Zhang Wenmu
Books are alive. When I was a child, I experienced some sports and saw some burned books printed and widely disseminated within a few years; I also saw that many books were taken away in bundles by the waste collectors within a few days of their publication. When I was young, I often thought about why older works such as "Lao Tzu", "Analects", "Sun Tzu", "Historical Records", "Zizhi Tongjian" and "Capital" could not be destroyed. Not to mention that the "General Guide to Governance" has been favored by politicians of all generations[1], and even "Capital", which issued a death notice to capitalist society, has also provoked generations of capitalists to read it at night and keep it. If we analyze these seemingly opposing phenomena together, we will find that the opposite is the movement: the life of the book is affirmed through the negation of its opposite; It is not enough for books to be loved by colleagues, but books that can make opponents have to read, read heartache and reluctant to destroy are good books with vitality. And the vitality of the book, whether it is long or short, must also disappear with the disappearance of its opposite—I remember that most of the books that were bundled and pulled away by the collection of waste were such unreasonable and unproblematic books.
The question is the lifeblood of the book. The length of the life of a book lies in the magnitude of the issues it involves, so that the views and conclusions of the book cannot be based on narrow personal opinions, but only on the iron law revealed from historical facts, which is not subject to human will. Here, personal private opinion is only a personified manifestation of the iron law, that is, the law of history. Marx's Capital, which deals with the most fundamental questions of the capitalist era, says in the preface to the first edition:
Even if a society has explored the natural laws of its own motion,—— the ultimate purpose of this book is to reveal the laws of economic motion in modern society,—— it can neither skip nor cancel the natural stages of development by decree. But it shortens and relieves the pain of childbirth. [2]
Laws cannot be described in selfish strokes, Marx said:
I will never paint the faces of capitalists and landlords in rose. However, the people involved here are only the personification of the economic category, and they are the bearers of certain class relations and interests. My view is that the development of socio-economic forms is a natural historical process. [3]
Since it is a law, the class, whether progressive or reactionary, will know that it is a historical process that can be accelerated or delayed without being artificially eliminated, and therefore needs to be understood and recognized. If these laws are profoundly reflected in your book, then the person under the influence of this law, even if he is the enemy of the law, if his thinking is still deep enough, will pay great tribute to the value of the book. Like many famous books, Capital has reached such heights that the statue of Marx stands in England, the mother country of capital, and that Capital has been more and more widely disseminated in the midst of more and more violent capitalist crises[4]. After Marx's death, Engels said that "Capital is often referred to on the mainland as the 'Bible of the working class'"[5]; Of course, this book is also a "bible" for the capitalists to understand the historical position and future of their own class, which is an important reason why a large number of landlords, capitalists and their descendants later betrayed their class and turned to the cause of proletarian emancipation.
The life of the book continues in the sifting of history. History is the booster of ideas and the filter of ideas. There have been many "book burnings" in history - this is not to be surprising, it is the same as "copying books", it is nothing more than a different way of sifting ideas through history; It is not just the unilateral acts of the ruler or the ruled that carry out this screening, but the result of the long-term run-in between the two sides, and only the books that are reluctant to destroy each other or repeatedly destroyed and then continue to be spawned by the times can have a long-term vitality in the long river of human history. There are many books in history that are still alive and dead – such books that will not be reproduced after they are lost, and there are books that are still alive even though they are dead – books that will be born again and again for history. Mencius understood this, and he told us, "It is better to believe in the Book than to have no Book at all." ”[6]
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[1] Xue Zeshi, "Listening to Mao Zedong's Lecture on History", Central Literature Publishing House, 2003, pp. 359-360.
[2] Marx, Capital - Preface to the First Edition, People's Publishing House, 1975, p. 11.
[3] Marx, Capital - Preface to the First Edition, People's Publishing House, 1975, p. 12.
[4] In 2011, it was reported that sales of Marx's Capital in Germany tripled compared to 2005 and 100 times that of 1990. The statue of Marx is back on the campus of the University of Leipzig in Germany. Yao Meng, Ji Shuangcheng, "Marx's Capital Sells Again", Party Building, No. 1, 2009.
[5] Marx, Preface to the English Edition of Capital, People's Publishing House, 1975, p. 37.
[6] "Mencius: Wholeheartedly", translated by Liu Juntian, Lin Song and Yu Kekun, The Complete Translation of the Four Books, Guizhou People's Publishing House, 1988, p. 635.
