(A new installment for A Critique of Rationalism in Modern World Ideologies by Sherwin Lu will continue next month.)

THE TEXT

“Socialism makes people lazy” is a common belief for many people and this false belief becomes a strong piece of evidence against the socialist system. However, does socialism really produce lazy people? Are workers indeed not motivated to work hard under socialism? Judging from my own family members’ performance, it seems to be true and untrue at the same time. When I was a child, my mother often called in sick because she would get the same pay, going to work or not. Isn’t this a proof that socialism encourages laziness? Not really! When my mother was “sick” at home, my father was eager to work at any cost, even when he was seriously ill. Why did my father work so hard even though he did not get more pay for his effort? In his own words, he worked hard in order to return the favor from the Communist Party. What kind of favor did he owe the Communist Party, then?

My father was born in a very poor peasant’s family near the Yellow River in Shandong Province in northern China. His family was so poor that they could not even afford to send him to school. Instead, he started to work for a landlord at a very young age. Nevertheless, no matter how hard he worked, he and his family still lived in poverty. When he was a teenager, permanent poverty and constant famine forced him to relocate to Beiping (today’s Beijing) where he continued to live a poor life. As an industrial worker at the bottom of the society, he also suffered all kinds of bullying, insults, exploitation and oppression from the capitalist class. Fortunately, after the Communist Party took power, my father was liberated together with all the working people in China! From then on, my father became a member of the leading class and was able to enjoy a stable and happy life! Job security, pension, and free health care as well as a higher social status as a master of the nation became a reality that he had never even dreamed of. It was the first time ever that he was satisfied with his life. He fully understood that it was the Communist Party who had provided him with such a great life and that without the Communist Party he would still live in suffering. That was why he wanted to repay the Communist Party for this great favor by working hard day in and day out.

Unlike my father, I was dissatisfied with my life. I was born and grew up under the red flag so I have never experienced exploitation and oppression. What made me unhappy was that children from revolutionaries’ and intellectuals’ families lived a better life. In addition, their subtle discrimination against children from working class families made me feel that the Communist Party should have liberated me from class inequality. Nevertheless, my father strongly disagreed with me: “Why aren’t you contented with such a good life? Do you realize that you are actually living in a honey jar?” Only after suffering from a tremendous amount of exploitation and oppression under Western capitalist system did I start to understand my father. He was right: When I was in China, I was indeed living in a honey jar! Without many years of suffering in the Western world, I would never come to understand why Chinese workers of my father’s generation loved the Community Party so much. They learned this simple truth from their personal experience: Only the socialist system can guarantee them a stable and happy life with human dignity! Therefore, they sincerely thanked the Communist Party and would like to return the favor by their hard work. In order to build the socialist motherland, millions of Chinese workers devoted themselves to socialist construction and only because of their dedication and sacrifices, the world is able to witness the Chinese economic miracle in the past few decades, which was possible only because of what had been achieved in the glorious Mao era, including the 10 years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution! My father’s era was an era of working class in power! It was the first time in human history that labor was valued so much! It was the first time that workers were motivated to work so enthusiastically so as to have created numerous economic miracles!

Countless examples demonstrate that men are not born lazy but are made lazy by the capitalist system which is based on exploitation and oppression. I myself am a case in point. I was extremely ambitious and worked very diligently to have a successful career while in China. Thanks to the universal guarantee of employment for university graduates in the fields of their studies, I had no difficulties in establishing a career in my chosen field, which enabled me to bring into full play my knowledge and skills to secure a fulfilling life and meanwhile to benefit the society. Also, because of the job security provided by the socialist system, no one ever needs to be concerned about losing one’s job. Therefore, I was able to commit myself to my professional duties without any worry about the possibility of being fired or laid off. In addition, contrary to capitalist relations of production hinging on competition, personal striving and individual interests, socialist relations of production are favorable to comradeship, cooperation and mutual benefits. An exploitation-free and oppression-free working environment which characterizes the socialist working place is naturally stress-free and bullying-free, which cannot be achieved in any capitalist society. What a great joy to work in a socialist working place! A deep sense of belonging, satisfaction, achievement and fulfillment remains the fondest memory of my working experiences in socialist China.

       After immigrating to Canada, I was surprised to find that work in the West is organized in such a radically different way that I had to learn to deal with a variety of man-made capitalist-specific barriers to employment. Resume, cover letter, interview, networking, job search, employment retention and many other unnecessary activities suck so much energy out of people but are deemed as essential skills to survive in the capitalist West. Also to my surprise, under the market economy, my academic degree in humanities and social sciences becomes unmarketable only because capitalists redefine skills as something that can generate profits for the capitalist class rather than something that benefits society as a whole. For the first time in my life I had to face great obstacles in finding and keeping a job, which are permanent struggles during anyone’s entire working life in the West. Not only that, the purpose of work under capitalism is just to make a living and to pay bills, which I had never imagined could be problems under socialism. What is more, there is no democracy at the work place where every decision is made by the management behind the doors without consulting workers. Under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, working relationship in the West is extremely stressful and your coworkers are your worst enemies while in socialist China they are your best friends. Bullying and other stress-inducing factors are prevalent at work due to such capitalistic ideologies and practices as excessive competition, unrelenting rivalry, lack of sincere co-operation and lack of democracy at the work place. Soon I came to the realization that alienation of labor makes working under capitalism such a great suffering that I would prefer to avoid work altogether if possible. Even though I still work very hard, it is not on my own free-will but is forced on me. Every morning it is a great struggle for me to get out of bed and to drive to work. I no longer feel the joy, peace, satisfaction and fulfillment I enjoyed in China. I am definitely not the only person who feels this way. In reality the majority of people in the West also feel that they are forced to work by the need to make money. I am only one of them. A recent Hays Canada study shows that half of Canada’s working population is unhappy, and a 2013 Gallop pollfound that 70 percent of American workers hate their jobs. Obviously, work in the West is a necessity and a source of unavoidable pain at the same time. As such, I finally conclude from many people’s experiences that it is exactly the reason why the Communist Party of China during Mao’s era considered it as a great mission to liberate the two-thirds of mankind from the severe miseries imposed by capitalism! How much I miss the days when I worked in China where the working class with a great sense of pride work together to built a brand new socialist society! What a significant contrast between working under capitalism as a wage slave and working under socialism as a master of the enterprise!

Indeed, Western capitalists and their government are perfect “lazy-bone” producers!  Why? Since the beginning of capitalism, unemployment has always been used by the ruling class as the most effective tool to control the working majority – it aggravates competition between workers so that business owners can keep wages low and reap bigger profits. That is why a capitalist government has never tried and will never try to guarantee employment for every member of the society. And keeping a certain percentage of working people out of jobs is also the surest way to demoralize hard-working people into lazy individuals. As the economic situation worsens in all Western countries, the unemployment rate goes higher and higher. An ever-growing unemployed population is haunting the West. A Finnish immigrant lost his job as a civil engineer after several years of services for the government and a few private companies. After sending out thousands of resumes without any response from employers, he felt hopeless and eventually gave up. As he gets accustomed to his unemployed life, laziness naturally sets in and he ended up on social assistance. Added to his suffering, when unhappiness takes a toll on his mental health, he is labeled by the society as mentally ill and unemployable! It seems that blaming the victim is the norm in today’s Western capitalist world. In reality it is the unjust capitalist employment system that makes many working men and women unemployed in spite of the fact that they have many skills to contribute to the society.  What a waste of valuable human resources! And what an insult to human dignity! Under socialism nobody is unemployable and everybody is a valuable asset for the society!

Western capitalists have destroyed dreams of many immigrants, dampening their passion to work hard for a better future. The majority of highly educated immigrants had very successful careers before immigrating to the West. They became lazy after living in the West for a while. For the first generation immigrants, to find a job in their fields of studies became a luxury, no matter how intelligent they are. In order to survive in the West, they are obliged to forget about all their education, skills and previous achievements. Tormented by the invisible hand of the market, many immigrants with master’s and PhD degrees are forced to change their professions. It is not uncommon for formal professors, engineers and even managers to work in factories, drive taxis and wash dishes. Even Gu Cheng (顾城, 1956-1993), one of the most accomplished Chinese poets in 1980s, was unable to make a living as a poet in the capitalist West. After he immigrated to New Zealand in 1988, his career ended as a poet, which is a common fate for many talented artists, writers, scholars, philosophers and scientists who were lured to the West by a false dream of “democracy”, “freedom” and so-called “human rights”.  Only a very few lucky ones managed to find professions in their fields of studies and can somehow enjoy what they do. The majority who are disillusioned about their American dream and other varieties of Western dreams, however, have to be accustomed to the daily suffering of working in physically-straining and mind-numbing menial jobs just in order to survive. Although the West portrays their society in a rosy picture, it is struggle for survival that is the essence and reality of Western-style “democracy”. How can anybody be passionate about his/her work in such unfair and unjust working environments?

Undoubtedly, both socialist and capitalist entrepreneurs make serious attempts to motivate workers to the maximum to generate profits for their enterprises. However, under the two fundamentally different socio-political systems, they use completely different methods to motivate workers. Capitalists play upon such lowest-level human instincts and desires as concerns over livelihood, greediness, and selfishness. Those who willingly work hard under capitalism are those who love money enough to toil for it. However, for those who absolutely cannot cultivate a love for money, work and life itself becomes an unbearable torture. Dissatisfied with a life of constant worry about money, the poet Gu Cheng eventually committed suicide. Before taking his own life, he lamented: “sometimes I truly would like to leave the world where I always have to think about money and am obliged to earn money”. As the Bible says, the love of money is a root of all evil. Even though contemporary mainstream Christianity has reconciled itself with Western capitalism, the Biblical principle still holds to be true that a society whose very foundation is to encourage, seduce or even force people to work for their private monetary gain is devilish. Nobody can deny that a society, which Gu Cheng successfully escaped from, on one hand naturally produces selfish individuals with degenerated morality and on the other hand kills many talents and geniuses whose skills are not appreciated by the capitalists for money-making purposes. Another famous Chinese poet Xu Zhimo (徐志摩, 1897-1931) in the early 20^th century rightly criticized the capitalistic competition and utilitarianism as they are particularly “harmful to the brilliant brains and their pursuit for pure knowledge and truth” since a commercial society with its “anti-human business” “can only formulate superficial and shallow souls but cannot generate creative instincts”. Therefore, he firmly advocated for China to “reject the [capitali]sm from the other side of the ocean.” He further pointed out that capitalism and all its values “are the enemies of an ideal society, obstacles of a decent human life. As for China, nowadays, the only hope is for the leaders of the nation to wake up, reject the foreign temptation, change the direction of self-destruction by their examples, otherwise the future waiting for the country would be darkness and downfall. As [the British philosopher] Bertrand Russell stated, the Chinese are the least contaminated by the evil force [of capitalism] therefore the most promising nation on earth.”(《罗素又来说话了》) Xu’s insightful critique is still valid for today’s China. 

The great Chinese philosopher Confucius stated in his Analects, “The mind of the superior man is conversant with righteousness; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain.” As a capitalist society is paradise for the mean men, a socialist society is heaven for the superior men and the noble-minded. A socialist system attempts to motivate people to work hard toward building a more just and fair human society by cultivating a sense of achievement, morality, responsibility, honor, vocation and vision, the highest-level desires and instincts in a human being. No wonder those who work hard for the common good under socialism are the most selfless, most sacrificial, most noble, most honest and most respectable men and women of their time. As the well-known Chinese novelist Wang Anyi (王安忆,1954- ) observes, “Communist ideal always attracts the best children. Communism is like a rainbow in the sky. It attracts the best children from all over the world.”  (《伤心太平洋》)  Needless to say, a society led by such individuals is definitely a society of “all for one and one for all”. Only a fool does not want to live in a society like this!