Xinshun 1730

Chapter 1426 The game of death

A reform of the old era will often lead to the sudden death of an empire.

The situation in Dashun is so special that it is impossible for Dashun's reform or revolution to rely on "liberation of spirit and mind" like the European Enlightenment Movement, or in other words, relying on chanting scriptures to set off a monstrous giant. wave.

On the contrary, the liberation of spirit and mind, in Dashun, is ranked behind material issues.

Take a simple example.

The most similar to Liu Yu's immigration and colonial policies in Fusang at this time is the industrial and commercial development of Russia in the era of Peter I.

But the situation of the two is different.

Russia.

The law stipulated the status of personal dependency of serfs.

And Russia's industrial and commercial reforms from Peter I to Elizabeth are like this: the old etiquette people are given the right to mine mines and develop metal smelting and other industries.

After the industrial and commercial capital of the old etiquette school develops, more people are needed to engage in industry and commerce.

And the nobles in Russia also need population-I have been fighting for a long time, and you gave me a fief to use it indiscriminately?I have tens of thousands of dessia acres of land, and I don’t have a single person. Should I let Lao Tzu cultivate the land by himself?
Therefore, in Russia, "serfs" as a "tool of production" are more important than land.

After the industry and commerce of the old etiquette school gradually developed, they began to "redeem people", give money to nobles, buy "religionists", and become free farmers instead of serfs.Then send these people to the factory, and then these people create more surplus value, and the factory owners then use the money to "redeem" more serfs.

This is what makes Dashun special.

In Russia, serfs had a status of personal dependency stipulated by law.

In Dashun, there is no law in Dashun for tenant farmers, self-cultivating farmers, and those who rent out tenants for a living, stipulating that they are personally attached to the landlord.

But this is the characteristic of pre-capitalism, or, rather, the premature disintegration of agriculture into aristocratic fiefdoms as a result of the premature development of agricultural technology and blast-furnace iron technology.

Man is a free man.

From a legal point of view, people are not subordinate to the landlord.

However, this kind of legal free person, or non-personal attachment in theory, is useless.

Because there is only so much land, and the landlord has land in his hands.Now, for the vast majority of people in Dashun, farming is the only way of survival.

Then, both the Law of the Ming Dynasty and the Law of the Great Shun stipulated that the landlord was not eligible to collect labor rent from the tenants.

However, law is law, jurisprudence is jurisprudence, and material reality is material reality.

Now the landlord said, if you come to work for my house tomorrow, build walls, dig ditches, and repair houses, I will not give you money.Do you want to go?
not going?If you don’t go, the land will not be rented to you next year, some people will rent it.

Go, go for nothing, at most provide a meal, it is impossible to give money.

Does that count as personal attachment?
Legally not.

In reality, it is, and it is a standard labor rent and feudal obligation.

The problem in Russia is that legally, serfs and slaves belong to serf owners.The capitalists of the old etiquette school want to pay for "redemption" so that these people can become legally hired laborers and free farmers.

The problem with Dashun is that the tenant farmers are not subordinate to the landlord in terms of law.However, the capitalists in Fusang need to pay money to "create the material basis of freedom", that is, to issue boat tickets, so that these people can become hired workers and self-cultivated farmers in Fusang in reality.

One is personal attachment created by feudal jurisprudence.Legally, it is a relationship of affiliation.

One is the personal attachment created by the material base.In terms of jurisprudence, it is not a relationship of affiliation, but people who are equal in abstract personality. There is no law saying that tenants cannot become self-cultivated farmers, landlords, or prime ministers, but whether they can do it and whether they have the money to study is another matter. up.

The issues of feudal jurisprudence rely on the emancipation of the mind, the enlightenment movement, the reconstruction of the law, the equality of all, and the banning of personal attachment.

The problem of the material basis... Relying only on the liberation of the mind and the enlightenment movement is not to say that it is not useful at all, but that it is not very useful.

Besides... as far as Fare and the anti-feudal laws in North America are concerned, many of them are already commonplace in Dashun.

Take, for example, the law of giveaway inheritance.

For example, in common people's homes, the law of Moses is banned, and the eldest son has the inheritance privilege to get several times more land.

For example, land can be bought and sold freely, regardless of the feudal legal rights of the nobility to the land, and the purchase of land requires not only the cultivation rights of the land, but also the purchase of those feudal legal rights, such as hunting rights on the land, night rights, etc. Broken stuff.

Of course, the same can be said.

This is due to the different conditions, history, and levels of agricultural productivity between the East and the West, as well as the time at which technologies such as iron ox plowing and ridge farming appeared at different times.

As a result, the European Enlightenment Movement is suitable for Europe.

And the Enlightenment Movement of Dashun is destined to be different from that of Europe.

The Enlightenment Movement in Europe was aimed at smashing the theocracy and the "confucian classics" of feudal jurisprudence.

Dashun's Enlightenment Movement is to solve material problems and smash the "hard work" that binds everyone.

Just like those tenants in Dashun who have no personal attachments in name, what problems can they solve by "chanting scriptures"?
After reading the scriptures, it is said that tenants and landlords are human beings and equal.The tenant has no obligation to serve the landlord...

This sutra is over.

The next day the landlord said, this sutra is well recited, the enlightenment is wonderful, now you and I are equal people.But if you don't work in my house, I won't rent it to you next year.Are you going or not?

Just chanting sutras cannot change this reality.

Liu Yu did not read the scriptures, but through the policies in North America, some tenants had the confidence that "I will not serve the landlord, I will go to Fusang for eight years and grant a hundred acres of land to go", or have tenants The material basis for "equality" with the landlord in personality.

Including, the slogan of "equal land" shouted by the peasant uprisings in the past dynasties is the enlightenment movement with Dashun's characteristics-only the equal land can be truly equal, otherwise it is just empty talk.

Can tenants and landlords be equal?

Isn't this empty talk?

This includes the characteristics of temples where they go to sleep for a month before they get married, and the situation in Jiangsu and Anhui that the tenants were enslaved and enslaved to the landlords for hard labor since the mid-Ming Dynasty.

According to the law, it is wrong to go to the temple to pay taxes for one month before getting married. The tenant has no such obligation, and the temple has no right to "power at night".

In fact, if you don’t go, then you won’t have land to plant; if you don’t have land to plant, you will starve to death.Because, under private ownership, the means of production are concentrated in other people’s hands, you don’t have the means of production, you don’t listen to what they say, and there are not so many positions where you can work as a proletarian to support yourself, so what else can you do but be obedient?

Europe has been influenced by religion for too long, and feudal legal rights are very deep, so it is necessary to read scriptures to enlighten.Creation of new scriptures, including the beginning of the Reformation, the ideal society of the Puritans is "a village community based on self-cultivation farmers, enlightened by tangible saints, and relying on benevolence and township".

And the way they realize this dream is to migrate to North America.

In Dashun, the traditional ideal society is actually a "village community based on self-cultivation farmers plus the enlightenment of tangible sages, and relying on benevolence and covenant".

The ideal is consistent.

The difference is that in Dashun, the only way to realize this ideal is to rely on the uprising of land equalization, or the reform of land equalization and restriction of land.

In simpler terms:

In the case of Europe, laws and regimes stipulated the inequality of people, personal dependencies, feudal obligations, etc.Therefore, the European Enlightenment Movement focused on "using scriptures to demonstrate these inequalities, which is wrong."

In the case of Dashun, the laws and political power, in terms of form, did not enforce personal dependencies.Therefore, the Enlightenment Movement of Dashun focused on "solving the root problem of the substantial inequality between people on the material level."

Or, at least, to carry out the formal freedom of the early industrial age.

This formal freedom means that a tenant can choose to be a tenant, or to work, to work in a sweatshop for a few years and die of exhaustion, or to go to North America as a contract slave.It's not that he doesn't even have the opportunity to choose, he can only be a tenant, even though in theory he is a free person who can do whatever he wants.

This cannot be achieved by simply reciting scriptures.

Even speaking, Liu Yu's policy in North America made tenants theoretically inappropriate as local tenants. Instead, they could choose to go to North America as indentured slaves, as hired labor, and eventually buy land and grant land to be self-cultivators, or rub cotton.

But this right to choose has nothing to do with enlightenment through chanting.

On the contrary, it is achieved by specific policies.

It was Liu Yu who used violence and state power to artificially create a social condition that allowed the employment relationship to exist through nationalized control of North American land.

Through war, trade, intervention, forced switching, etc., it has been ensured that the capital in North America is profitable, and then it can take out real money, hire people to go to North America, or at least pay for the ticket to North America.

Because of this, don’t say that just chanting sutras is useless.

It is useless to simply paint big cakes: for most tenants and poor peasants, the situation is not that they have some old-fashioned ideas, hard to leave their homeland; or do not believe in the benefits of farming in Fusang, etc.

Rather, she simply has no money and cannot afford to go.

This is not to say that as long as you liberate your mind and smash your old ideas, you can directly launch a spiritual atomic bomb and spiritual ascension, and directly jump from Northwest Shandong to North America.

The world is physical.

Just like the line in the movie "The Piano", it's actually a nonsense irony: You have to emancipate your mind first, and only after you emancipate your mind can you liberate yourself... In essence, the secondary industry collapsed, 300 per year The yuan is not enough for the train ticket to the south, even if the old workers' brains are freed to the point that it doesn't matter if they go out and sell them, they will not make money.Everyone goes to sell, all go to fried chicken chops, and all go to shine shoes...they are all engaged in the tertiary industry, so there must be shoes to shine, right?

Because the world is material.

Therefore, in the final analysis, Dashun will ultimately rely on policies, development, industry, and industrial promotion to solve these practical problems.

Instead of simply chanting scriptures for enlightenment, problems can be solved.

Policy promotion is reform.

If the reform fails, then the only option is to remove the reform and save lives.

Dashun is different from Manchu.

Opposing the Manchus to be emperors and returning our country to the Han people, this scripture is powerful for the Manchus.But even so, the premise of the sudden death of the Manchu Qing Dynasty was blind reform, and it was even bold enough to stop the imperial examination.

In Dashun, it was impossible to recite sutras that could be recited in the late Qing Dynasty, which did not involve issues such as ownership and means of production.Then, in Dashun, even if you recite the scriptures, you have to involve a series of scriptures related to the production system, ownership system, etc., such as land ownership, equal farmland, and limited farmland.

And once you can’t recite the sutras that are too abstract, but you want to recite the sutras that are concrete, then you will definitely have big troubles—in fact, even those sutras that are too abstract must have something hidden behind them.For example, the separation of North America was read as a very abstract scripture, but when it was actually operated, it was directly copied from the pro-British faction and completed the land reform.

But in Dashun, because there is no condition for reciting abstract sutras, it is doomed that even if it is necessary to recite sutras, the sutras must be earth-shattering, at least it must be the Confucian retro school Juntian is the most benevolent government in the world The level directly affects the specific material basis and means of production.

(End of this chapter)