Irrefutable Evidence

On the night when the dike broke, no one thought it was a natural disaster. In order to expand their estates, the nobles in the upper reaches transferred flood control workers to build pavilions. He stood in the flood water up to his waist, watching his hut float away, and understood for the first time: God doesn't kill people, people kill people. --- When he was sixteen years old, he was conscripted into labor in the iron mines. After hammering for twelve hours every day, the palms of my hands became rotten and rotten. He saw iron ore being burned into molten iron and cast into farm tools and weapons. Those farm tools turned the wasteland into fertile land, but the fertile land belonged to the nobles; the heads chopped off by those weapons were all people with calluses on their hands like him. He began to ask a question that everyone thought "should not be asked": Why? Fleeing, living in the market, eavesdropping on the debates in Jixia Academy - Confucianism talks about benevolence, Mohism talks about love, and Taoism talks about inaction. He couldn't understand until an old blacksmith yelled at him: "It's all nonsense if you can't use farm tools." The hammer woke him up. He went to a small town on the border and learned from bankrupt farmers to farm, record harvests, and calculate land rent. In three years, he used charcoal to write down more than 300 notes, and discovered a secret that everyone saw but no one dared to tell: There is more iron, more land, more food - but more people are starving to death. Because not a single grain of the extra grain fell into the farmer's bowl. When the aristocratic tax collectors imposed another "iron tax", he stood up. Not with any profound doctrine, but with the smell of earth and a hoe made by myself. He doesn't know how to write gorgeous articles or talk about esotericism. He only knows one thing - Take those who don't have enough to eat and plant the land where they can have enough to eat. As for the nobles, Confucian scholars, Taoists, and Legalists... He has a question to ask them: "Have your words of wisdom ever given a hungry man a full meal?" --- The evidence is as solid as a mountain—— Iron is evidence and iron is also the answer. Purpose: 1. Core proposition The purpose of this book is expressed in a formula: Iron → Surplus product → Private ownership → Class → State → History This is not a cool article about "travelers using modern ideas to transform ancient times", but an experiment in historical materialism that "let history speak for itself". The protagonist is not a prophet or a savior, he is just an ordinary person who is forced to think in the midst of hunger, labor, escape and death. His ideas did not come from heaven, but grew out of the soil, iron, and blood. 2. Three "Rejections" First, reject the "heroic view of history." There is no "Chosen One" in this book. Everything the protagonist could think of was what the material conditions at the time allowed him to think of - the popularization of iron tools provided surplus products, and the surplus products gave birth to class differentiation, which created contradictions and questions. The protagonist is just standing at a turning point in the development of productivity, and asks "why" more than others. Each of his "awakenings" was accompanied by a failure, a hunger, and a death. History was not pushed by him, but by countless silent people at the bottom like him who pushed it inch by inch with hoes and sweat. Second, reject "didactic philosophy." There will not be long quotations from Capital in this book, and there will be no protagonist standing on the city wall preaching that "productivity determines production relations." Philosophy must be internalized in the plot: when the protagonist faces the tax collector's whip, he is not thinking about the "exploitation theory" but "why"; when he swings the hammer in the iron mine, what he experiences is not the "labor theory of value", but "the hoe I hit feeds a hundred people, but I am starving to death." All the truths are allowed to be judged by the readers themselves from the story. Third, reject "shuangwen logic". This book will not let the protagonist cheat all the way, push the nobility, and build a utopia. The process of reform is tortuous, the internal degeneration is real, the counterattack of the old forces is cruel, and even the protagonist may eventually fail, go into exile, and be forgotten. But the charm of historical materialism lies precisely in this: the failure of a person does not equal the failure of thought. The protagonist may fall, but the bamboo slips he left behind, the students he taught, and the production relations on the small piece of land he changed will slowly spread like rust, eventually corroding the entire old world. This is not cool, this is the dialectics of history. 3. Two "hugs" First, embrace "matter". This book will focus on "things" - how to smelt iron, how to cultivate the land, how to collect grain, how to calculate taxes, and how to keep accounts. These seemingly boring details are precisely the "hard core" of historical materialism. After reading this book, readers may not necessarily recite the dogma that "productivity determines production relations", but they must know that an iron plow can allow a farmer to plant thirty acres of land, and the surplus grain of thirty acres of land can feed three off-the-job soldiers, and three soldiers can conquer a tribe - and this is the first driving force of history. Second, embrace "ordinary people". The protagonist of this book has no aristocratic bloodline, no inheritance from famous teachers, and no system of heavenly descent. He is the most common "savage" - conscripted, enslaved, and forgotten. His comrades were blacksmiths, masons, deserters, and bankrupt farmers. The names of these people will not be recorded in the history books, but the stone they push away together will roll down the steep slope of history and smash through an old era. To write about them is to write about the real creators of history. 4. Ultimate purpose There is only one purpose in writing this book: Allow readers to re-view history with a pair of "materialistic" eyes when they close the last page—— We saw how iron tools dismantled mine fields, how the land system gave birth to classes, how the reform was repeated, and behind the only sentence in the history books, "People are not living well," is how individual people struggled, thought, and resisted in material difficulties, and ultimately - even if extremely slowly - pushed society forward. History is not mysterious. History has laws. The rules can be recognized.