"We Can't Be Beasts"
A worker's day begins with a commute. In megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it is very common to commute within 1 hour each way; If the commute time is around half an hour, congratulations, this number is lower than the average of many major cities in China (see the 2022 China Major Cities Commuter Monitoring Report), and you are already happy.
Then it's time to arrive at the workstation, hold the keyboard with both hands, keep your eyes on the computer, and rarely move all day. Although many companies no longer require 8 or 9 a.m. working hours, working hours are still 8 hours (from). If overtime is required, 996 and 007 are at your disposal. By the time you finish work and go home again at the same time as in the morning, it may already be late at night. - As for whether to continue working after returning home, that is another question.
How many hours do we really put into "work"? According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the average weekly working hours of employees in enterprises nationwide in 2021 were 47.8 hours, so it is estimated that the annual working hours are at least 2,300 hours. In contrast, among OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, Mexico has the longest annual working hours at 2127.8 hours; Germany has the shortest, only 1349.3 hours (see OECD official website 2021 data).
More than 200 years have passed since Robert Owen made the declaration of "8 hours of work, 8 hours of entertainment, 8 hours of rest" in 1817. During this period, Ford introduced the two-day holiday system, and countries gradually wrote the 8-hour work into law, and the proportion of freelancers with more flexible work was increasing. By 2019, the three-year experiment with a four-day workweek covering 1% of Iceland's population had been "overwhelmingly successful", and since then, the pandemic has made "working from home" a new option. However, at the same time, high overtime hours, frequent hidden overtime, and unclear overtime pay are still practical problems faced by contemporary social animals.
In 1914, Ford shortened the 9-hour working day to 8 hours and raised workers' wages (see Ford Corporate Home)
Is it possible that our working hours will be shorter than 8 hours in the future? Where has the time gone, and why is it so important?
In The True Man Should Be Temperate in His Working Hours and Live as an End and Not a Means.
This article is excerpted from Yang Zhao
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01.
Live to live V.S. Really live
Economic behavior is human behavior, and the factor in human behavior that must not be ignored is time. Time is the fairest, there is no way to discount, so time is the most fundamental constraint. First of all, Marx took time as the premise, which means that people live, no matter who they are, no matter what state they are in, there are only 24 hours a day, which is the most fundamental and unchangeable fact.
On top of that, it is also a very clear fact that we can divide everyone's life into two different parts. In 24 hours a day, we must use a certain proportion of production to sustain survival. This means that part of your life must be that you live to live, and the other part is really alive for Marx.
"Life Cutting"
Marx believed that we work to achieve living conditions, which stems in part from animal instincts. Therefore, this part does not belong to the true meaning of human beings, and only when you have obtained the living conditions to live, you use the rest of your time to pursue other desires other than animal nature, then you can be separated from animals and become a complete person.
Marx then pointed out that in the pre-industrial pre-industrial state of capitalist labor, it was the self-determination of how much time to spend and how to maintain one's life. Of course, this is an ideal type. However, from an ideal point of view, the life of most people in society is basically to choose how much time to devote to maintaining their own life, and this ratio is fixed. Because under that production conditions, time cannot be greatly shortened subjectively. If you are a farmer, in order to grow enough food to sustain your life, how much time you need to plow, sow seeds, weed and harvest in a year is basically fixed, without investing this time, the farmer cannot cultivate the food, so of course you cannot arbitrarily shorten the time cost.
On the contrary, we are less likely to arbitrarily extend working hours. Because longer time will not be effective, investing more time and labor will not increase food output. More importantly, these productions are for our own lives, and if we can't eat so much food, why do we spend so much time producing what we can't enjoy? Therefore, we do not spend time on increasing the need to survive, and the time saved becomes our real life and life.
02.
Laborers who sell their time
After industrialization, people became laborers and workers, so a different situation was derived. The first is that we can no longer decide how much time we have to spend to meet our survival needs, because the means of production are not in our hands, so we can only sell our labor. We can only sell our labor for wages.
The farmer can grow the food he needs in the field, and he knows exactly how much food he needs. The worker is different, after selling his labor power, he earns wages, but how much the worker's labor power is worth is not something he can decide. So workers can't say that I'll earn the wages I need if I work 8 hours. Because sometimes, his 8-hour salary far exceeds his living needs, but his labor will depreciate or appreciate.
Can the workers themselves decide whether labor appreciates or depreciates? No. Because the production tools were not in his hands, the workers could not decide what to produce on their own, so he could only ask his boss: "How much are you going to pay me to work for me?" The boss told him, "You are paid $50 for an hour of work." "After a while, the boss needs more production, so he raises his salary by 60 yuan an hour. But workers may also be told by their boss when the content of the work remains the same and all working conditions have not changed: "Sorry, starting tomorrow, there will be only 30 yuan left in an hour's wages." ”
"Male Love and Female Love"
Workers have no right to decide how much of their time they can pay for their survival. This means that you have no right to decide how much time you need to devote to entering this system, how much you can produce, and how you can meet your survival needs. What you have is still 24 hours, but you as a person, your division of time has become different. You are divided into labor time that you can sell, and labor time that you cannot sell.
How is the division of time between what workers can sell and what they can't sell decide? It is necessary for the reproduction of labor. It means giving workers time to sleep, rest and eat, which is the time required for the reproduction of labor power. Because if even this time is sold, as a laborer, the value of the new day is less than the previous day. So each of us in the labor market is divided into two parts: one is how much time you need to leave your job, so that you can come back tomorrow to continue working; The other part is the time you can sell as labor, and this time is not something you can control. You are not a buyer of your own labor, but a buyer of labor is someone who holds the means of production. In our language today, the person who holds the tools of production, that is, creates jobs, is actually the one who buys your labor.
In the past, you had to choose how much time you needed to live – you always knew how much time you needed to work as a farmer or craftsman to make ends meet and support yourself. Now that you become a laborer who sells time, you don't know where this line is, because the relationship between this line and the price of labor is floating.
The price of labor's labor time is determined. What determines the price of labor time? First of all, what cannot be broken and must exist is the cost of labor reproduction. As a capitalist, he does not kill his workers, he wants to maintain the state in which the workers can return to production the next day, which is what the capitalist must obey. In addition, because the capitalist controls the production machinery and the production conditions, he has a high degree of decisive power over the purchase and sale price of labor hours.
"Unborn"
Again, this is the difference between political economy and economics. From an economic point of view, I believe that many people will be able to accept this year's salary, which is a "willing to fight" relationship, determined by complex supply and demand compromise negotiations.
The salary that the boss is willing to pay you, you can choose to accept or refuse, this is the market. The market means that there must be an equilibrium when every transaction is established. As the party that provides labor costs, the boss agrees with you on the price according to his own needs; You are on the side of supply or, if there is a need for survival, promise to sell your labor at that price. The two form a balance, and that's the market. All transactions in economic theory are balanced in the market, so reasonable, not only the rational choice of the boss, but also the rational choice of the laborer, the two have found a convergence, as long as both parties agree on the amount of wages, it must be a state of balance.
03.
One willing to fight, one willing to be beaten?
But Marx was just asking: Is this really the case? We can't just observe and analyze individual transactions. Since the existence of capital in the 19th century, there have been not simple individual transactions between capitalists and workers, but many factors related to transactions in the case of collective transactions. These factors will not be just supply and demand, but also other factors.
Part of the key factor, which Marx called the superstructure, is helping you decide what is right, good, or right. This superstructure reflects the substructure, which is the arrangement of production. Capitalists hold great power, so they naturally create a superstructure in a way that is beneficial to themselves. Where capitalists hold great power, the social superstructure that emerges from it tells you to believe that transactions are equal.
"Male Love and Female Love"
This superstructure necessarily discriminates against or oppresses workers. Thus, in Marx's later analysis, what he called the greatest enemy of the working man emerged. The greatest enemy of labor is not even the capitalists, but the superstructure built to cater to the interests of the capitalists. The superstructure affects the laborers, so that the laborers have a false consciousness in their hearts, a false identification of interests. The laborer does not know where the real benefits of being a laborer are, but identifies with the capitalist, or with the set of values given by the superstructure created by the capitalist, thus creating a false consciousness. Once the worker has a false consciousness, it means that he recognizes this "one willing to fight, one willing to be beaten" transaction, and it is impossible to realize that there are other possibilities.
When you as a worker but completely accept the statement of market economics, believe that as long as there is a boss to provide any wages, as long as someone is willing to accept this salary, it is reasonable, once you enter this market economics thinking mode, you will forget or ignore the method of market economics to destroy or harm the real interests of a person as a laborer.
Until now, Marxism has been highly valuable in at least this respect, providing us with an alternative way of thinking beyond the superstructure model produced by market economics, telling workers how to further understand what fairness in human behavior is.
04.
Your wages will always be less than the surplus value of your labor
Marx's first emphasis was on the exploitation of the surplus value of labor, because he was confronted with the existing superstructure and the false consciousness it created: including the laborers themselves who felt that their status was inferior to the capitalists, and the laborers looked at other people who were also laborers with hostility. This superstructure creates a variety of different false consciousnesses day after day. Therefore, the first thing that can and should be changed is that a new superstructure value must be created to replace it.
The existing superstructure creates the imagination of capitalists giving workers jobs and wages, so that laborers have jobs so that they can live. How can workers have self-dignity in this superstructure imagination? How is it possible for a worker to realize the value of his labor in the course of trading?
"Hansawa Naoki"
Marx told us to look the other way around, and offered a very clear set of analyses. That is, the program that was originally a W-G-W (COMMODITY-MONEY-COMMODITY) is now going to be changed to a G-W-G (money-commodity-currency) program.
Marx emphasized: How can it be that workers owe capitalists? The capitalists paid a sum of money, bought machines, controlled the means of production, bought the labor power of the workers. The worker pays labor, using Marx's deliberately simplified algorithm, the worker works in the factory for 3 hours, and the production value he produces reaches 100 yuan, which refers to the value of meeting his own needs. This means that after 3 hours of work, he has created the value he needs to survive, and he does not have to continue working. If he continues to work, what is created is surplus value. Why is it called surplus? Surplus is excess or excess value, not necessary for himself, nor produced for himself.
All value comes from labor. Part of the surplus value is distributed to the capitalists and partly back to the workers. For example, if the worker receives 120 yuan at this time, it means that he receives 20 yuan from the surplus value, and the other part is distributed in the payment of land rent, factory costs, machinery costs and raw material costs, and if these surplus values are 80 yuan, they add up to 200 yuan. This means that if a worker completes the labor value of 200 yuan, he will repay and balance all of the above. Beyond that, if there is more value left of labor, where will it be? It's all about the capitalists. Why can capitalists have capital? Because he exploited and took away the surplus value of laborers in this way.
So for Marx, such an analysis and algorithm must be established to ensure the status and dignity of the laborer: how can the capitalist be so rich if the surplus value is not taken away? How can capitalists enjoy all these luxuries? In other words, why do workers instead thank the capitalists for the wages they pay? The wages that capitalists give to laborers are always lower than the surplus value of labor actually created by laborers, because if not, capitalists will not give laborers jobs and wages.
It is important to remember that working time is not objective, and there is no way for workers to separate their working time from themselves or sell it as a property. Working time is the life of the laborer, the life of the laborer cannot be extended indefinitely, and part of his living time is sold, which is equivalent to shortening the other life he can have, that is, the real life of non-labor.
"I, get off work at the point"
The capitalists do not put in any labor and do not participate in any production. The capitalists mentioned here refer to people who simply own capital, not people who use their mental power to think about how to invest. The capitalist pays capital, because the money he pays out becomes capital, so he can take away most of the surplus of the labor value created by the laborer. As a worker, what is the awareness you need most?
You have to persevere and ask: Where is my surplus value?
Marx insisted on the position that we should do everything possible to shorten the period of time that each person lives as a means, and in this way increase the time spent living as an end, so that everyone can freely choose how to live and engage in various activities.