Let’s imagine these scenarios: You tirelessly contribute to your company’s success day in and day out, making significant contributions to its performance while your boss merely stands around giving orders and working with words; you’re working in “996 mode”(a popular term on the Internet in mainland China, referring to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week) and barely making ends meet with a modest salary, but your boss rakes in millions annually; and unfortunately, you discover that the promised year-end bonus has became a joke, but your boss is busy using company culture to “PUA” you, suggesting that your work is more about personal growth—do you ever feel exploited?

Your boss does virtually no work, while all the tasks are handled by the employees. Why is it that the capitalists earn tens or even hundreds of times what the workers do just by sitting back? Shouldn’t the profits in the boss’s hands also include a share rightfully belonging to the workers? Is he appropriating what should be the workers’ rightful earnings? Does this exploitation have any justification?

Shouldn’t we dedicate a major discussion programme to delve into this issue? But before we do, let’s understand the definition of exploitation. What is exploitation? Exploitation is a concept introduced by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. In simple terms, it’s when capitalists appropriate the labour income that rightfully belongs to the workers. More formally, exploitation is the capitalist’s unpaid appropriation of the surplus value created by the worker’s surplus labour. What’s this so-called surplus value, huh? And why do capitalists get to snatch the surplus value created by workers for free? Let’s start with the labour theory of value: the value of a commodity is the human labour that’s embedded in it, and it’s determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. This socially necessary labour time is the average time it takes for a general worker in society to produce a commodity. Generally speaking, value is created by the labour of the workers, right?

But because of the development of private ownership, in the “evil” capitalist society (very Chinese description LOL), capitalists have monopolised the means of production like machines and factories. They don’t participate in labour themselves; instead, they hire workers. The issue is, the capitalists don’t pay the workers purely based on the labour they provide. They deduct the surplus value created by the workers, keeping it as the company’s profit.

So, what exactly is surplus value? It’s closely related to the labour theory of value, but it’s a bit special. Mainly because in the “evil” capitalist society, labour power is also a “commodity” that can flow. But this commodity is different from machines or factories. Labour power is a special commodity. Although its value is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to maintain it (basically, the money needed to keep a worker alive), it can create more value than its own value. This means the value created by labour (the value of the goods produced by the workers) is greater than the value of the labour power itself, which is just enough to keep the worker alive. And the difference between these two values is exactly the surplus value. The salaries capitalists paid are just enough to keep the worker alive, however, they take the surplus value created by the workers for free. This is what Marx calls “exploitation”.

Back to our original question, why do those “evil” capitalists (again, very Chinese terminology lol) get to deduct the surplus value? It’s because they monopolise the means of production, but the workers don’t. Without the means of production, workers are not able to produce on their own. Therefore, they have no choice but to transfer their surplus labour products to the capitalists for free. This forced transfer of surplus labour is essentially forced labour, or to put it simply, unpaid overtime.

Given this, it’s clear that this kind of exploitation by capitalists, which involves forced labour, is unjust. Many political philosophers, following Marx, from Britain to America, argue that capitalist exploitation of workers is morally reprehensible. Let’s not go too deep; just think about us workers slogging away at 996, while the capitalists are sitting there doing nothing and raking in the profits. No matter where you are in the world, whether in the West or China, any society or culture would consider this unjust, right?

However! Is this TRUE???