New Shun 1730

A reform that cuts into the old times often leads to the sudden death of an empire.

The situation of Dashun is so special that it is impossible for the reform or revolution of Dashun to rely on "spiritual and ideological liberation" or chanting scriptures like the European Enlightenment to set off a huge wave.

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

Let me give you a simple example.

The immigration policy and colonial policy that Liu Yu is carrying out in Fusang at this time is the industrial and commercial development of Russia in the era of Peter the Great.

But the two situations are different.

Russia.

The law stipulates the personal dependence of serfs.

The industrial and commercial reforms of Russia from Peter the Great to Elizabeth are like this: giving the old ritualists the right to mine and develop metal smelting and other industries.

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

And the Russian nobles also need population-I have fought for a long time, and you have misused the fiefdom I gave me? I was granted tens of thousands of acres of land, but I have no one. Do you think I should farm the land myself?

Therefore, in Russia, "serfs" as a "tool of production" are more important than land.

After the industry and commerce of the Old Ritualists gradually developed, they began to "redeem people" by giving money to the nobles to redeem "church members" and become free farmers instead of serfs. Then they sent these people to factories, and then these people created more surplus value, and the factory owners used money to "redeem" more serfs.

This is the special feature of Dashun.

In Russia, serfs have a legally defined personal dependence status.

In Dashun, tenant farmers, self-cultivating farmers, and people who rented land for a living, Dashun did not have laws that stipulated that they were personally dependent on landlords.

However, this is the characteristic of pre-capitalism, or the premature development of agricultural technology and blast furnace iron technology, which led to the premature disintegration of the aristocratic feudal system.

People are free people.

From a legal perspective, people are not subordinate to landlords.

However, this kind of legal free man, or legal non-personal dependence, is useless.

Because there is only so much land, and the landlords have the land. And now, for the vast majority of people in Dashun, farming is the only way to survive.

Then, the Ming Dynasty Law and the Dashun Law also stipulate that landlords are not qualified to collect labor rent from tenants, that is, tenants do not need to pay for working for landlords, and it is considered an obligation.

However, laws are laws, legal principles are legal principles, and material reality is material reality.

Now the landlord says, you come to work for my house tomorrow, build walls, dig ditches, and repair houses, and I won’t pay you. Will you go?

No? If you don’t go, I won’t rent you the land next year, there are many people who rent it.

Go, you will work for nothing, and at most you will be provided with a meal, and it is impossible to pay.

So is this considered personal dependence?

Not in legal terms.

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

The problem in Russia is that, legally, serfs belong to the serf owners. Old Ritualists capitalists have to pay money to "redeem" these people, so that they can become hired workers and free farmers in legal terms.

The problem in Dashun is that, legally, tenant farmers do not belong to landlords. But Fusang capitalists have to pay money to "create the material basis for freedom", that is, to provide boat tickets, so that these people can become hired workers and Fusang self-cultivating farmers in reality.

One is personal dependence created by feudal legal principles. Legally, it is a relationship of subordination.

The other is personal dependence created by material basis. Legally, it is not a relationship of subordination, but people who are equal in abstract personality. There is no law that says that tenants cannot become self-cultivating farmers, landlords, or prime ministers, but whether they can do it or have money to study is another matter.

The problem of feudal legal principles depends on the liberation of thought, the Enlightenment, the reconstruction of the law, equality for all, and the abolition of personal dependence.

The problem of material foundation...relying on the liberation of thought and the Enlightenment alone is not useless, but it is not very useful.

Moreover...as for the legal reform and the anti-feudal laws in North America, many of them were already commonplace in Dashun.

For example, the equal inheritance law.

For example, the Mosaic Law was abolished in the homes of ordinary people, and the eldest son had the privilege of inheritance and got several times more land.

For example, land can be freely bought and sold, without considering the feudal legal rights of the nobles to the land, and in addition to buying the right to cultivate the land, buying out those feudal legal rights, such as the hunting right on the land, the right to eat at night, and other crap.

Of course, you can also say that.

Because the East and the West have different situations, different histories, different levels of agricultural productivity, and different times when technologies such as iron tools, cattle plowing and ridge cultivation appeared.

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

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

The European Enlightenment is to smash theocracy and smash those feudal legal "debates".

The enlightenment movement of Dashun was to solve material problems and break the "hard work" that bound people.

Just like the tenants of Dashun who were nominally not personally dependent, what problems could they solve by "reciting scriptures"?

After reciting the scriptures, it was said that tenants and landlords were both human beings and were equal. Tenants had no obligation to work for landlords...

The scriptures were finished.

The next day, the landlord said, "This sutra is well read, and the enlightenment is wonderful. Now you and I are equal. But if you don't go to work at my house, I won't rent the land to you next year. So will you go or not?"

Reciting sutras alone cannot change this reality.

Liu Yu did not recite sutras, but through his policies in North America, some tenants had the confidence to say, "I won't serve the landlords, I will go to Fusang to work for eight years and get a hundred acres of land." In other words, there is a material basis for the "equality" of tenants and landlords in personality.

Including saying that the slogan of "equal distribution of land" shouted by peasant uprisings in the past dynasties is the enlightenment movement with Dashun characteristics - only equal distribution of land can bring true equality, otherwise it is just empty talk.

Can tenants and landlords be equal?

Isn't this just bullshit and empty talk?

This includes the characteristic of the temple that one must sleep in the temple for a month before renting the land, and the situation in Jiangsu and Anhui that tenants were serfed and served the landlords since the mid-Ming Dynasty.

The law says that it is wrong to go to the temple to pay taxes for a month before getting married. Tenants do not have this obligation, and the temple does not have the right to "open the door at night".

In fact, if you don't go, you will have no land to farm; if you have no land to farm, you will starve to death. Because, under private ownership, the means of production are concentrated in the hands of others. If you don't have the means of production, you don't listen to what others say, and there are not so many jobs where you can work as a proletarian to support yourself, then what else can you do except obey?

Europe has been influenced by religion for too long, and feudal legal rights are very deep, so it is necessary to recite scriptures to enlighten. Create new scriptures, including starting from the Reformation, the Puritans' ideal society is "self-cultivating farmers plus the education of visible saints, and village communities based on benevolence and village agreements."

And the way they realized this dream was to migrate to North America.

In Dashun, the traditional ideal society is actually "self-cultivating farmers plus the education of visible saints, relying on benevolence and village communities".

The ideals are the same.

The difference is that in Dashun, if you want to realize this ideal, you can only rely on the great uprising of equal land distribution or the reform of equal land distribution and land restriction.

To put it more simply:

In Europe, it is the law and the regime that stipulate the inequality of people, personal dependence, feudal obligations, etc. Therefore, the focus of the European Enlightenment is "using scriptures to prove that these inequalities are wrong."

In Dashun, it is the law and the regime that, in form, do not forcibly stipulate personal dependence. Therefore, the focus of the Dashun Enlightenment is "to solve the root cause of the substantial inequality between people at the material level."

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

This formal freedom means that a tenant can choose to be a tenant, or choose to work, or choose to work in a sweatshop for a few years and die of exhaustion, or choose to go to North America as a contract servant. It is not that he has no chance to choose and can only be a tenant, even if he is a free man who can do whatever he wants in theory.

This cannot be achieved by simply chanting sutras.

Even if Liu Yu's policy in North America allows tenants to choose to go to North America as indentured servants, hired workers, and eventually buy land to become self-employed farmers, or to make cotton.

But this right of choice has nothing to do with the enlightenment of chanting sutras.

On the contrary, it is achieved by specific policies.

It is through Liu Yu's use of violence and national power to nationalize the land in North America that a social condition that allows employment relations to exist is artificially created.

It is also through war, trade, interference, forced opening and closing that capital in North America is guaranteed to be profitable, and then it can take out real money and silver to hire people to go to North America, or at least pay for the ship ticket to North America.

Because of this, don't say that chanting sutras alone is useless.

It is useless to just draw big pictures: for most tenants and poor peasants, the situation is not that they are conservative and reluctant to leave their homeland; or that they do not believe in the benefits of cultivating in Fusang, etc.

Rather, they simply have no money and cannot afford to go.

This does not mean that as long as we liberate our minds and smash the old ideas, we can directly make spiritual atomic bombs and spiritual ascension, and directly jump from northwest Shandong to North America with a thought.

The world is material.

Just like the line in the movie "The Piano in a Factory", it is actually a nonsense irony: You must first liberate your mind, and you can liberate yourself after liberating your mind... In fact, the secondary industry has collapsed, and two or three hundred yuan a year is not enough for the train ticket to the south. Even if the old workers' minds are liberated to the point that they think it doesn't matter to go out to sell, they can't make money. Everyone goes to sell, everyone goes to fry chicken chops, everyone goes to shine shoes... If everyone works in the tertiary industry, there must be shoes to shine, right?

Because the world is material.

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

Rather than simply reciting scriptures to enlighten people, they can solve the problems.

Policy promotion means reform.

If reform fails, then we can only remove the reform and add a life.

Dashun is different from the Qing Dynasty.

Opposing the Manchus as emperors and returning the mountains and rivers to the Han people, this kind of scripture has power over the Qing Dynasty. But even so, the premise of the sudden death of the Qing Dynasty was blind reform, and it was even bold enough to stop the imperial examination.

In Dashun, you can’t recite the sutras that you could recite in the late Qing Dynasty, which don’t involve issues such as ownership and means of production. So, in Dashun, even if you recite sutras, you have to involve a series of sutras involving land ownership, equal distribution of land, and land restrictions, which involve production systems, ownership, and other issues.

And once you can’t recite too abstract sutras, and you have to recite sutras about specific materials, then something big is bound to happen - in fact, even reciting those overly abstract sutras, there must be material hidden behind them. For example, the separation of North America was a very abstract sutra, but when it came to specific operations, it was directly raiding the homes of the pro-British faction to complete the land reform.

In Dashun, because there was no condition to recite abstract sutras at all, it was destined that even if you had to recite sutras, the sutras must be earth-shattering, at least at the level of the Confucian retro school’s equal distribution of land is the most benevolent government in the world, directly touching the specific material basis and means of production.