In social practice, not every labor will create a corresponding wealth. A lot of ineffective labor not only does not create wealth, but it consumes it. For example, a hard day of farming will have a corresponding effect on the growth of crops, and recreational activities such as going out to climb mountains consume a lot of physical strength, but they have a counterproductive effect on the increase of wealth. In the same way, not every accumulation of wealth requires a corresponding labor – or more precisely, a corresponding human labor. Some natural wealth can be harvested freely, such as fish and shrimp that grow in the river, and if you pick it up, you will immediately get this asset with exchange value.
In real life, human beings have gone through tens of thousands of years of evolution in spiritual civilization, distorting many of the most basic logics. On the economic side, since the advent of commerce, the labor that produces wealth is exploited by the labor that carries the goods, since the emergence of culture, the labor that produces material wealth is exploited by the labor that produces spiritual wealth, and since there has been some hysteria, the labor that produces hard income is exploited by the labor that entertains itself. With the development and progress of society, the forms of exploitation have become more and more complex, so that the productive forces have been continuously improved, and the production and life of human beings have also fallen into various strange traps.
Under the pressure of strong social consensus, we have transformed the correspondence between the production and distribution of wealth to an extremely vague one. The gradual increase in the share of unearned wealth in the distribution of wealth in society as a whole seems to be more serious than unearned gains. Labor does not have a positive effect on the production of wealth, but in the name of labor, it naturally acquires the corresponding right of distribution, so that after crossing the border, it forms a reversal, which promotes the emergence of a large number of ineffective labor for the purpose of obtaining distribution. The original intention of human labor is to produce wealth that can nourish the body and mind through such contributions, but the intervention of various factors of production other than labor provides a stage for the existence of a large number of ineffective labor under the wage economy.
No one's wealth is created independently and thus enjoyed and distributed independently. The exploitation of nature by human beings is more serious than the exploitation of their fellow human beings, but the survival pressure of nature is less than that of human beings. It is not necessary to work all the time to survive and develop, so that human beings have enough leisure and surplus wealth to carry out consumption activities that have nothing to do with survival and development. However, today, when the productivity has been greatly improved, why can't the vast majority of human beings get rid of the shackles of labor? It lies in the fact that the distorted ideology of human beings has made labor and distribution too tight.
Although our current work pressure is decreasing and our work efficiency is constantly improving, there is still a serious mismatch between our leisure and entertainment conditions and our production results. A large amount of ineffective labor eats away at the labor force and wealth of the whole society, which is the norm in our society today. Our excessive respect for labor and excessive trampling on labor coexist, and I will call it formalistic labor. People at the top of the wealth distribution chain have converged on the bad quality of scattering wealth for nothing, and designed some projects that can make people work but cannot produce wealth for employment, leading the consensus of the whole society on distribution according to work, so that gradually many labor projects are not set up for production, but only for distribution. Wealth is never created in a vacuum, and the pressure of production caused by such a waste of wealth is borne by those workers who are really involved in the production of wealth. But most of them don't take on much, because there is also the magic of nature and technology.
As a result, our society has become this miraculous state. A large number of people are engaged in ineffective labor that does not produce wealth but only consumes it, and a small number of people interact with nature and produce wealth to provide for everyone. The harder that large group of people work, the more frequent the exchange of wealth in the whole society, the more serious the consumption, and the greater the pressure on nature and technology. In the long run, the consequence will inevitably be that the entire human group will collectively perish in the contradictory state of squandering their own lives on the one hand and squandering the gifts of nature on the other.
Any kind of normalized social chaos can be traced back to the most basic operating logic of the entire society. To completely rectify these chaos, it is often necessary to subvert this logic. In the present social order, the best, quickest, and best way to increase collective wealth is to reduce ineffective labor. We should return labor to the essence of production, instead of doing boring things in the atmosphere of comparison. In a formalist family, parents let their child sweep the floor for 10 minutes and then pay him 100 yuan, but the result is that the compensation is still paid in full for sweeping the floor. As a result, the parents lost 100 yuan and had to add the physical strength to clean again, and the children made a profit while making trouble. In a formalist society, more stupid labor and distribution abound, mainly because nature is too generous as parents, and human beings are really too idle as children.
– February 19, 2024
"More than a Taste".