Chapter 541: Digging Deeply into the Potential Value of Craftsmen (Seeking Votes and Subscriptions)
Luo Chong has his own ideas on how to dig deeply into the potential value of craftsmen and how to make craftsmen create income for the tribe.
This is mainly based on the current embarrassing situation of the Han tribe, that is, all craftsmen are enslaved in state-owned workshops controlled by the government. There are basically no craftsmen who can be called "craftsmen" in the folk. At most, they are helpers who can do some simple work, and they are not even apprentices.
This has led to a very strange situation, because the feudal emperor period in history was basically a small peasant economy system.
What is a small peasant economy system? Simply put, it is self-sufficient, and the people do not need to consume at all.
For clothing, you have a loom at home, grow some mulberry and hemp at home, and buy cloth? It doesn't exist at all.
Moreover, at that time, they didn't even have a spinning machine to make their own linen cloth. The linen thread used for weaving was rubbed out by hand. This step of manually rubbing the hemp fiber into linen thread was called "achievement", and the term achievement in later generations also came from this.
For food, you can grow your own food, eat meat, and raise livestock. Even if you don't have any, it's not difficult to raise a few chickens and get a few eggs. You don't need to spend money on food, except for salt.
After solving the problem of food and clothing, you can chop firewood yourself. The only places where you need money are probably buying salt and iron, after all, farm tools and the like are indispensable.
For other things, there is really no need to spend money.
But the Han tribe is different.
The Han tribe is a social system that has been transformed from public ownership to private ownership, and it has only been a short time, so it is inevitable that some problems will appear.
For example, when it was still public ownership, the Han tribe set up a collective breeding base, and all livestock belonged to the tribe. The people themselves did not have livestock, and then they also established a textile workshop and a metallurgical workshop. These two units are still products of the public ownership system.
From the perspective of the time, the establishment of these workshops can concentrate resources and efforts to the greatest extent to engage in production. The benefits of doing so are not only high efficiency, but also save waste of raw materials.
Take metallurgy for example. It is more economical to build several large blast furnaces than to let every household build a small blast furnace. At least you can use all the charcoal together. How much heat consumption can be saved? Besides, you are an ordinary citizen and you don’t have the ability to mine and crush ore, let alone mix ingredients. Resources are scarce, and they will be scattered and wasted?
From this perspective, even after the current private ownership reform, the workshop production model is a symbol of "advanced". The
same is true for the textile industry. You wash wool, spin woolen yarn, and weave woolen cloth yourself. How much time is wasted in the middle? Moreover, everyone's skills are different, and the quality of the product cannot be guaranteed.
However, if you operate under the workshop model, you can use assembly line operations to produce, which not only greatly compresses the conversion time between several steps, but also each worker only does one job every day, which makes them more skilled. In this way, the quality can be guaranteed, and the efficiency is higher and faster, which is completely incomparable with private workshops.
But now it is different. Although private ownership has begun, it has only started to pay wages to the workers in the workshop. It has changed from voluntary work to working for money, but the actual ownership of the workshop is still in the hands of the public. All the production equipment in the workshop has not been distributed to the people because of the privatization reform. That is nonsense.
But the situation is different now. The Han tribe needs to develop into a small peasant economy to achieve self-sufficiency for the people. Don't think that the transformation from collective factories to private workshops is a social regression. That is nonsense.
Look at the problem according to the background of the times. The production model that is too advanced is more likely to have problems in the face of a relatively backward background of the times.
It's like you have a Dongfeng heavy truck, but there is no original engine. Now you only have a donkey as a power source. Even if you force the donkey to be tied to the heavy truck and whip it to death, it can't pull it.
At this time, you only have a donkey and no other power options, but you can't just leave, so you might as well replace the Dongfeng heavy truck with a two-wheeled wooden cart. Although the load capacity is different, the donkey cart can finally run, which is better than you standing there anxiously.
The Han tribe is now facing the same situation. In the textile workshops in Hanyang City, dozens of looms can no longer meet the demand for cloth for tens of thousands of people, not to mention the existence of large "cloth-consuming" households such as sailboats.
What should we do at this time? Expand the scale of the workshop? Machinery is easy, just let the carpenters in the wood workshop make it, but where can we recruit workers?
Men are important laborers. In addition to farming and producing food, they also have to participate in a lot of construction. Besides, it is not right to recruit a bunch of men to weave cloth.
But now women are also very busy. Women have auxiliary fields that are not inferior to men to plant, planting mulberry, hemp, vegetables, soybeans, lacquer grass and other cash crops. Who has time to work in your workshop? Do you think you are not tired enough?
Besides, they have to have children. After all, this is also an important matter, which is related to the population reproduction of the entire tribe. From a physiological point of view, women are indeed a vulnerable group.
I don't mean to look down on women. It is purely an objective physiological analysis. With a big belly, they have to look after two or three-year-old children, and wait for the birth of the "second" or "third" in their belly. How can you still let them work in the factory?
How can we improve productivity without expanding the workshop? And while improving the productivity of the tribe, we must also create fiscal revenue for the government.
Luo Chong's solution is to directly let the wood workshop build a batch of spinning machines and looms, but the Han tribe no longer organizes corresponding textile workshops, but directly sells these wooden machines to the people.
The most critical thing now is that the people don't want their own looms, but they have no channels to get them. There was no place to buy them before, and the government workshops would not sell them. They wanted to find someone to make them themselves, but there were no craftsmen who could make looms among the people.
This is the current situation of the Han tribe that Luo Chong said. Craftsmen are very scarce among the people. It is difficult for ordinary people to find a carpenter to make something for themselves, and the government of the Han tribe does not sell finished products. This has led to a market gap in many things. However, the market has shown a strong desire to buy.
Luo Chong is very sure that as long as these machines are sold to the newly built counties, they will be warmly welcomed and snapped up.
Although not many people buy cars and boats, every household has a loom.
Moreover, Luo Chong is a person who traveled from the modern times. With his knowledge and experience, he can make this loom into the "four major items for marriage" and manipulate public opinion in the Han tribe to create a concept that newlyweds must buy looms when they get married, which is used to promote looms, just like the concept of buying bicycles and tape recorders when getting married in the 1970s in China.
In addition, there is ironware. Although this needs to be strictly controlled, control does not mean that it cannot be sold. Luo Chong has an immature idea.
In the folk, blacksmiths who have passed the government's grading examination can be awarded several levels of blacksmith certificates. Then these blacksmiths can apply for private blacksmith shops with their qualification certificates. After obtaining a business license, he can buy smelted iron ingots from the government, and then come back to use the iron ingots to process utensils for the people.
The purpose of doing this is, first of all, strict control. Private blacksmith shops only have the right to purchase iron materials for reprocessing, but they do not have the right to smelt iron themselves. Moreover, the number of iron ingots that a blacksmith shop of a certain level can purchase each year can also be controlled by limits.
For example, how many people are there in the city, how many farm tools are worn out and how many new people are added each year, these data can be used to limit the annual purchase limit of iron ingots for this blacksmith shop.
Of course, this is just a preliminary idea and there is no way to implement it specifically, because how to take the exam, how many levels there are, how to divide the levels, and how many iron ingots quotas each level of blacksmiths can get each year, all of which need to be carefully studied.
On the other hand, there is the issue of the transformation of the original textile workshops and metallurgical workshops. Once looms and blacksmith shops become popular among the people, the living space of these two workshops will be squeezed, and there is no way to not transform.
The transformation of the original state-owned workshops is a big deal. It is not to be disbanded all at once. That is impossible. They must continue to work, but how to do it is a problem.
Luo Chong also has his own ideas. For example, the metallurgical workshop has decided to subcontract the manufacture of tools and the retail of ironware to blacksmith shops in various places, so the metallurgical workshop can transform and specialize in the remaining tasks.
For example, the mining of minerals, the smelting of metals, the manufacture of weapons, and the wholesale of metal raw materials.
This is also good. The metallurgical workshop can put aside all the trivial matters such as making farm tools and focus on studying how to expand steel production capacity, whether to build more blast furnaces or upgrade technology.
There is more time to spend on the research and development of more high-tech weapons. In fact, Luo Chong has been hesitating whether to make firearms. This is really a big problem.
Now it is not a question of whether the Han tribe can make it. As far as the current Han tribe is concerned, making a bird gun or something has no technical content. The matchlock and flintlock are very low-level. With Luo Chong's senior research in arms, he can make an early model of double-barreled shotgun, even an early Browning version of the pump-action five-shot shotgun.
The reason for this confidence is that the shotgun cannot shoot far and the chamber pressure requirement is very low. In other words, the quality requirements for the barrel are not strict, that is, the technical level requirements are low, even lower than the requirements for flintlocks.
Anyway, it is a smoothbore shotgun. There is no need to maintain airtightness or rifling. It is loaded with shotgun shells, so there is no need to aim. A dozen 5mm lead bullets can directly hit your face within 100 meters, and a big hole can be made in 50 meters. What is the need for aiming?
If this thing is used to shoot giant apes, it must be very powerful. One shot can make a hole as big as a bowl, and it is five shots in a row. The loading structure is also very simple. It can be loaded with a pull and a push.
In addition to the barrel, the most important part here may be the spring. However, the spring steel technology of the Han tribe has long been applied to the shuttle of the shuttle loom. Long-term use has proved that the spring of the Han tribe has no problem at all.
Another thing worth noting is that the world's first pump-action shotgun developed by Browning is very different from the modern Remington because it uses an external hammer excitation device.
Compared with the internal excitation mechanism of modern firearms, this feature has lower requirements for the level of production and manufacturing. It is just a hammer, which can be made by hand. At most, it can be solved by using the lost wax casting method. It is not a problem at all.
In fact, this shotgun is the famous five-shot shotgun in the modern chicken game. In reality, this firearm was developed in the context of World War I. At that time, it was equipped with a half-meter-long bayonet and was known as the "trench scavenger".
The five-shot shotgun with a bayonet is quite unique.
Luo Chong has had this idea for a long time. The Han tribe has always focused its development on the south. Why? It is because there are strong enemies in the north, and the Han tribe does not have an effective expedition capability. It is difficult to defeat those monsters in terms of individual strength and weapons.
Let's put it this way. If you are given a steel knife or a spear, do you dare to rush up and kill it?
The size alone can bring a serious sense of oppression to the soldiers. If only long-range weapons are used to attack, it would be better. However, the power and firing rate of the crossbow arrows are not easy for the giant apes with flexible body movements and huge bodies. First, it is difficult for you to aim. Secondly, the attack effect is limited. If you don't shoot more than a dozen arrows at the vital points, it is difficult to kill the opponent directly. But if you shoot more than a dozen arrows, it will rush to your face long ago.
But the Han tribe was not afraid of the giant ape. At worst, I would build a city and dig trenches for defense.
I can't beat you, but you can't beat me either. As long as I'm in my permanent fortifications, I'm invincible. No matter how many of you come, I can use the fortifications to deal with you.
Although I become a soft egg after leaving the city wall, so what? I will first develop my strength. When I become strong, I will wipe out your nest in one pot, leaving you with nothing.
But powerful weapons have always been a double-edged sword. Firearms are easy to manufacture, but people who can use guns are difficult to manage. This is what Luo Chong is most worried about.
The giant ape is absolutely vulnerable in front of the muzzle of the shotgun, but Luo Chong can't stand a single shot in front of the five-shot burst
. So, it is better to develop the tribe first, and when the population increases, train a special force to use firearms and directly command it, so that he can really rest assured.
It's not that Luo Chong is timid, but his status and position are there. Anyone can get into trouble, but Luo Chong can't. Under the current situation, if Luo Chong is gone, the Han tribe will basically have nothing left, and will definitely collapse under the double blow of the grassland people and the Xin tribe.
This process may not be fast, after all, the Han tribe has many strong walls, but if the other side is determined to besiege the city, your arrows and soldiers will be consumed sooner or later, and it is only a matter of time before the city is broken. How long you can hold on depends on the people guarding the city and the generals attacking the city.
(End of this chapter)
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