Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：17  发布时间：2025-05-25

Nian Guangjiu's business was good, which made people around him envious. Now he has hired 12 employees. Some people immediately associate it with Marx's famous statement in "Capital": "When the number of employees reaches 8, it is not an ordinary individual economy, but a capitalist economy, which is exploitation." Therefore, rumors of "a capitalist named Nian Guangjiu has emerged in Anhui" and "Nian Guangjiu is an exploiter" immediately spread throughout Anhui. This debate seems to have never appeared in public newspapers at the time, but it has been widely circulated among government officials. "Anhui has a long history of using 12 people to stir fry melon seeds, is it considered exploitation?" This has become a very sensitive topic circulating throughout the country, with debates, defenses, and crackdowns. A major debate with strong ideological characteristics has begun.

It is obvious that in the orthodox political economy discourse system at that time, the exploitative nature of the era was beyond doubt. Marx clearly defined the boundary between "small owners" and "capitalists" in Chapter 9 of Volume 1, Part 3 of "Capital". According to his calculations, at that time (mid-19th century), those who employed less than 8 people and directly participated in the production process like workers were "intermediate figures between capitalists and workers, becoming small owners", while those who employed more than 8 people began to "occupy the surplus value of workers" and became capitalists. In almost all socialist theories, "seven down and eight up" is an ironclad boundary. Nowadays, the long-standing melon seed factory actually employs 12 people, and its nature is almost self-evident.