Creation: Editorial Department of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
On November 12, the General Office of the State Council issued the “Notice on the Arrangement of Some Holidays in 2025.” Starting from January 1, 2025, the holidays for all citizens will be increased by two days (the Spring Festival and Labor Day each will have one more day), bringing the total number of statutory holidays to 13 days. This policy of increasing holidays appears to be beneficial to the people, improving their working conditions, and imposing restrictions on the widely condemned “adjusted rest days.” However, the bourgeoisie increasing holidays is not “the old master’s mercy” giving the workers some rest, but a behavior serving their own class interests.
Generally, the arrangement of rest days is to serve the workers’ recovery of their labor capacity and is an important part of the reproduction of labor power. But it must be pointed out that the nature of socialist rest days and capitalist rest days is entirely different. During the socialist period, statutory holidays were even fewer than after the capitalist restoration—New Year, Labor Day each had one day off, National Day had two days, and the Spring Festival had three days, totaling only seven days, and there were no weekends. The current holiday system was established after the capitalist restoration. The double holiday system was finalized in 1995, and in 1999, the State Council reformed and introduced a new statutory holiday system, setting three days for the Spring Festival, Labor Day, and National Day each, and adding Qingming, Dragon Boat, and Mid-Autumn Festivals as statutory holidays, ultimately determining the total holidays at 11 days. This seems to be a great thing: more statutory holidays, shorter working days, and improved people’s lives. But after the capitalist restoration, Chinese workers did not live better lives because of the increase in statutory holidays. What is going on here? The fundamental issue lies in the ownership of the means of production.
Many vulgar bourgeois economists boast about the role of holidays in “promoting consumption,” but they forget one of the most important political economy principles: all consumption is based on certain production. Some people must produce so that others can consume. If someone proposes to increase more holidays to enable workers to consume more during holidays, they are essentially demanding that more workers engage in more hated wage labor during holidays, producing more goods for consumption. To make workers produce more so they can consume more, holidays are effectively canceled! This is undoubtedly a brilliant paradox. Ask yourself, when restaurant waiters finish their shifts, supermarket clerks close their stores, transportation workers take leave, or even sanitation workers and farmers—who maintain the daily operation of society—are absent, or when all workers abandon their posts and rush into shops, what can they buy? Who provides their clothing, food, housing, and transportation? It is clear that such a paradox can only be resolved under the premise of the employment labor system in capitalism: either it becomes empty talk in practice or turns into countless workers producing more exhausted than before during holidays, while parasitic classes—capitalists, big merchants, usurers, securities speculators, worker aristocrats—flock to “attentive” shops and enjoy a “higher quality” consumption experience than before. This presents a stark irony: you do your best, I allocate according to needs!
If the essence of the matter is like this, then increasing holidays only benefits the exploiters’ consumption experience, while only causing greater torment for the working people. But what if holidays do not allow all workers to rest, only some non-essential workers? Under capitalism, this situation will not change. As mentioned above, one person’s consumption means another’s production, so the consumption of these workers must also be based on the production of others. This first excludes the possibility of large numbers of industrial and commercial workers resting, or merely replaces their positions with others—so the situation remains the same: the total amount of production by workers stays constant, only the specific workers change. Most importantly, even if all these difficulties are overcome, after some idle workers are pushed out of society, they face a new problem: where does the money for consumption come from? Capitalism is built on the foundation of wage labor, and all the income of capitalists comes from the exploitation of workers. Workers’ wages for their labor are not equal to the value of the goods they produce but are the residual after deducting the capitalist’s income—surplus value. Workers’ total consumption is insufficient to buy all the goods they produce, and capitalists cannot give up exploitation, leading to a serious contradiction between production and consumption—goods pile up, while consumption is scarce. Even for workers with real free time, holidays can only mean poverty with no work to do.
Finally, the superficial extension of statutory holidays cannot fundamentally improve the living conditions of the working masses. Capitalists constantly find ways to intensify exploitation—forcing overtime, encroaching on rest days, or setting complex labor regulations within limited working hours to increase workers’ labor intensity. Workers cannot get basic rest during limited holidays, and even the statutory holidays themselves have become a distant dream. For many workers in the service industry today, “statutory holidays” have become synonymous with disaster; forced overtime is the norm, and holidays are the most painful working days. It is evident that when society still belongs to a few owning the means of production and forcing others to work for them, the contradiction between production and consumption can only be confrontational. Increasing holidays cannot fundamentally solve this problem. It shows that to truly improve workers’ rest conditions, only a revolution to establish socialism can achieve this.
In socialist society, since the means of production have been publicly owned, the antagonistic contradiction between production and consumption is resolved. When the surplus products produced by workers no longer belong to capitalists in the form of surplus value but become the common income of all workers, each worker can, on the one hand, receive a portion of social products proportional to their labor, and on the other hand, obtain social welfare benefits—medical care, education, housing, and other social services—from their necessary income. Thus, workers, as producers of all products, can consume all the goods they produce, and their extra labor becomes their extra gain for the first time.
At this point, increasing holidays becomes unnecessary because labor under socialism is no longer wage labor serving capitalist greed but socialist labor serving the well-being of all workers, including themselves. Workers who control the means of production can consciously plan reasonable production, arrange suitable working hours and intensity for themselves, and no longer fall into endless toil as in capitalism. In this way, labor transforms from a forced, painful task into a beneficial social activity that benefits oneself and others. Even without extra holidays, workers can achieve a proper balance of work and rest. Since labor is aimed at improving the living standards of all people, and rest is well guaranteed, why must holidays be increased? This is the secret why socialist society does not have excessively long holidays yet people remain energetic and physically vigorous. As a result, the contradiction where some workers must produce for others’ consumption during holidays is also resolved—in socialist society, a day of labor is also a day of consumption, and necessary work to maintain social operation during fewer holidays can be arranged through proper scheduling. This is entirely achievable by the workers who hold the reins of production.
Certainly, such a situation also means that the entire society must implement what Marx called the bourgeois legal-rational distribution according to labor, and that inequality still exists in fact, but it is a significant step forward compared to the capitalist distribution system of labor without reward and reward without labor. Moreover, after the establishment of socialism, with the development of productive forces and the continuous transformation of production relations, and as people’s ideological consciousness improves, labor increasingly takes on the meaning: it is no longer merely a means of livelihood but the primary interest of people. When labor truly means developing various talents, gaining experience, enriching knowledge, and cultivating interests, who would refuse more labor? Thus, the holidays that seemed unattainable under capitalism are now the opposite—no one complains about too little rest but rather about too little labor! At this point, holidays lose their reason for existence, and people will live in a happy society where labor and proper rest are fully combined. This is the beautiful picture depicted by communism.
From this, it is clear that the decree by the Chinese Revisionist Party to increase holidays is merely ineffective in improving the working conditions of the broad masses of workers. Just two days of holiday cannot allow them to rest from heavy wage labor, let alone that they have difficulty enjoying the holidays they should have. The sudden increase of two statutory holidays by the Chinese Revisionist Party not only reflects their attempt to deceive the people with reformist means but also precisely indicates the deepening ruling crisis. Looking at this year, the VAT (tax on most circulating goods), which truly reflects the domestic consumption market, has fallen by 5.6% compared to the same period last year. The extreme weakness of the consumption market has made the Chinese Revisionist government nervous, and they are trying every means to reverse this decline. But as Marx pointed out long ago: “The fundamental cause of all real crises is nothing but the poverty of the masses and their limited consumption…”[1] The extended statutory holidays cannot change the reality of the extremely impoverished and powerless masses to expand consumption; they are meaningless for improving consumption. Increasing statutory holidays will inevitably become a ridiculous cover-up for the ugly rule of the Chinese Revisionist regime. For the working people, it is meaningless because they have never truly had rest days; for the exploiting class, it is equally meaningless because every day can be their rest day. The problem has never been about the number of holidays, but about who has nothing and who is rich beyond measure. When the private ownership of the means of production in capitalism remains the root of workers’ suffering, any holiday is useless. The real solution can be summarized in one sentence: abolish private ownership! Only by overthrowing the Chinese Revisionist social-imperialism and rebuilding socialist China with public ownership of the means of production can the working people truly be liberated.
Marx: “Das Kapital” Volume III, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Volume 25, People’s Publishing House, 1974. ↩︎