Recently Pinduoduo has once again made the topic of 996 hot, and I said: “Whether overtime is reasonable, whether it is legal, how it should be compensated, how it should be punished—let those questions be set aside for the moment. In any case, we should first make one thing clear: whether or not one works overtime has nothing to do with ‘personal striving.’ Because after I get off work I can study like mad, I can take on side jobs like mad, I can devote myself to public welfare… There are plenty of worthwhile causes to struggle for. To limit a person to struggling only for one boss is not called striving; it is called slavery.” In fact, I have already made the issues of striving, overtime, and freedom clear in an earlier article.
Here I want to add one more discussion, namely: what do “capitalists” or “capitalism” mean?
There is a tradition in our country of cursing “capitalists,” so it comes especially naturally to the tongue; I myself do it often as well. But it is important to note that I certainly do not want to retreat into a context of arguments over whether one is “red” or “capitalist,” nor do I have the slightest intention of opposing the market economy in favor of a planned economy. First of all, I think it is simply wrong to equate capitalism with the market economy.
Capitalism, as the name suggests, is first and foremost a “-ism,” an ideological program or tendency of thought, not an economic system. It is only because a certain economic system is most easily mutually reinforcing with people who hold this kind of thought that we often link capitalism with a specific economic system, but this connection is by no means necessary.
Of course, a “capitalist” is not necessarily a “capitalism-ist,” just as a scientist is not necessarily a scientism-ist. Nor is a capitalism-ist necessarily a capitalist; in fact, many workers and poor people believe in capitalism more fervently than business owners do, just as some śūdras and untouchables are more devout in Brahmanism than Brahmins are.
But the originally relatively neutral term “capitalist” has already become a pejorative. Its neutral meaning has been replaced by words such as entrepreneur, operator, financier, and so on. In this context, when we once again take “capitalists” as the object of critique, we may as well understand the term anew—we are not referring to practitioners engaged in capital operations, but specifically to employers who believe in “capitalism.” By extension, it can also include “spiritual capitalists,” who may not be employers but still believe in capitalism.
So what does it mean to believe in capitalism? As the name suggests, it means thinking about everything according to a program in which “capital” is supreme, measuring everything by capital.
I said: “The core of this kind of idea is money worship: your time, interests, dignity, and even life can all be measured in money. Everything essential degenerates into a quantitative question, the bottom line ceases to exist, and a slippery slope becomes inevitable.”
Reducing the problem of “overtime” to the problem of “overtime pay” is a classic capitalist way of thinking. These people believe that if overtime is improper, it is only because the money offered is not enough. As long as the employer pays enough overtime compensation, they have the right to require overtime arbitrarily.
Many people think this way. They will say, “If Pinduoduo gave me 50,000 yuan, I’d do it too.” But it is precisely when this logic becomes universal that involution becomes inevitable.
So what counts as “enough”? Zhang San says 50,000 is enough, Li Si says 40,000 would do, Wang Wu says 30,000 is fine. In the end, even if the pay is raised by a few cents, as long as the job is not lost, someone will be willing to do it. From 50,000 yuan down to 50 fen, there is no qualitative boundary whatsoever. The result is inevitably “involution”: workers do not struggle against capitalists, but against other workers. Workers compare one another’s bottom lines, and those bottom lines will inevitably keep slipping lower and lower.
If no logic beyond capital exists to constrain this kind of involutionary competition, how far can the bottom line ultimately slide? Slavery has already shown us the answer. Slaves in ancient times did not receive nothing at all; they also had monthly stipends, tips, and some servile dependents could even manage accounts and take dividends, while eunuchs could still embezzle and engage in corruption. What makes a slave a slave has never been that they do not receive money, but that they do not have freedom.
And if a modern person can endlessly sell off their freedom for money, sell off leisure and life, then what is the difference between them and a slave? At most there is only one thing left to console oneself with: the freedom to quit. But when slave-like employment becomes a common phenomenon, and when various loans are pressuring people not to resign, then this so-called “freedom to quit” also becomes merely a supposed freedom of making a limited choice among different slaveholders.
The key issue is not how to increase overtime pay quantitatively, but how to define the bottom line of overtime in qualitative terms. This bottom line was proposed more than 200 years ago by the movement activists of the time: the slogan “8 hours’ work, 8 hours’ recreation, 8 hours’ rest.” This is not a matter of measurement, but a qualitative division, meaning that everyone’s freely disposable “leisure” should be equivalent to “work.”
“Leisure” or “recreation” does not necessarily mean lying on the sofa watching TV (there was no TV 200 years ago anyway), but includes any pursuit that gives one joy. For example, I like writing books, so for me writing books is “recreation,” is self-enrichment. For example, I care deeply about public welfare, and I feel genuinely happy when I see the smiles of orphans, so doing volunteer service is also a kind of “recreation” for me.
The demand for an 8-hour workday allows the working class, engaged in tedious occupations, to enjoy “leisure” just like the leisured class of antiquity (the aristocracy), and thus to have the possibility of freely carrying out creative activity. Only by ensuring leisure does the “striving” in the true sense become possible—striving for science, for art, for human welfare, or for family, for self-realization.
Opposing money worship is not about establishing another, more supreme value to constrain everyone; on the contrary, it is about leaving room for plural subjectivities. In modern society, “leisure” is not only a kind of “welfare,” but also a “responsibility.” In “leisure,” no one else designates any value or purpose for you; everyone can and must choose their own life for themselves, struggle for the causes they identify with, and create for the things they appreciate.
Perhaps a certain person’s personal values align perfectly with the company they work for, and they voluntarily believe that working overtime is the best way to realize their personal ideals. So then are they allowed to work overtime? If we allow this to happen, then inevitably more people will be “voluntarily compelled” to work overtime, unable to effectively express their objections. For the sake of the larger picture, the law should prohibit any overtime work. If someone really insists on realizing ideals that are perfectly aligned with the company, they can also use their leisure time to study, pursue further education, and improve themselves, rather than necessarily working overtime. More to the point, for the vast majority of people the so-called “ideals” that align with the company are nothing more than making money.
996 is exploitation, but it is not just the exploitation of workers’ money; it is the deprivation of workers’ freedom. Of course, many workers are willing, and consent to surrender their freedom. In the same way, in ancient times many people voluntarily sold themselves into slavery. But since the Enlightenment, the first great achievement of modern civilization—if not the only one—has been to reject the “freedom to be a slave.” I once said: “Does a person have the freedom to voluntarily be a slave? The modern answer is: no! If modern civilization since the Enlightenment can be said to have achieved even the slightest thing, it is the exaltation of individual freedom and the fundamental dismantling of slavery. If we cannot even hold on to this, we are truly unworthy of being called modern people.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply