New Shun 1730

After understanding his concept of "productivity".

After understanding his understanding of the state as a tool to protect the development of productivity.

It is easy to come up with the truth of "tariff protection when poor, free trade when rich" in List's economics.

It should be noted that List is not opposed to free trade.

However, his definition and understanding of productivity and his cognition of the state as an abstract necessary tool for the development of productivity can be used to deduce his attitude towards the theory of free trade.

That is: you Britain is a first-developed country, the war in Europe has caused a large amount of capital to flow into Britain, your British industry has developed, and it has an absolute advantage over other countries.

At this time, you Britain shouted Adam Smith's free trade theory, which was not valued and used at all.

Isn't this for the sake of maintaining the interests of your own country?

And you, Adam Smith, when you came up with the free trade theory, Britain's advantage had already been established, so you are clearly a nationalist, but your policy that is beneficial to the country is in the name of universal, world, free trade.

Therefore, Britain, which was shouting about free trade and had established an absolute advantage at that time, was not universal, world, or free trade at all, but was centered on national interests, or the reasonable conditions for maintaining the development of its own productivity.

Therefore, it can be concluded that Germany, as a latecomer country, should remove its cover and take its core.

Since the starting point of Britain's policy is based on national interests, it just holds the banner of "free trade" under the first-mover advantage.

Then, latecomer Germany naturally also has to take national interests as the cornerstone, but based on reality, it has to hold the banner of "tariff protection".

Therefore, List is absolutely not opposed to free trade at the root.

Instead, "tariff protection when poor, free trade when rich".

It's just that first-mover countries, or some advantageous countries, can package things that are beneficial to their own country with things like the world and freedom.

But in essence, just like Britain's free trade, it is just a policy and rhetoric for "the development of the country's productivity".

The productivity here is the productivity defined by List, not the concept of productivity in Marx's political economy.

Under this definition.

A strong country is needed to complete the German Customs Union and promote the development of this productivity.

This is Germany.

It takes the intervention of a strong country to complete the development of industry and commerce. It needs a detailed "Report on Manufacturing", including a series of industrial policies including copper, coal, wood, grain, silk, steel, and glass. Specific support methods include subsidies, bonuses, export tax rebates, increased tariffs, etc.

This is Hamilton in the United States.

It takes a strong country to protect and promote free trade with gunboats, troops, bayonets, etc., under the condition that the first-mover advantage has been achieved.

This is the free trade of Britain.

And so on, and so on, their ideas are all in the same vein.

Here, the "productivity" defined by List is more like the concrete "industrialization".

Here, productivity not only includes science and technology, factories, equipment, machinery, products, etc.

It also includes political systems, social and cultural ethics, social operation forms, laws and other factors.

In simple terms, it can be understood as "industrialization" - a set of technologies, factories, products, and political systems, social ethics, cultural products, social operations, laws of the industrial age, consciousness of the industrial age, etc. that are compatible with the industrial age.

In other words, "industrialization", or the industrial age, is regarded as a goal.

And the state, or the regime, will serve as a "tool" to achieve this goal.

Everything is aimed at the development of "productive forces" under this definition.

The difference in the definition is that the productivity defined by Lao Ma does not include production relations. Instead, it is the answer to "seeking what determines the production relations and superstructure", that is, productivity. This is a logical deduction.

The productivity defined by List is an intuitive observation impression, and it can even be said that it is an intuitive and concrete explanation of the development of the national economy based on the concept of [national wealth], or even a "concrete description of industrialization - just like describing a plant, what kind of leaves it has, what color its flowers are, etc.".

Of course, Quesnay also talked about the word productivity. But Quesnay was a physiocrats, whose foundation was that agriculture was the only industry that created value. Therefore, the word productivity here in Quesnay refers specifically to agriculture.

Therefore, the word productivity has different meanings in different articles and different people's theories.

Let's use a crude biological metaphor. List's productivity is similar to the descriptive biology stage, which describes what plants look like; Lao Ma's productivity is similar to the molecular biology stage, which explains why this thing is like this, what determines it, and what gene determines whether this flower is purple or black.

And under the current situation of Dashun, which one is easier to understand and accept?

In the social form of Dashun at this time, the imperial power was still very stable, the bourgeoisie was shrinking, and agriculture still dominated. Coupled with Liu Yu's subtle influence of quoting out of context, it is obvious that Dashun's practical school is more likely to accept List's concept of productivity.

After all, the cornerstone of Liu Yu's deception is derived from the definition of "total national wealth".

And from this cornerstone, the so-called "ineffective labor of small farmers in the macro sense of small plots of land" is introduced.

From "ineffective labor in the macro sense", the idea of ​​"industry and commerce accommodate more population and create effective labor" is introduced.

In the end, this description of "industry and commerce develop and accommodate more population" is essentially the concept of "productivity" in List's economics.

Including laws, morals, regulations, national policies, as well as technology, machines, factories, etc. after the development of industry and commerce.

Here, the concept of "productivity" is distorted into a "prophetic description of a society with developed industry and commerce".

Rather than an interpretation of social production relations such as the pre-Qin system, Zhou Li fantasy, small peasant economy, imperial power, landlords, gentry, tenancy, etc.

Once productivity is understood in this way, many problems will naturally arise.

For example, "first-developed countries are right, so they are right", you see, the future is already there, if you are different from some technologically more developed countries, then you must be wrong.

After all, since it is a "descriptive" stage, then a "grown plant" is alive and well, and you just need to transform yourself into that.

If you are different from that, you should first consider that you must have done something wrong. If the flowers on the other side are not as "bright" as yours, then you should first consider whether there is something wrong with your definition of "bright".

This distortion of the concept of productivity will naturally have many negative problems.

However, for Dashun at this time, these negative problems do not have practical significance for the time being.

On the contrary, this more concrete, easier to understand, easier for ordinary people to imagine, and essentially condensed the industrialized society containing production relations into a "productive force" concept, has a strong communication ability.

And this communication ability is closely related to the current situation of Dashun.

There are many different ways to interpret the current situation of Dashun.

And Liu Yu's interpretation of "total national wealth" and the reality that Dashun's per-acre output before industrialization had basically reached the peak of the Iron Age of ox-plowing make this "industrialized" "productivity" concept clearer.

Take North China as an example.

Is three crops per year and intensive farming an improvement in productivity compared to one crop per year and rough farming?

If you say, no, it is not, and only mechanized large-scale production with tractors and fertilizers can be considered an improvement in productivity, that is not wrong, but it is not realistic now.

Assume that three crops per year and an average yield of 150 kilograms per mu require 10 laborers to plant a certain area.

And one crop per year and rough farming, with an average yield of 100 kilograms per mu and a certain area, only 3 laborers are needed.

However, this is correct for North America, which has a small population and a lot of land, or North America, Britain, and even France, which have insufficient industrial and commercial populations.

For Dashun, which has no shortage of potential wage workers, three crops per year and more labor are correct and have realistic significance - agricultural revolution is called agricultural revolution in Britain, but it is called per-mu yield regression in Dashun.

The problem is that even so, in North China, even on the basis of more labor for three crops per year, many people are still "ineffective labor in the macro sense".

Even if we say that we can achieve the ultimate of intensive farming with three crops in two years, we still don’t need so many people. Reducing the agricultural population by a few million will not affect the total grain output.

This is the current situation basis of Liu Yu’s advocacy of “industry and commerce to accommodate more people and transform them into effective labor”.

That is the basic appearance of the future of crude industrialization as productivity that is depicted - for easy imagination, people can understand that farmers have 30 mu of land per household, and people outside the household are working in industry and commerce.

Even if we say that it has been compressed to 30 mu of land per household, intensive farming, and three crops in two years. 30 mu of land per household is not much, because we also have to consider the pasture for livestock. Without livestock, intensive farming is not enough for basic manure.

Even if it is compressed from "a family of five, a hundred mu of land" to "a family of five, thirty mu of land and a cow", it has shrunk by one third, and it may even continue to shrink.

Take Shandong as an example. Even with such a compression, Shandong can still take out nearly 10 million people. While ensuring that agricultural grain output remains unchanged, Shandong will invest in industry and commerce. Shandong is about to reach the collapse red line of the iron ox-ploughing era of 3 mu of land per capita, and another way of saying "a family of five, 30 mu of land and one cow" is actually 6 mu of land per capita for the agricultural population.

So it can be simply inferred that in this "industrialization" model of "solving ineffective labor", at least a social model of "at least several million people in Shandong make a living from industry and commerce" should be constructed.

This is a model that people of the Dashun School can understand and believe can be achieved.

Of course, in the thinking of some people in the Dashun School, this model is derived from the "Malthusian economics" mentioned above: foreign trade under the concept of so-called "effective demand", the fruits of victory in World War I, the country's materialistic class, officers and soldiers, students, landlords, nobles, etc. In addition, some radicals added equal distribution of land to small farmers in "effective demand", which theoretically can support a model of "industrial and commercial society of millions of people" without collapse.

This does not mean that this model is correct.

Rather, it means that people cannot create history as they wish, nor do they create it under conditions chosen by themselves, but under conditions that they directly encounter, are established, and are inherited from the past.

What are the established, established, and inherited conditions from the past that Dashun and other practical schools of thought are directly encountering now?

Under these conditions, let them imagine what a real industrialization would look like? There was no place to even copy it, and no opportunity to see it with my own eyes.

This is the same as those who can only understand the era of super-light speed, wormholes, and space battleships but are still at the core of modern times.

Naturally, people like Dashun can only build a model based on the current basis, then think about what that model looks like based on the current basis, and finally draw a simple calculation and conclude that the theory is feasible.

That's enough.

In this process, through the continuous struggle between various classes, it may eventually become completely different from the illusion at this time. This is the normal, struggling, and historical development.

But at this time, after constructing this model, this group of people naturally hoped to use the state as a tool to strengthen it, so that with the help of this tool, they could realize the development of Lister's "productive forces" that included the meaning of production relations.

As a result, in Dashun, the distorted scriptures have gradually taken shape, with a beginning and an end.

The Malthusian interpretation is an interpretation of the current situation that there are a large number of practical classes in Dashun, while the tenant farmers and small farmers have basically no "effective demand".

Lister's approach was to serve as the goal of national wealth, and the new school hoped that the state would be used as a tool to achieve their goals. This is consistent with the Confucian dream of three generations of rule, which must be realized by the state, policies, education, etc.

Only the last "ultimate goal" is left, which is closely related to the positioning, knowledge, and interests of the people of the Real School, as well as the small farmer's dream of equalizing land and the trend of equalization in Dashun since ancient times. Because of this, this utopian "ultimate goal" has a utopian "benevolent and righteous goal" in the distorted "industrialization" fantasy, which is in line with the traditional people-centered, land equalization and other ideological trends.

It has a beginning and an end, and has an entity that is easy to imagine and understand. It spreads naturally and will not simply die out.

To talk about this end, we have to talk about the class attributes of Dashunshi School.

To talk about this, we have to mention the "self-deprecation" that the Dashunshi School has been doing over the years - saying that they are not scholars.

The subtext of this kind of self-deprecation is: first, being a scholar is a kind of superior status; second, we are not opposed to being superior to others. What we are saying is that only those who studied in the imperial examination and studied properly are not considered scholars. This kind of self-deprecation is actually a kind of resentment. Some people still hope that the emperor will regard them as scholars one day in the future; third, in fact, we are the truly capable scholars, and those people are just nonsense scholars and knowledgeable people?

Politically speaking, Saint-Simonianism was most in line with the demands of Dashun and other practical schools.

Simply divide society into three parts.

Part One: Learned People.

Part Two: People who are afraid of change, those with vested interests.

Part Three: The Rest.

So, according to this classification, bloodshed, revolution, etc., how terrible is it?

Then, the people in the second group directly give up the right to rule to the people in the first group, peacefully hand over the power, and let the "real scholars" rule without bloodshed, and "give us the position that should belong to us", and then Wouldn't it be wonderful to have these true scholars guide the transition to a new era?

For the Practical School of Dashun, their self-deprecation is not actually saying, "Actually, we are the learned people, we are the scholars, and we should be the rulers, and you so-called scholars, you are clearly vested Those who are interested, please get down quickly and make room for me.”

"If we want us to rule and govern, this country will not be able to take off?"

And this returns to the previous question: Lao Ma has been opposing the interpretation of productivity mixed with production relations. In Dashun, productivity is a distorted concept, not a concept that explains production relations, but a concept that explains production relations. Abstract yet concrete future of social development.

It's actually similar to the Utopia, the spread of learning from the East to the West, the rule of three generations, and the like. However, it is based on developed industry and commerce or fashionable industrialization.

Therefore, it is easy to have this kind of fantasy.

The definition of fantasy, drawing a fantasy conclusion.