heartless, capital eats people. This hatred is a little like the old hatred of slavery. And again, let me ask you, from a height, to press that hatred down, cool it, and go look at what capital actually is.
The first line has to be said plainly. Capital is not evil. But it is not called good, either. Capital is a tool. Do not freeze up the moment you hear the word tool. This whole book, from beginning to end, sets up exactly this position, peeling the things that have been taken for demons, or taken for gods, back to their plain nature as tools. AI is a tool. And capital, too, is a tool.
And what is this tool, capital, for? It does one thing, and a remarkable thing. It gathers what is scattered. You alone, with three hundred in your pocket, can get nothing done. A thousand people, three hundred each, scattered, can get nothing done either. But suppose there were a tool that could take those thousand people's three hundreds and gather them into three hundred thousand, and then into three million, thirty million. That gathered money can build a factory, buy a batch of machines, hire a batch of workers, and turn things out by the thousand and the ten thousand. This tool that gathers scattered money, scattered people, scattered strength into one great force is capital.
It gathers the scattered resources, organizes labor into large-scale production, and takes a thing one person or ten could never do and gets a thousand people, ten thousand, to do it together. It created a productive power the likes of which human history had never seen, and for the first time things could be made this many, this fast, this cheap. And in the gathering of that force, in the making of those things, it did one thing along the way. It settled a great ring of people.
In a city, there is one big factory, gathered together and built by capital. And in building, it first settled that great crowd of workers inside it. But what it settled reached far past them. The workers have to eat, so around it there are restaurants, and the restaurant folk are settled. The workers fall ill, so there are hospitals and pharmacies, and the doctors and druggists are settled. They save and borrow, so there are banks, and the bank people are settled. They build and repair houses, so there are construction crews, and the masons and carpenters are settled. They tire and want to unwind, so there are massage and opera and movies, ring upon ring, all of them living off the foot traffic that one factory brought to life. This whole ring of people, a few thousand at the least, tens or hundreds of thousands at the most, are all settled by that one capital-gathered factory.
So you see, this tool, capital, peeled to the very bottom, is also settling people. And in the power to settle people, in the sheer number settled, it is the largest of the three. Slavery settles the people of one estate. Distribution according to labor settles one working person and another. Capital, once it gathers, settles a whole city, a whole region, a whole chain of industry. Its productive power is the greatest, and the people it settles are the most.
Then if capital is such a fine tool, where does today's towering hatred of it come from? The hatred is not without cause. This tool, capital, has one deadly shortcoming. It, in itself, has no direction. It has no eyes. It recognizes one thing only, the rate of return. Where the return is high it goes, where there is no money to be made it turns and walks away. It looks down, utterly, on the things that earn no money but are most precious, raising children, caring for the old, nursing the sick, doing the long, slow work of learning, because in its eyes these things earn nothing. And toward the people who create no value, children, the old, the sick, it can be as heartless as heartless comes.
But hear this line clearly. A tool has no direction, and the fault is not the tool's. A knife has no direction. It can cut vegetables, and it can wound a person. Whether it cuts vegetables or wounds a person is not decided by the knife, it is decided by the hand that holds it. This tool, capital, has no direction, and it can be taken up to settle the people of a whole city, or taken up to push people out and wipe them away one by one. Which direction it goes is not decided by capital. It is decided by the hand that holds the capital. By a person.
Think this through, and you understand that the cursing of a hundred years took aim at the wrong thing. A factory is built and tens of thousands are settled, and capital did this. A sweatshop wrings a person down to half a life, and capital did this too. The same capital, on one side settling people, on the other wringing them, and where is the difference? Not in the capital, but in the hand that holds it, and which way that hand aimed it. To curse capital for eating people is like cursing a knife for killing a person. It is aimed at the wrong thing. A knife killed a person, and the one you should go after is the murderer holding it, not the knife. Capital wrung a person, and the one you should go after is likewise the hand that held it and aimed it to wring, not capital itself. So this towering hatred hates the wrong place. The one to hate was never this tool, capital. The one to see clearly is what kind of hand is holding it.
Slavery, socialism, capital, three of them, looked at from a height, and did you see it, underneath, they are doing the same one thing.
Slavery pens people up to settle them, by the vilest means. Socialism settles you by the effort you put in, and gives you fairness and dignity. Capital gathers people up to settle them, with the greatest productive power and the most people settled. Three, with different names, different means, and yet the layer at the very bottom of them is the same. Settling people. Giving a person a place to be, food to eat, a way to live, and to live steady.
These three, ordinary people quarreled over for a hundred years, as though they were three mortal enemies who could not live under the same sky. But from a height, with the names peeled off, looking to the very bottom, they were always meant to be tools in one person's left hand and right, meant to be used together, to make up for one another. Between them there was never any such life-and-death feud. What set them up as mortal enemies is not the things themselves. It is the people holding up this flag to curse that one.
Think how unjust it is. A worker earns his wages by distribution according to labor to keep his family, and at the same time he works in a factory that capital built, and he also hopes that when he is old there will be a distribution-according-to-need pension to catch him. These three things, in that one man, are used together, are keeping him alive all at once, and where is the mortal feud in that? But the moment you step into that quarrel, the one who believes in this system has to hate that one, the one who holds up this flag has to curse that one. Three tools that were meant to be used together are quarreled, alive, into three enemies, and every person is forced to pick a side. Quarreled to the very end, and that worker, who should have been settled well by all three of the tools together, is left instead, by the quarrel, not knowing which way to turn. This is the absurd thing that only from a height can you see. The people doing the quarreling quarreled away the common thing under their own feet.
And then there is a fourth, communism, distribution according to need, which sees to exactly those people the first three can never settle, the ones who can by no means reach a share on their own. And there is the fundamental layer that nails all four down. These the next section will go on to show you. For this section, first see these three clearly. Slavery, socialism, capital, peeled to the very bottom, are all settling people.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.