The lifeblood of capitalism and modernity – from Han Feizi to Stalin

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For a long time to come, whether in China or in the West, conservative traditions and modern restorations were always arguing, but there was never an institutionalized approach to innovation, which was normal, because if you want to innovate, you had no problem when you first started innovating, but how do you keep innovating? For example, the Mongols, they marched all the way to the west, bringing a lot of Fusion of Chinese and Western cultures, what about after the fight? The margins of war expansion were also the margins of their innovation, and then they returned to the cycle of history. So in both the East and the West, we see impulse reforms, and then eventually tend to be flat and conservative. Zhang Juzheng, Wang Anshi. But there is no doubt that disapproval of tradition and the development of the world have become increasingly common.

A good example is Maitreya Buddha, the spread of Maitreya culture in China did not happen with Shakyamuni, it combined a lot of folklore, a little later than the spread of Buddhism, but Maitreya culture is a very classic anti-traditional culture, or some people use it as an example of modernity in Buddhism. After Maitreya's incarnation, everyone can live for 100,000 years, and henceforth be happy and joyful, a story that is very different from the "traditional" world, and it is not difficult to understand that Maitreya culture is often combined with rebellion. This shows that even in the long Middle Ages, in the traditional Chinese world, the pursuit of new systems and new ways of life still exists, and everyone is not always satisfied with the status quo, and the "differences" of the Dharma and Rostow's "change of desire" really exist.

Capitalism was the first, and the use of institutional forms to clarify social rationality came from the era of "progress". In traditional feudal societies, the legitimacy of landowners and monarchs comes from the divine right of kings, while in capitalist societies, legitimacy comes from the increase in profits.

Quite simply, it's hard to judge who had the higher morals in Kangxi or Louis XIV, but you can judge whose country was stronger by comparing the income of their state and their citizens. We do not say whether this method of evaluation is right or wrong, it will be mentioned later that Marx has a huge objection to this, he feels that measuring morality with money is a kind of alienation and materialization, but you cannot deny that the capitalist worldview, for the first time, gave the world a quantifiable evaluation standard. Then the pursuit of profit allows a country to start having a common goal from top to bottom.

If a party, a country, and a nation proceed from the basics, if their thinking is rigid and superstitions prevail, then they will not be able to advance, their vitality will cease, and they will perish the party and the country.

So what is the sum of profits? It's GDP, and GDP is a profit indicator that measures the total profits of an economy in a year. GDP growth is the embodiment of capitalist modernity and the result of capitalist modernity, and for the first time all participants in economic activity have a common goal of increasing their own profits, and then as Habermas said:

The law is made by the citizens themselves for themselves, it is the public will, not the embodiment of the ruler's will, and the law contains the spirit of the contract. If the people can have a broad and rational discussion of the relevant issues, and on the basis of this discussion, form a public opinion, and then form a public will, then this public will may be transformed into law.

The pursuit of profit in capitalist society is a universal public will, the capitalist social system is the first time, we no longer evaluate a person, a country, an organization from morality, from character, from blood to evaluate the good or bad, profit indicators replace everything. Of course the growth of profits, as Marx criticized, plunges everyone into madness, alienates the world, and materializes others.

So if Han Fei first proposed that tradition is not necessarily the only path to development, in the next thousand years, countless reformers have tried to find new paths of development, but they have all been defeated by tradition, and capitalism and the pursuit of profit are the first reforms to defeat the traditional ideas of feudalism. That is, Marx said that capitalism replaced feudalism. But in fact, the path of capitalist development has become a line that replaces all traditionalism, from slave society to capitalist society, and from the theophytic state to capitalism. Capitalism is not so much a stage of development after feudalism as it is a stage of putting an end to all traditionalism. Whether the representative of traditionalism is a feudal lord, a slave owner, or a religious guru. Even though these people are now capitalists, they know deep down that their legitimacy does not come from any blood or dogma, but from capital.

The legitimacy of capitalism is reflected in the growth of profits, and finally it condenses into the growth rate of GDP.

So if Han Fei pointed out that tradition does not necessarily lead to the future, traditional things are not necessarily reasonable. Capitalism offers a possible solution, which is to use profit growth to reflect its rationality, to get rid of the shackles of tradition and move towards the future. But just like Confucianism, the rationality you rely on will also become your shackles, Confucianism is limited by the sublime trend of thought, Confucius, Mencius, Zhu Xi generation is not as good as a generation (I have always felt that they are not necessarily inferior to a generation, but Confucian philosophy makes them only one generation less than a generation, otherwise how retro?). ）

Capitalism is also bound by its own pursuit of profits, the legitimacy of capitalism comes from profits, then the illegitimateness of capitalism naturally comes from the loss of profits, how many revolutions broke out when the economic growth rate decreased?

If we do not properly concentrate the central financial revenue and strengthen the financial resources of the central authorities, we will not be able to live a long life, and eventually the whole country will suffer. For example, the financial situation in Guangdong, if there is no support from the central government in the next few months, the days will be quite difficult.

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A very interesting phenomenon is that Marx used such a term when acknowledging the contribution of capitalism

The bourgeoisie, where it has achieved domination, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relations

This sentence is very similar to the words of Confucian critics 2,000 years ago...

Let all the people of the world be renewed, and practice more modestly, and be careful with their own bodies; and the hopes of all the people may be filled with virtue and the world, and the whole world shall rest

Confucians also felt that if Qin Shi Huang could use feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations, he could live in peace with the world.

And Marx's critique of capitalist modernity is, in a sense, like an assertion of the fate of capitalism:

The bourgeoisie cannot survive unless it constantly revolutionizes the means of production, and thus the relations of production, and thus the relations of society as a whole. ...... The constant change of production, the constant upheaval of all social conditions, the perpetual instability and change, this is what distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all previous epochs.

After Marx's death, Schumpeter also believed that creative destruction was essential.

If capitalism was a revolutionary when it replaced traditional feudalism and religion, according to Marx, "the bourgeoisie has played a very revolutionary role in history", then the embodiment of its revolution is the continuous improvement of profits, the constant reorganization of more relations of production.

From Napoleon to the European Revolution of 1848, to the October Revolution, to the Xinhai Revolution in China, to the colonial liberation movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America after World War II, more and more feudal societies, slave societies, and theocratic countries were overthrown by the legitimacy of capitalism with profit growth. And capitalism has spread to more and more countries.

Then the spread of capitalism also meant that the room for growth began to diminish.

So it is not so much that the slow growth of capitalism is about to have a crisis, but rather that this is the fate of all reformers, for thousands of years, if you are conservative, you will not lose as long as you do not move, if you are a reformist, you reform the capitalist countries after the growth rate decreases, the risk of war will be reversed, you reform the colonies through war, and then the growth rate decreases, and the risk of war begins to occur again.

So I understand that a lot of friends feel that there is a risk of war now, but by the same token, if you think about it carefully, you will find that war will not solve the problem at all in the 2020s. If capitalism after World War II still has a bunch of virgin land to develop, and now most of the world's population countries have basically entered the capitalist society, a simple thinking, China has done the United States, can you be more relaxed than the current Fed? The United States has China, can you be more powerful than China's credit pulse/land finance? In fact, everyone has already opened fire.

The legitimacy of such a war can only be found in nationalism (very cool), and it cannot be found in capitalism (but it does not make money). For the solution to the problem, it is said that drinking to quench thirst.

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Then in a world with a slower and slower growth rate, when Marx's predictions seem to come true, we have two paths in front of us, one was set by Stalin, when the first leaders of the Soviet Union immediately realized this problem after coming to power, if the state of Tsarist Russia was composed of feudal society and a little bit of capitalism, then how can a newborn Soviet prove its modernity, how to prove its legitimacy?

At that time, the profits of other countries in the world were growing, and it was certainly impossible to return to the feudal period, and it was not realistic to take the capitalist road. Stalin's view, then, was that "communism is the continuous development of the productive forces," which is exactly the same as that of Trotsky, if capitalism uses the growth of profits to resist traditional ideas, to encourage everyone to keep moving forward. Communism, then, uses continuous productivity improvement to block the road of social regression and encourage everyone to forge ahead.

Logically, if Han Feizi proposes the possibility of progress, and capitalism proposes a method of progress, when the progress of capitalism is embodied, or modernity reflects the gdp growth rate is getting lower and lower, we have two possibilities:

· Find a new embodiment of progress

· Back to a more traditional society

If communism offers a potential solution and a new possibility for society to progress, it is not impossible to go back to the past with a pessimistic view.

Returning to more traditional societies is also a very tempting practice, more and more religious trends are being restored in low-growth areas, and it is difficult to say whether BTC's gold standard approach is an improvement or a retro. The idea of the metacosm is a very complete creative destruction, because it directly creates a world... But you don't know if the world it created will be a feudal country... If it is true that as Microsoft and Meta said, the metacosm is the interaction between reality and virtual, when the economic growth rate in the real world is less than 1%, build a universe that grows by 1% per year, and the probability is also a medieval universe.....

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To sum up, for everyone, the era we live in is the present, the modern, and the past is the past. We are always faced with a choice between choosing to deal with the problems of the present in the past or to deal with new problems in a new way.

Han Feizi said not to indulge in the past, there can be a second way

Capitalism offers a way to abandon tradition, to give modernity to modern people with the increase in profits, to make us brave enough to say goodbye to the past, and to transform all the old world, but its reform seems to have reached an inflection point, and the growth rate of GDP has begun to decrease

We have two paths before us, one is that we find a new source of modernity, for example, communism is constantly transforming the productive forces. One is a more conservative route, as Rostow predicted, the pursuit of quality and inner world after high consumption, and the metacosm came into being. The concept of green water and green mountains is also slowly penetrating the hearts of the people, which means that the stage of capacity expansion is slowly ending

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At this point, I don't think I have written this story well, but I hope that you can feel this coincidence of history, Shang Martin's views are similar to those of Rostow after 2000, Marx's critique of capitalism and Confucianism's condemnation of the Fa, Rostow's prophecies are more or less related to the green waters and green mountains and the metaverse.

If you want to explain in one sentence why GDP must grow, because only the increased GDP can prove that capitalism is still transforming the world, capitalism can prove that it has been valuable for the subversion of feudal society, slave society, and theocratic state in the past 200 years, and can resist the erosion of traditional conservative thinking, which is the lifeline of capitalism.

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