Recently I’ve posted someremarks on Weibo about the 996 issue, and there’s already quite a bit of text; I’ve excerpted it here and will also fill it out further
What I was first responding to was Jack Ma’s representative statement:
Last night I had a conversation with my colleagues at Alibaba about the hot-button issue of 996 at work. Today many young people are facing this problem. I think that if you choose to win your own happiness and success through struggle and effort, you may want to seriously reflect on what I’m about to say; but if you want your future to be happier and more joyful than ordinary people’s, yet are unwilling to pay the price of working harder than ordinary people, then those lawful, reasonable, and always-correct words are more suitable for you. If needed, I can say those too, and say them very well! But I think young people should have the chance to hear the truth. No company should, and no company can, force employees to do 996; Alibaba has always advocated living seriously and working happily! But young people themselves must understand that happiness comes from struggle! I do not defend 996, but I salute the strivers!
Jack Ma’s remarks are marked by extreme hypocrisy, and this is shown most clearly in the line “I do not defend 996.” The biggest difference between these modern exploiters and ancient slave owners is that they not only demand obedience, but also demand “voluntary” obedience—not that I’m forcing you, you know; it’s that your ideological awareness is so high that you consciously and willingly want to work for me. If you go to North Korea, you can find the most such workers there, each and every one of them possessing a highly developed Juche consciousness, all absolutely volunteering their own dedication. Chinese capitalists still fall far short. Recently, Jack Ma’s “theory of happiness” and Liu Qiangdong’s “brotherhood theory” have acquired a bit of the essence of Juche. Keep it up!
This logic sounds pretty inspiring, but the biggest logical trap is that it links hard work and struggle to overtime labor. Leaving aside the question of the meaning of effort itself, even if effort is always a good thing, does effort necessarily mean effort for your company? So I said:
The point is very simple: you advocate hard work and struggle, and that’s not wrong. But why should a person’s entire effort count only as working for you? For example, Zhang San works 996 every day, comes off work tired like a dog, while Li Si works 8 hours a day, studies another 6 hours after getting off work every day, and on weekends goes looking for part-time jobs or training. Who is working hard, Zhang San or Li Si? Why does only working for the boss count as hard work?
996 is not about encouraging struggle; it is precisely about squeezing struggle dry, gathering all your struggle under the boss’s name, while cutting off the time and energy you would otherwise use to struggle for causes other than the boss’s. Capitalists do not in the least want you to work hard and struggle; they merely want you to sweat more for them, merely want to extract as much labor from you as possible. Marx is over 200 years old, and yet capitalists can still shout “exploitation” with such righteousness and solemn grandeur. How ironic.
If we are to talk about hard work, Alibaba employees may not even compare with slaves in antiquity. Slaves also worked hard and struggled, trying to get the master to bestow a little more favor; they could even marry and have children, and from the moment the children were born they had slave status too, with the whole family of three working for the master, harmonious and merry, blissfully happy. So what exactly is the difference between capitalists and slave owners? Of course, times are progressing, and capitalists and their lackeys will say: you’re “free,” aren’t you? If you’re not satisfied, just quit; nobody is forcing you to go to work. Since you are going to work, you should obediently create surplus value for the boss; slaves cannot quit, but you can quit, so you are free.
Using “freedom” to justify exploitation and oppression is an even more despicable matter. Freedom, properly speaking, is the freedom of “human beings”; freedom of occupation or freedom of market choice are only derivative forms. What matters more are the “four freedoms.” Freedom first appears as freedom of thought and freedom of speech; next it includes association and demonstration, and so on. Besides freedom of occupation, workers can also freely petition, call for action, demonstrate, and even strike. Market freedom is, in the final analysis, built upon human freedom. Some capitalists do not respect human freedom, yet use market freedom to excuse themselves. This is exceedingly ugly.
For hypocritical capitalists, apart from using “the freedom to quit” to justify their own exploitation, they fundamentally do not respect human freedom. For example, women’s freedom to bear children is discriminated against, the freedom of entertainment and leisure is squeezed as hard as possible, the freedom to choose other part-time work is not welcomed, and the freedom to demonstrate or strike is even less tolerable. Even when employees truly want to make use of their “freedom to quit,” the boss will not welcome them with open arms either; he will still try every means to withhold pay and obstruct them.
To respect human freedom is, in essence, to respect human independent personhood, to respect the fact that others will always live in ways you do not agree with. You may believe that your company has created the most perfect working environment in the world, but your employees are all independent individuals; you cannot demand that they too place all their life’s aspirations within your company.
Of course, freedom is always real and conditional. It is also improper to talk about freedom in the abstract, divorced from reality. So some people fall into another logical trap: they take the helpless misfortune that must be faced in reality and treat it as what ought to be demanded.
They say: the environment is like this; if you don’t do 996, you can’t compete. If you’re so capable, why don’t you step up? Go be the boss and try it?
But what we are criticizing is precisely this environment itself. In a famine, you may well have no choice but to go hungry, but you must always clearly remember: it is a good thing for people to be well fed. You can’t let yourself get hungry and hungry and then develop a sense of superiority, inventing all sorts of lofty-sounding reasons to say that going hungry is glorious and being full is shameful. Not only do a few people with stomachs full of grease preach to the poor that hunger is good for health, even some people who have had enough of hunger develop Stockholm syndrome, turn around, and invert black and white, thinking that if people are not made to go hungry they will never grow up.
Famine is real, but it is a misfortune. Precisely because hunger is bad, we should pursue enough food and clothing; war is cruel, so we call for peace. 996 is bad, so it should be criticized. One must not turn helplessness into an ideal.
People live in reality, and inevitably have to compromise with forces in reality that are hard to contend with. But human beings are animals that can think, and the greatest feature of human thought is that it can transcend reality and speak about what ought to be or what is ideal. Take Jack Ma and the like: aren’t they precisely using the “ideal” of “happiness” to lure people into struggling for it? Even if you really do want to defend the reality-bound helplessness of 996, it should not be done with the face of an inspirational mentor. If I cannot feed the people who follow me, I should feel ashamed, not proud.
The larger environment does change, and it is precisely every person who struggles for an ideal, every person who resists reality, that gathers into a force capable of changing heaven and earth. The abolition of slavery and the establishment of the 8-hour workday were all brought about by generation after generation of people unwilling to compromise with reality, continuously “working hard and struggling.” If those inspirational gurus who preach hard work and struggle still have even a shred of conscience, then they ought to know that what should truly be encouraged is precisely the kind of “hard work and struggle” directed toward freedom, and struggle for liberation.
Hard work and struggle are indeed good things, but for whom do we work? One who works for the master is a good slave; one who works for their children is a good parent; one who works for themselves is a free citizen; and one who works for the cause of the liberation of all humanity is a great person. Such greatness is not necessarily out of reach. When we earnestly criticize the 996 system and the exploitation and hypocrisy of capitalists embodied in it, we are adding bricks and tiles to the cause of human liberation. Borrowing Jack Ma’s final sentence, let us “salute the strivers”!
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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