Labor Laws in China

The National People's Congress has begun delibaration on a new labor law, an important next step in the development of capitalist labor (power) markets. By the way, a lot of the definitions of capitalism on the web are unadulterated b.s. (Google and other search engines promote these obfuscating definitions by ranking them high in searches on the term.) The term was coined by Marx to describe a specific social arrangement within which workers were employed to create new social value. It has nothing to do with human rights or individual freedom or even private property (in general) or markets (in general). This is precisely why populists at the turn of the last century, including William Jennings Bryan, were understood as anti-capitalist populists (fighting against the growth of big corporations that hired armies of laborers versus the self-employed farmer or artisan or the family business). Capitalism is defined by the development of markets in labor power. And this is an important point for understanding the transformations taking place in the Chinese economy. Before the pro-capitalist reforms, there was no labor power market in China. Workers were assigned to a specific work unit or commune. And the first step in the reforms was not, in fact, towards the creation of capitalism (capitalist labor markets) but was, rather, allowing productive self-employment. Productive self-employment has always been an alternative to capitalism and has generally been the victim of capitalist development. The same is happening in China. Just as self-employed doctors have become rare in the U.S. as capitalist medicine has come to dominate medical care, the same is happening throughout rural China as self-employed farmers (who had gained this right with the earliest reforms) are increasingly finding themselves pushed out of business and into capitalist labor power markets. The problem has been that these new labor power markets are poorly regulated and provide ample opportunities for the employers to abuse their employees. That is why new labor laws in China are needed (just as they were needed in the early period of capitalist development in the West). Among the problems that are being addressed in this new legislation: employers have been able to withhold or reduce wages for just about any reason they can make up for doing so, employees can be terminated without notice, and the terms of labor contract have been, in general, too ambiguous and open to interpretation. Why the new attempt to reform the labor law (the first labor law was passed in 1994)? It is, in part, a response to growing dissatisfaction with the Party among workers and also the outcome of growing internal debates between the Party's minority leftists and the ruling modernist Marxists. President Hu Jintao likes to see himself as a moderating force in these debates and wants to use his tenure as president to make Chinese capitalism a bit less harsh (with the hopes that this will moderate the protests and keep the leftwing of the Party quiet). We'll see.