Last month I posted an article talking about my impressions of the two Wu teachers’ gathering, and as a result a commenter who was criticizing Professor Wu Tong showed up and we exchanged several rounds in the thread below. It’s not that I absolutely had to defend Professor Wu Tong; after all, my dealings with him have mostly been public and not much private, and I wouldn’t dare pound my chest and guarantee that he himself is beyond reproach. But taking the matter strictly on its merits, and judging only from the circumstances presented by the accuser, I still couldn’t help wanting to defend him: not only Professor Wu Tong, but also, in a certain sense, the kind of graduate supervisor I have in mind.
Although I didn’t make it explicit in the defense at the time, we can see that the disagreement involved the struggle between “freedom” and “equality”: what I kept emphasizing was the advisor’s freedom to choose students, whereas I did not regard standardized rules for guaranteeing equality as a particularly important issue.
A long time ago I already mentioned that “equality” replacing “freedom” is the common root of the predicament of modern science and modern democracy. Many of the problems of modernity, in my view, are in fact problems of the usurpation of power by “equality.” This stance of mine is obviously not limited to questions of technology and education; after all, this was originally a political problem.
So after this dispute I had intended to write a summary post, but in the end I found it hard to confine the issue to graduate education. The part that requires concrete problems to be analyzed concretely had already been fully expressed in that series of comments, and if one is going to add a “summary,” why not widen the target a bit~
The struggle between equality and freedom is sometimes regarded as a yardstick for distinguishing the left and the right. Generally speaking, I don’t like to pick a camp, but if you insist on asking what my political inclination is, then I have no choice but to place myself on the right. According to the test on “China Political Coordinates (Peking University Weiming version),” I am clearly to the right politically (0.9), conservative culturally (-0.6), but somewhat left of center economically (-0.1) (I just took it again a moment ago; a few years ago the result was roughly similar, though a bit more moderate). This score seems accurate, though I feel that economically I could be a bit more leftward — and below I will explain why being left economically and right politically is perfectly reasonable. This article can be seen as my qualitative declaration and basic explanation of my political stance.
Of course, I am not saying that we should ignore the rights of the poor, but I do not want to describe my claims as a struggle for “equality.” A more appropriate expression would be the pursuit of people’s enjoyment of “basic freedom” or the “minimum conditions of life/education.” In my view, many problems are problems of poverty, not problems of the gap between rich and poor. Poverty is in some sense absolute: if in a society the poorest people are nearly starving to death, but the richest people also cannot get enough to eat, then everyone is poor; whereas if in a society even the poorest people are well fed and clothed, while the richest live in prodigality, then nobody is poor — even if the “gap between rich and poor” in the latter society is far greater than in the former, there is no more serious problem. What urgently needs to be solved is the problem of destitution, not the problem of disparity. Of course, if social disparity stagnates like dead water and cannot flow, then it also becomes a problem; but this is not a problem of equality, it is a problem of mobility, and flattening disparities will not bring about mobility.
In my view, the so-called problem of equality is generally nothing more than a bottom-line issue: that is, some people lack certain minimum conditions for enjoying sufficient freedom within the community. According to Arendt’s formulation, this is a problem of “labor,” or rather of overcoming necessity. In order for free creation and communication to become possible, people must first be able to eat their fill and have a place to live, so that they no longer have to face animal needs like hunting for food all day long. But such minimum conditions or bottom-line rights are not the most important thing. Many modern people in fact also regard the problem of equality as a bottom-line issue, but where they differ is that, in their view, bottom-line issues are the most important issues, the highest value. When we speak of pursuing truth, the spirit of freedom, and so on, we are often met with questions like this: don’t scientists and artists need to eat? What pursuit is possible if the problem of food is not solved? — Of course I quite agree with this point, but what they imply is that the activities that guarantee food are actually more valuable, and are primary. Yet I want to say that eating is a minimum condition, and that precisely means eating is the least important of needs, or rather, it would be best if it weren’t a need at all; it is not some higher or lower value, but rather the very thing that needs to be endowed with value.
For example, air is of course a prerequisite for everyone’s life; if you have no air to breathe, naturally you can do nothing. But only in some most urgent moments does breathing become our primary need; under normal circumstances, breathing is not a need at all. The fact that “being able to breathe” is the prerequisite of any life does not mean that “breathing” ought to be our highest life pursuit or should be the foremost thing in our lives. There simply is no question of whether “the meaning of life lies in breathing.” In fact, rather than saying that “breathing” is what the meaning of life hinges on, it would be more accurate to say that it is nothing but life itself; to ask after the meaning of life is really to ask after the meaning of breathing, the meaning of eating. In essence, the question of what human beings live for and questions like why we eat or why we breathe are one and the same question — and thus we cannot answer the inquiry into meaning with a tautology like “people live in order to eat” (just as “people eat in order to breathe”).
Breathing is the minimum condition for human beings as biological creatures; foraging is the minimum condition for human beings as animals; dwelling is the minimum condition for human beings as cultural beings; going to school and working are the minimum conditions for human beings as modern citizens… These minimum conditions sometimes run into problems; some people voluntarily or involuntarily lose certain conditions. Doing our best to ensure that everyone in society can (equally) enjoy these basic conditions is the responsibility of every member of society. But responsibility is not the same as pursuit, and duty is not the same as meaning. In collective life, everyone always bears various responsibilities and duties toward others, but if a person lives his entire life only for others, then he is merely a slavish slave without responsibility; he tries to place the meaning of his personal life in others, but where, then, is the meaning of others? Is it enough just for others to live?
The predicament of modern ethics lies precisely here: people understand ethics as bottom-line ethics, but they fail to see that bottom-line issues and questions of meaning are two completely different things. To promote life as the highest meaning — this pompous concept is in fact nothing more than a tautology along the lines of “the meaning of life lies in life.” People begin to debate whether this life that counts as the highest meaning should be one’s own or others’, human life or life including animals, and these elaborate and intricate disputes obscure the hollowness of the original proposition — modern people go round and round, yet still cannot find the meaning of life outside life itself. At bottom, the “logic of the bottom line” bears a great deal of responsibility: modern people confuse the “lowest” with the “highest,” confuse the “starting point” with the “goal,” and thus plunge the entire inquiry into meaning into a quagmire of paradox.
“Value” replaced “the good” in becoming the central concept of modern ethics, turning ethics into a kind of economics. This is not only true in terms of quantitative methods of research, but also in terms of the discipline’s own positioning. (As Arendt said) economics from the very beginning was “household management,” aimed at overcoming necessity, or rather at solving those problems that guarantee the “minimum conditions.” In this domain, equality indeed takes precedence over freedom, or rather, the problem of freedom has not even begun yet. So when my test result shows that I lean left economically, especially when it comes to basic social welfare, subsidies for agricultural products and housing, and the like, I do not support free competition, but rather tend toward overall balance. I also support the “free market,” but what should mainly participate in free competition are those “works,” not “consumer goods” (see Arendt’s distinction).
What is truly important in the so-called problem of equality is nothing more than the question of starting point, but even as for the starting point, it does not necessarily always have to achieve equality (which is why my economic coordinates are only slightly leftward). Each person’s “minimum conditions” differ; for example, you may be full after eating two buns, whereas I need six buns to be full — and that is not equality. What is the reason for supporting the view that people ought to be equal? We say: everyone is a “person,” so they should be equal. That is correct, but if I give one person one yen and another person ten thousand U.S. dollars, and both are given “money,” is that equal? Obviously not: this money is not that money; they have different face values, or belong to different currencies, and thus are not identical. But people are different too — so does that mean different people must receive the same wealth in order for equality to count?
If what we invoke is the abstract “human being,” then we can only derive abstract wealth or rights, such as that everyone needs at least food, housing, and other wealth. But these concepts of food, housing, and so on can only be abstract as well. You cannot, on the one hand, abstract away the concrete differences among people, and on the other hand insist on the real equality of wealth with wealth.
Specifically, each person’s “minimum conditions” for being able to live freely are multiple and diverse, and are related to that person’s constitution, cultural and historical background, and aspirations. For a modern citizen today, conditions such as telephone access and internet access have already become necessities of life, but they were not so more than a decade ago. For someone who aspires to play the piano, the minimum requirement — one piano — is much greater than for someone who plays the erhu. But in any case, such basic needs are finite: for the purpose of playing the piano, you need one piano; two may be better, three or four may also be useful, but you definitely do not need dozens of pianos. In any case, buying a piano is not the purpose; playing the piano is the purpose. But when we convert basic needs into money, it becomes difficult to measure those needs — exactly how much do you need: one hundred thousand, one million, or ten million? Moreover, money has the most peculiar mode of existence: any real need is finite, because it is constrained by the limits of the human body — no matter how much I love hamburgers, I do not need a hundred hamburgers a day; no matter how much I like playing the piano, I will not change dozens of pianos a day and play them one by one. But if everything can be converted into money, then I can accept it all, the more the better; at worst I’ll eat five hamburgers and then sell the remaining ninety. The meaning of consumer goods originally lies only in securing certain basic conditions of life, making possible the unfolding of activities that go beyond mere consumption; in other words, they are the prerequisite for pursuit, not pursuit itself. Money, however, is most likely to make people lose themselves within it, turning the most universal medium into the highest end, and never allowing satisfaction to be reached.
If one wants to transform the issue of “minimum conditions” into one of “equal rights,” then one needs to use some unified standard to subsume the various needs that differ from person to person, lumping buns together with houses, pianos together with erhu — and then the natural method is to convert everything into “money” and measure it by monetary value. But such a conversion often results in the loss of purpose; money usurps the throne, and the tool of tools now becomes the purpose itself. This is also one form of the problem I mentioned in the article “Mathematics, Education, and Machinery,” namely the lack of a dimension of practical knowledge, the conflation of process and end.
Marx’s critique of alienation and commodity fetishism also touches on similar issues, and the communism he envisioned is precisely an ideal of such a free society. The reason I still support communism is that, in my mind, the crux of communism is freedom rather than equality — freelance work, distribution according to need: do whatever you want, take whatever you want. Is such a society possible? Of course it is not very realistic, but nor is it especially unimaginable. In fact, the condition necessary for communism is indeed the immense abundance of material goods (or rather, the immense abundance of consumer goods production), and it does not especially require some extraordinarily elevated moral state. For only when material goods are enormously abundant is it possible to abolish money, and once any form of currency is abolished, human needs (no matter how greedy they may be) will ultimately remain finite — as long as surplus pianos are completely worthless, you will not need ten pianos; if you do not love playing the piano, then you won’t even ask for one piano. This is not because you are so morally noble, but simply because you do not need it. You also would not envy your “wealthy neighbor”; even if he has a hundred pianos, you would not wish to possess them equally. This is not because you are particularly detached and pure, but simply because useless pianos have no value at all — they are just a pile of scrap metal… The abolition of money will eliminate those false needs, and it is precisely these false needs that cause human demands to expand without limit. As long as people’s demands are ultimately finite, distribution according to need will still remain possible.
Of course, communism is still too distant in any case. For the present, so-called socialism, insofar as it is anti-capitalist, is something I also support. The difference between capitalism and socialism is not public ownership versus private ownership, but rather, as the name suggests, whether capital is taken as the core value or whether social relations replace it. In my view, one basic task of socialism is to use means such as socialization to shift onto society the task of individuals securing basic means of subsistence; the basic needs of clothing, food, housing, and transportation are allocated by the state, and thus no longer need to be capitalized. In a situation where material abundance has not yet been greatly achieved, by restricting capitalization one weakens the role of money at the level of basic living needs. In this way, although people still inevitably have to bustle about in order to obtain and compete for basic means of living, such bustle is severed from the accumulation of capital, and thus can potentially be kept within limited bounds.
Of course, because it is unrelated to capital accumulation, people’s enthusiasm for labor is also difficult to guarantee. The key problem of the industrial age is that workers can no longer possess the products they produce: farmers can harvest the fruits of their own labor, so even if those products cannot be converted into money, my labor has at least yielded a result; but a worker on an assembly line does not even produce a complete product, he merely sells his labor power. The key issue is not whether the worker’s wages can buy what he produces, but rather that, in any case, if the worker’s diligent labor is to obtain some result, it seems that payment must first be made in monetary form. In other words, the usurpation by money, the tool of tools becoming the foremost end, is something already determined by the industrial age’s mode of production.
How, apart from money, can another kind of purpose be established? Perhaps only by appealing to social relations. That is to say, the worker should no longer be an averaged-down cog selling neutral labor power, but rather a social member with individuality, where participating in certain kinds of labor also means taking on certain specific social roles. Labor is the corresponding duty of various social roles and the prerequisite for establishing the corresponding social relations, while outstanding labor can even directly provide personal glory in the corresponding role. In this way, the purpose of labor can no longer be the accumulation and valorization of capital, but rather the construction and cultivation of social relations. Such a society will not fall into capitalism’s circle of meaning (production is for the sake of accumulating capital — accumulating capital is for the sake of expanding production; the chicken lays the egg and the egg lays the chicken, endless proliferation without end). Production is for maintaining the basic social environment (interpersonal relations and living conditions), and the basic social environment is for ensuring that everyone enjoys sufficient freedom, thereby having the conditions to pursue something in “active life.”
This is the distinctive “socialism” of Gu Di. It may differ from other versions of socialism, but if I still nominally support socialism and pursue communism, it is in the above sense.
I’ll stop writing here for now. Next I may also write an article about “wang,” which will still involve related issues.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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