In a recent reading club, some comrades mentioned a news story about a “bottom-tier programmer earning three thousand yuan monthly” who suddenly died. However, after investigation, it was found that Gao, the deceased, was not a low-level worker at all, but a worker aristocrat who divided surplus value and sucked the blood and sweat of the broad laboring masses.
The original report mentioned that Gao was a department manager in his company, equivalent to a middle management position. The so-called “three thousand yuan” in the headline was only the base salary, plus various commissions and performance bonuses, which actually amounted to nearly twenty thousand yuan after taxes. Clearly, the bourgeoisie fabricated such news with ulterior motives. They knew very well Gao’s position and actual income level but deliberately wrote the headline as “32-year-old programmer with a base salary of three thousand” suddenly died, and also created a tragic atmosphere in the text, describing Gao’s wife calling him home “with deep affection” late at night, and claiming Gao “sleeps only (!) 6-7 hours a day.” This was simply a clumsy attempt to portray “low-income groups” as capable of renting out empty houses or driving private cars for ride-hailing, as “experts” say.
In short, the reason the bourgeoisie fabricates such news reports is to erase the brain-body and class differences in capitalist society, to portray office workers with high salaries as being the same as those working on construction sites, in factories, or delivering takeout as beasts of burden, and to equate worker aristocrats and bourgeoisie with the broad physical laborers. This is nothing but saying: “Though small and large differ, they are both ‘not carefree’.” Although programmers sit in offices and enjoy air conditioning and heating every day, they are still “working people,” just with “higher wages.” They are also “oppressed” by capitalists to the point of sudden death. We do not deny that Gao might have died suddenly, but he was not killed by labor itself, but by engaging in exploitative activities—dying for personal success, climbing higher, and consuming more of the blood and sweat of workers and peasants. Such death, as a result of contradictions within the exploiting class, is as light as a feather.
Below is the news link for everyone to critique:
TMD, only six or seven hours, right? How many workers, after going home, can’t even sleep for six hours. I think these sudden deaths are purely due to excessive indulgence.
Bourgeoisie will not show great mercy by compensating workers with 390,000 yuan; many workers who die from overwork in factories receive at most 130,000 yuan in compensation for work-related deaths. They are also forced to sign and swallow the compensation with their fingerprints, suppressing the voices of the families. Recently, the reactionary labor law of the Chinese Communist Party further stipulates that “factories have no obligation to provide humane compensation, only the obligation to send the deceased to medical treatment,” meaning that once the worker’s body is taken away by the hospital after death, they can ignore it. Similarly, a 60-year-old sorting worker at Zhongtong Ningbo branch, who died suddenly after consecutive night shifts, bought work injury insurance, but was excluded from compensation by Ningbo Social Security Bureau due to age, claiming he did not meet the conditions. Now, the so-called arbitration bloggers like Shao Wudi and others who are popular on Bilibili are all sugar-coated agents released by the Chinese Communist Party, pretending to express some form of class “rights protection” that effectively erases class differences. The owl who loves legal aid even runs his own law firm as a capitalist. Those arbitration bloggers are backed by law firms affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, and they have revealed that their success in arbitration is due to cooperation with CCP courts, objectively dulling workers’ struggles.
The news intentionally downplays this person as a so-called “middle manager,” but in reality, most of the overtime is just pushing others to work 996, engaging in various overtime competitions, etc., and in fact, it is truly exploitation leading to death.