123 points by vermilingua20 days ago | 49 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].
>When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible.
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
Overworked Chinese workers have been making western consumers better off for more than two decades now. Chinese domestic consumption is very low even among developing countries, negligible compared to its gigantic export.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
The 996 working culture in this page is actually *996.ICU*. "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). [1]
Take a step further, do you want to overwork to death if you have other choices? One of the reasons behind 277k stars in 996.icu repo is that 996 working culture literally takes over every single corporations in China. With the downturn of China economy and the selective execution of Chinese labor law, in recent years, 996 becomes even harsher to labor force in China because there are more than overwork now, e.g. low salary and low human rights. When you say 'make the average consumer better off', you conveniently ignore the tears, sweets, and blood behind the facade of neijuan.
Anyone who's been on call after a 12-hour day knows how this ends. Tired people typo the rm path, skip the checklist, and push on Friday night. 996 doesn't buy you output, it buys you incidents.
The next sentence is "On a personal level, neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing."
No, sociologists use the term involution to describe Asian rice farmers. These farmers poured an increasing amount of labor into their tiny patches of land to extract the last bit of productivity, yet despite their hard work, they remained poor.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
Consumers win only while the losses last, though. What happens when the price war kills half the suppliers and the survivors quietly raise prices? Has anyone measured whether the average consumer is better off after, say, five years of this?
I disagree that it's diffused. Everyone I've seen use it means the same thing: competing harder for the same prize with no extra payoff. Only the setting changes, from exams to jobs to dating. Is that really many meanings?
This came up a lot recently in regards to competition in the solar and EV spaces.
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
Is there a way to only apply this to corporate profits but not the labor market? A world where production and labor demand is constantly growing but returns stay flat would be a great one.
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
Small correction: neijuan is just the Chinese rendering of "involution," which Geertz popularized (not coined, I think) for Javanese rice farming. He at least tried measuring it, via labor per hectare. The modern usage is much vaguer though.
> Goldenweiser uses Māori decorative art as an example. The development of art was done within the framework of already existing patterns. The final pieces were elaborate and complicated in appearance but fundamentally the same as existing art.
Definitely a concept that should be diffused and discussed in France, especially in preparation of next elections for which anti-capitalist sentiment is quite high.
If this interests you, read up on tangping, "lying flat". It's the opt-out response to neijuan: people quit the overtime race instead of competing. Bailan ("let it rot") is the follow-up, where people stop even pretending.
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229