New Shun 1730

"Treating the symptoms? Treating the root cause?"

The old emperor had heard these two words countless times over the years.

However, when it came out of Liu Yu's mouth at this time, the emperor still sounded very novel.

After repeating it in a murmur, the emperor smiled silently, turned his back to Liu Yu, and said calmly: "Master said, the journey of the great road will bring great order to the world. If you don't know the great road, how can you cure the root cause?"

“I don’t think about treating the root cause.”

"I have read some of the articles you wrote, and in summary, there is only one sentence: This world is about material things."

"Guan Ziyan: Canglin knows the etiquette."

"Besides that, regardless of the great principles, virtues, even the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the rule of the Three Generations, or even the revival of civil and military affairs, can they solve the current situation you mentioned that Shandong has three acres of land per capita and a yield of less than a hundred kilograms per mu?"

"If it can be solved, it can be cured."

"If it can't be solved, it will be a repeat of three generations of self-denial and ritual restoration. Does it mean that relying only on rituals means there is no need to eat?"

"Emperor Taizong once said that there are thousands of words, but only one sentence: the common people will rebel if they don't have enough to eat."

"Whether it is equalizing land or limiting land, the solution is not to solve the problem of more than 100 kilograms of land per mu or three acres of land per person. What is solved is the problem of people being connected by roads and people having no place to stand."

"But this matter will not solve the problem of more than 100 kilograms per mu and 35 acres per person."

When Liu Yu heard this, he thought that the way he used to build the railway to deceive the emperor was a variant of the thinking of the Westernization Movement. Political conservatives may not necessarily be technologically innovative.

What the emperor said now is actually not correct.

Indeed, whether it is equalization of land or land restriction, land cannot be transformed.

However, in order to solve the problem of yield per acre, industrialization is needed; and the huge impact of industrialization will inevitably make small farmers miserable; and small farmers who are miserable, of course, do not want to be peacefully left behind by the wheel of history, as those progressives say. Crush.

Therefore, the issue of equalizing and limiting land is the only way for Dashun to transform.

The reason why this is the only way to go is because of the special circumstances of Dashun.

Again, the first industrial revolution required millions of people. And Dashun has no shortage of people.

The first industrial revolution required a market. Dashun now has a vast market from the east of the Cape of Good Hope to the other side of the Pacific.

Does Dashun have the kind of situation that Lao Ma said, "textile machines are capital under certain 'circumstances'"?

have.

Does the development of capitalism in Dashun have to start from agriculture?

You can say yes or you can say no.

Agriculture is the foundation of industrial development, and Dashun's agriculture, at this time, is the pinnacle of the world's agricultural productivity per mu. Of course, it is not per capita, but per mu, but Dashun does not need to consider per capita agricultural productivity for the time being to free up enough people to invest in industry.

The premise of capitalist development is to separate labor from the means of production. At this time, in the pre-industrial era, it refers to "agriculture" and "land", which separates labor and land.

Dashun had completed this premise a long time ago.

The reason why it is difficult for farmers in Europe to separate from their land is because of the strong feudal system, which makes a series of issues such as private ownership, sales, property rights, and exclusive ownership of land very unclear.

One of the problems that the British enclosure movement had to solve was the question of who owned the village commons.

In Dashun, this question does not exist at all: What is village common land? In other words, what is "commons"?

In the pre-industrial era, the late handicraft era, and the early stage of capitalism, development required only a few things.

For Europe, Lao Ma said, everyone in this crappy handicraft industry is about the same level, so it needs strong national power to obtain colonies, markets, and internal protection from tariffs.

This is true.

Even the tea that is a specialty of Dashun will be stolen without strong protection from the state.

The national strength that Dashun has developed in recent years has solved problems such as colonies and markets. And because of Dashun's silver problem and price revolution problem, Dashun does not need to consider the issue of internal tariff protection.

This problem was solved after the end of World War I.

Population, especially a population stripped of labor and means of production... Just a natural disaster in Dashun can create a British industrial population sufficient for the first industrial revolution in history.

For the first industrial revolution, a population of one million was enough.

The rest is capital, primitive accumulation, currency, gold and silver, raw materials, technology... In fact, Dashun has no shortage of these things now.

Therefore, in fact, at this moment, Dashun has fully accumulated all the prerequisites for the first industrial revolution, and it is completely capable of breaking out smoothly.

Shandong has a population of about 28 million at this time.

The Songsu area, of course, includes Nanjing, Xuzhou and other places, with a population of 32 million.

Together, they have a population of 60 million.

From the outbreak of the first industrial revolution to the time when the sun never set on Britain until the time when Britain and France dominated the world before the Franco-Prussian War, did the total population of Britain and France, combined, total 60 million?

The problem now is not the various preconditions.

The changes of the times are not about solving problems. If all the prerequisites are met, you can get it right in one step.

The change of the times requires bloodshed, death, repression, and a painful process of a new era being born from the womb of the old era. Especially in the case of Dashun, it is a standard difficult birth of a new era. Because it is too afraid of pain, it only protects the big and not the small, and accumulates too many contradictions.

Different countries face different situations.

For example, the situation faced by the UK is the shortage of wage laborers who have been deprived of the means of production, which is the primary problem.

In Dashun, the primary problem is the serious surplus of potential wage laborers who have been deprived of the means of production.

It must be noted that the prerequisite for the development of capitalism is the "large number of laborers separated from the means of production".

This is the prerequisite.

And this prerequisite, in the UK, is the enclosure movement.

So, that is to say, the enclosure movement is not a prerequisite for the development of capitalism.

It is because of the "large number of wage laborers separated from the means of production". This prerequisite can only be expressed in the form of enclosure movement in the UK.

To use an analogy: the prerequisite for having a baby is the fertilization of the egg.

The concave and convex movement is just one of the prerequisites; test tubes, artificial plugging, and even theoretically swimming are all possible, etc.

The problem of carving a boat to find a sword is that when you see others doing concave and convex movements, you think that concave and convex movements are the necessary conditions for having a baby, but you don’t think about what the real necessary conditions are.

What is your situation? Can you stand up? Or can you stand up very well but have no tadpoles... These situations are different. If you can’t see the essence through the phenomenon, don’t understand the prerequisites that Lao Ma said, capital is a social relationship, etc., just copy the phenomenon from the developed countries, then there will definitely be problems.

The problem of Dashun is that capital is too free. The Dashun court ruled but did not govern. The local areas were actually in a semi-autonomous state, which made capital grow its own legs. Even if it was not promoted, it would run hard to merge land, creating millions of potential workers whose labor and means of production were separated every year.

It must be noted that at this time, whether it was France or even North America, buying land was not as convenient as Dashun. There are many restrictions on buying land, but Dashun has almost no restrictions in legal terms. As long as you are willing to sell and pay money, you can buy it. In some areas, Dashun even recognizes the land deeds of the previous dynasty. In some places where Dashun compromised in the past, the issues of land skin, land bones, first ownership, first tenancy rights, second and third subleases after the first tenancy rights have always been a headache for the local counties of Dashun.

Simply put, because Britain's mercantilist policies are too strict, capital is too unfree, and trade is too restricted, if Britain wants to develop, it must solve its own problems of strict mercantilist policies, too unfree capital, and too restricted trade.

And Dashun, for various historical reasons, has to find ways to restrict capital that is too free and can freely purchase land; to limit the investment rate of return on land, if it cannot be solved by economic means, it must find ways to force capital not to flow to land by administrative means.

This problem of capital flowing to land was a headache for Liu Yu when he was reforming Songsu.

Take Britain as an example.

The enclosure movement had a significant effect, raising the yield per mu in Britain from 90 jin to the current 130 jin. This greatly developed productivity - and if you want to go higher, you have to wait until the 1800s, when Bengal saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter, and Pacific guano were traded on a large scale to fertilize the fields.

Take Dashun as an example.

In addition to growing cash crops, if you only grow grain and merge land, can you achieve the effect of the British enclosure movement on increasing yield per mu?

In fact, not only can't, but you may even have to retreat at this time.

Because, in the North China region of Dashun, with the increase in the contradiction between people and land, intensive farming and three crops in two years have actually pushed the yield per mu to the limit.

Why must we consider growing grain? Does growing grain mean that the ruling class is "ignorant and ignorant"?

Because the people of the Qing Dynasty found that opium had high profits, was too market-oriented, and everything was based on profits, too invisible hands, and then there was a wave of "strange famine".

Then, the issue of increasing agricultural yield per mu does not need to be considered.

Another important achievement was to provide a large number of landless vagrants to Britain, so that the development of capitalist industry and commerce had enough population.

And this achievement... is it meaningful for Dashun?

The third achievement is to solve the common land problem in Britain and determine the exclusive ownership of land.

And this achievement... Dashun, let alone arable land, even a small forest of trees where branches are broken for cooking is exclusive ownership in some places, so this achievement is even more meaningless.

The fourth achievement is to allow British capital to gather, so that some landowners can invest money in industry and commerce.

And this achievement has been solved by Dashun with tea, silk, porcelain, cotton cloth, rhubarb, brass, etc. Dashun's financial capital in the developed areas, lacks the landlords' money? Before, a casual trip to South America could bring back 300,000 or 500,000 taels of silver. From the mid-Ming Dynasty to the present, how much silver has this place consumed? How many more have been spit out? Silver, or currency, still needs to be gathered in the hands of a few people by enclosure?

Again, the same sentence.

The First Industrial Revolution only required a population of one million, but the huge productivity it unleashed would have led the world into modern history.

With the development of capitalism, it will take until the third or even fourth industrial revolution and full industrialization before hundreds of millions or even billions of wage workers are needed. At that time, the problem here is to find a way to destroy the small peasant economy and provide more industrialized personnel.

Taking the heyday of Britain as an example, with a market of 35 million square kilometers, almost half of the world, how many people in the first industrial revolution can Britain accommodate? At most, 5 million, at most.

And Dashun now assumes that it will follow the old path of the British Empire in history, which is equivalent to... I have prepared a table of dishes, but there may be 100 tables of people eating, what should I do? Of these 100 tables of people eating, the 99 tables that have not sat down will inevitably choose to overturn the table. It's not easy to do if everyone sits down? Then don't do it! Overturn!

Even if all the people on your table are full, the remaining 99 tables are hungry-it's the age of firearms, and you still think it's the era of feudal knights and warriors? Riding on a war horse and wearing armor, can you fight against a hundred people with a full meal?

Times have changed!