Recently, a screenshot has gone viral on platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
The content of the image shows a cleaning lady at Fuzhou Dongbai Commercial Center who committed suicide by jumping off after suffering under the oppression of the capitalist system. Her monthly salary is only over a thousand yuan, and she is also owed wages. The labor intensity is extremely heavy, working conditions are very harsh, and her living situation is tragic. The poster in the picture is a milk tea shop worker also exploited, who expressed deep sympathy for the cleaning lady who committed suicide. Since this incident, Dongbai Center has not responded directly, and insiders say the family of the cleaning lady has already been demanding compensation. Before this incident, there were many reports of cleaning workers suffering oppression and choosing to jump off buildings. For example, in November 2022, a cleaning worker at Shenzhen University committed suicide by jumping off. She used to: “lay on the ground in various corners of the school, only daring to sneak into the teaching building to sleep in the corner after students finished their evening self-study.” The toilet was her usual place to hang clothes, and she also showered and washed her hair there. Her bedding and pillows were kept in the cleaning supplies room. Some students even said on WeChat: they saw this cleaning aunt working three jobs alone, working until late at night, sometimes until two or three in the morning. To keep her job, some months she had to pay 3,000 yuan to the property management.
These stories are truly moving, even the petty bourgeoisie who are usually indulging in pleasure have come forward. During this period, many petty bourgeoisie spontaneously took photos of the cleaning staff’s break rooms in shopping malls and urged people to check if similar phenomena exist around them—“going to their workplaces, nearby office buildings, shopping malls, supermarkets, to see if such scenes are also present.” As more similar photos were shared online, they discovered: “Many cleaning staff do not have dedicated rest areas; the last compartment of the public restroom, the storage or workroom, is their rest area. Some even eat and take naps there.” However, just as these petty bourgeoisie expressed sympathy and compassion for female cleaners’ harsh working conditions and tragic lives on Women’s Day, some opportunistic online bloggers and media immediately appeared, hypocritically calling for the establishment of rest rooms for cleaning staff, and said:
“This is not welfare; it’s basic dignity.
When we are drinking coffee by the floor-to-ceiling windows
Please remember to leave a warm door for those guarding the city’s cleanliness.”
These “advocates” speak abstractly and detached from reality: “We cannot pretend not to see. This is not a motivational story about ‘hard work can improve life,’ but a systemic loss of dignity for workers under outsourced labor systems, a sharp projection of the rupture between urban living costs and bottom-tier income. The dignity of workers should not be curled up next to mop buckets, the warmth of universities is not only in lecture halls, but also in those dark corners that support the campus’s dignity.”
However, for employment workers like cleaners who rely on selling their labor to survive, the most directly impactful factor on their lives is their wages; working conditions are secondary. Therefore, calls and promotions on online platforms (mainly Xiaohongshu) to establish rest rooms for cleaning staff completely ignore the primary contradiction, and the previous posts did not point out why the working conditions and wages of cleaners have become so shockingly poor.
As Marxists, we are not satisfied with merely depicting social reality with abstract, ornate language, nor with offering superficial sympathy from a lofty perspective. We need to clearly and precisely point out the essence and causes of social issues in plain language, to indicate the direction of struggle. We speak based on facts and truth.
From the perspective of Marxist political economy, the plight of these cleaners is not simply “hard work cannot improve life” or “urban living costs and bottom income are disconnected,” nor can establishing rest rooms alone improve their situation.
According to the “Overall Statistics of Cleaning Personnel in Zhejiang Province,” “Most cleaning workers are over 50 years old, with the highest proportion between 50-60 years old, reaching 70%.” “The income of cleaning workers is affected by their years of service and workplace. Overall, their income is quite low. Among them, over 52% earn less than 4,000 yuan.” Why are the wages of cleaners so low? And why are most of them women?
Because, under capitalism, wages are a form of the value of labor power, and changes in wages are fundamentally based on changes in the value of labor power. When labor power is sold as a commodity in employment, it is governed by the laws of commodity prices—namely, supply and demand. In imperialist countries like China, with technological development, machines displacing workers have emerged. Large numbers of workers, unable to find jobs, become unemployed or semi-unemployed, leading to an oversupply of labor. Under these conditions, competition among workers to sell their labor intensifies, while competition among capitalists to buy labor weakens. This results in workers often being in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, while capitalists are in a dominant position. To survive, workers must sell their labor under the harsh conditions imposed by capitalists lowering wages. As a result, labor prices are often driven below the value of labor power. The quantity of living materials that wages can buy—the real wages—is often insufficient to meet workers’ basic needs or even sustain their minimum living standards. Because labor prices are extremely low, workers have to work even harder, leading to a saturated labor market, lower wages, and an inability to meet basic survival needs. To obtain enough living materials, they have to work under more arduous and exhausting conditions, which further depresses labor demand from the bourgeoisie, increasing unemployment.
In this vicious cycle, the bourgeoisie can more freely select younger, stronger labor, dismissing older workers. As in China a few years ago, where firing employees over 35 caused public outrage.
This is why older workers are extremely excluded from the job market, and women, due to physiological reasons like pregnancy and menstruation, are considered to generate less surplus value than men in the capitalist labor market. Socially, because they are bound by Confucian family roles, they are also marginalized in the labor market. Therefore, older female workers, often without pensions or with very low pensions, cannot maintain a normal standard of living and are forced into the heaviest, dirtiest cleaning jobs. Due to oversupply of labor, the number of middle-aged and elderly unemployed women is huge: according to the Nazi government’s frank admission in the “Elderly Reemployment and Population Dividend Release,” “Currently… 34.43% of 60-64-year-olds and 27.49% of 65-69-year-olds are employed… employment among those 70 and above is 11.76%.” Moreover, “According to public data, from February to September 2020, job seekers aged 35 and above who submitted resumes on Zhaopin increased by 14.9% year-on-year, more than twice the growth rate of those under 35; among them, those aged 35-49 increased by 13.5%, and those 50 and above increased by 32.4%.” This also indicates an aging workforce.
Therefore, in a society with widespread unemployment among elderly women, and with labor supply exceeding demand, wages for cleaners are driven down to extremely low levels. Because of these reasons, cleaners are also in an unfavorable position within the labor relationship with cleaning companies, often facing poor working conditions, and some even have to pay out of pocket for cleaning supplies.
Besides economic reasons, the reactionary rule of the Nazis also contributes to the current situation of cleaners. “In the barbaric country of imperialist China where the ruling class directly implements fascist policies, the plight of the broad working people is extremely tragic. Over the more than forty years of capitalist restoration in China, social wealth has increased significantly under the efforts of hundreds of millions of workers working overtime and under heavy loads day and night. But at the same time, the gap between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has widened and deepened. The essence of capitalist accumulation is ‘extreme wealth accumulation on one end and poverty, slavery, and labor torment on the other,’” for the bourgeoisie in Nazi China, the poorer the workers, the greater the profits they can extract. Therefore, this capitalist country not only refuses to improve workers’ conditions as they loudly claim with “poverty alleviation” and “common prosperity,” but also allows the bourgeoisie to exploit workers to the fullest. From this class basis, Nazi China and its bureaucratic capitalist system are the fundamental reasons for the decline of cleaners’ conditions. That’s why, in this reactionary fascist country that has shed its democratic veneer, real reforms are impossible.
From the policies issued by the Nazi Chinese government, it is clear that the Nazi government strongly supports the expansion of capital in the domestic service and cleaning industries, precisely because supporting capitalists in these sectors increases the exploitation of the proletariat and boosts fiscal revenue.
Given this, what is the purpose of bloggers and media outlets on the internet wildly hyping social reform— even just trivial “voice” to establish rest rooms? For this ongoing, long-term spontaneous movement initiated by petty bourgeoisie on online platforms, which is exploited by the Nazi government and opportunists, we should view dialectically:
The typical petty bourgeoisie women on Xiaohongshu who spontaneously investigate the working conditions of school and nearby shopping mall cleaners are generally petty bourgeoisie leftists. When they see the suicides of cleaners or revelations that cleaners can only rest and eat in the last cubicle of the toilet, they may feel some sympathy. However, this sympathy usually occurs without touching their personal interests. These petty bourgeoisie often see such disclosures during leisure and leave a comment before continuing their pleasure-seeking. Before ideological remolding, although they may have some sympathy for the suffering of the proletariat, they do not abandon personal interests to participate in labor practice, revolutionary struggle, or sacrifice their lives to overthrow the Nazi rule and build socialism. This is because: “The petty bourgeoisie is a class between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its upper layer is closer to the bourgeoisie, and its lower layer is closer to the proletariat. Although petty bourgeoisie ideology differs from bourgeois ideology, overall it still belongs to the realm of capitalist private ownership ideology. Because petty bourgeoisie engages in scattered, small-scale, individual labor, it develops habits of focusing on its narrow life and property. When facing issues, they naturally prioritize personal interests.” (From “The Road of Future Revolution in China”)
Furthermore, since the petty bourgeoisie, on one hand, tends to lean toward the bourgeoisie as private owners, but on the other hand suffers exploitation from the bourgeoisie and faces bankruptcy, they are in a contradictory position. They can criticize and expose many contradictions of capitalism but do not understand the root causes of these contradictions. They oppose private ownership only from a standpoint of defending small private property, not advocating for revolutionary abolition of private ownership. They imagine that social reform can eliminate capitalism’s shortcomings. Due to these reasons, this spontaneous movement is merely a petty bourgeois plea for social reform by Nazi bureaucrats or the bourgeoisie. It is like slaves kneeling and begging their masters for mercy! It is a vain hope to “add the ocean of capitalist suffering into a bottle of social reform lemon juice to turn it into a sweet socialist ocean” (Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Social Revolution?”). Even CCTV admits: “Establishing rest rooms for cleaners… but in terms of quantity, it’s still not many… shopping malls, office buildings, every inch of land is precious.” Moreover, when all media copy and paste headlines like “Cleaners’ rest rooms should not be the last cubicle of the toilet,” why do they all tacitly ignore the most crucial issue—wages and benefits for cleaners?
Thus, the social reform hoped for by petty bourgeoisie is impossible to truly realize.
Besides petty bourgeoisie leftists who have some sympathy for the proletariat, many malicious actors seek to profit from this spontaneous movement. The Xiaohongshu bloggers who produce cheesy, empty language are among them. They seek fame and traffic (mainly to promote products and share surplus value from industrial workers), and they loudly “speak out,” but their purpose is obvious. The most evidence of their ambitions is a recent trending search on Xiaohongshu:
The Nazi government’s mouthpieces, CCTV, are also happy to exploit this harmless, non-critical content that does not challenge private ownership or the Nazi social system to demonstrate their justice and deceive the masses. Thus, the Nazi government colludes with some malicious opportunists, using CCTV news and various self-media to create public opinion, deceiving the petty bourgeoisie who harbor illusions about fascist rule and diverting real contradictions.
History has proven that this “benevolent master’s” patronizing “voice,” which pretends to show compassion from a superior position, has no real impact on the foundation of Nazi rule. Otherwise, this event would not have “gloriously” appeared on CCTV but would have been suppressed online and in reality, like the Pucheng incident and ongoing workers’ strikes.
We detest the parasitic class that exploits and licks the surplus value of workers, indulging in luxury like “drinking coffee by the floor-to-ceiling windows,” while on the keyboard, they hypocritically “speak out” for cleaners’ rest rooms. We despise these opportunists who use the tragic plight of workers as tools for fame and profit. So, what should we do? For Marxists, we should not only see that cleaners are oppressed but also recognize that they are the proletariat— the most selfless and most combative class. Because they have no private property, they are not burdened by it. When oppressed, they can stand up and fight. The 2018 strike of Jinqiu cleaners in Shanghai proves this: workers did not survive on pity but united with over 120 workers, gained support from security personnel, and fought back! This spontaneous economic struggle also achieved results.
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/328146465
Not only cleaners, but Chinese proletarian women are a powerful revolutionary force. Their extremely low economic and political status makes their revolutionary potential even greater. Petty bourgeoisie women on online platforms, who also have experienced oppression, can, after learning Marxist principles and undergoing ideological remolding, abandon reformist illusions and contribute to mobilizing the proletariat to overthrow private ownership. We must demand rest rooms and wage increases during this transitional period of capitalism, but more importantly, we must overthrow private ownership, eliminate exploitation, and liberate all humanity—solving the root problems!