By Canyang Ruxue ("Blood-Red Setting Sun") · November 11, 2026 · Source: Junguozhi

The public debates over mistresses, "edgy" livestreams and the refusal to work in factories are, at bottom, the defining question of our age: should human beings live as subjects with dignity, or struggle on as objectified tools in the chains of capital?

In recent years, our society has produced scene after scene that is absurd and yet all too real. On one side, the major short-video and livestreaming platforms teem with content built on "edginess" and body display. Behind the female influencers raking in fortunes stand countless young people from the bottom of society, who collectively drain their savings tipping in cyberspace and sink into psychic exhaustion. On the other side, scandals about wealthy men, executives and the power elite of capital keeping mistresses and forming secret, twisted "harems" hit the trending lists every few days. In cruel contrast, vast numbers of proletarian men at the bottom of society, unable to afford sky-high bride prices[note 1] and the cost of a car and a home, are being shut out of courtship and marriage en masse and condemned to lifelong bachelorhood.

Out of these social fissures, a set of shocking survival rules has spread through popular culture: "Better a rich man's concubine than a poor man's wife."[note 2] "Better to sell your body than go work in a factory." "Better to run an edgy livestream than find a proper job." When some young people come to treat these extreme and absurd choices as the de facto "optimal solution," what we see reflected is a society of private ownership riddled through with structural paradoxes that turn right and wrong upside down.

Moralists habitually stand on the high ground of abstract ethics and respond to these phenomena with the condemnations of self-appointed guardians of virtue, blaming them simply on "moral decline" or "money worship." Yet people's consciousness cannot be explained from their own heads; on the contrary, it must be explained from the contradictions of material life.[note 3] These seemingly absurd, topsy-turvy social phenomena are precisely the inevitable products of private relations of production in their decay and alienation, of capital penetrating and devouring every corner of human life.

I. From "Alienated Labor" to the Abandonment of Traditional Ethics

To understand why some young women today would rather attach themselves to capital (by becoming a mistress, for instance), or sell their bodies on the tide of digital capital (through edgy livestreaming and the like), than enter modern society as a standard-issue cog in the machine, we must first return to the theory of "alienated labor" that Marx so profoundly set out.

Labor ought to be the life-activity through which human beings realize their worth and attain freedom and creativity. Under the capitalist system of private ownership, however, it has been alienated into an external, hostile force that oppresses the worker. The sweatshops of manufacturing and the low-level assembly lines of the internet giants are textbook spaces in which capital exploits labor power at maximum intensity.

Here the worker is alienated from the product of his labor: the more he produces, the richer the capitalist grows and the poorer he himself becomes. He is alienated from labor itself: work does not satisfy human needs but becomes a grind that torments the body and crushes the spirit. He is alienated from his species-being, and he is alienated from other people. Under brutal KPIs, quasi-military management, endless overtime and meager piece-rate wages, what the traditional factory offers working people at the bottom is not only day after day of physical depletion but the systematic stripping away of human dignity.

"Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind."
— Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

When ordinary labor in the real economy loses every channel of upward mobility because the rate of surplus value has been squeezed to its limit, and when the myth of "getting rich through hard work" shatters against capitalist monopoly and hardening class lines, individuals begin to run a cold calculation of costs and benefits.

Thinking as rational economic actors, young women see clearly that decades of toil in a factory will not even add up to enough to weather one serious illness or keep pace with the value of a home. The return on this "legitimate labor" is outrageously low. By contrast, refusing the factory and investing one's bodily capital and beauty capital directly in the "attention economy" or the "private exchanges" constructed by the capitalist market may break with traditional morality, but by the pure logic of monetized survival it offers a startlingly "high rate of return."

This is by no means individual moral degeneracy. It is what happens when the system of alienated labor herds and expels working people wholesale, and market rationality blooms grotesquely in a dead end.

II. "Better a Rich Man's Concubine Than a Poor Man's Wife" and the Essence of Bourgeois Marriage

The paradox of "better a rich man's concubine than a poor man's wife" pierces straight to the hypocritical core of the modern bourgeois institution of marriage, and sketches the appalling polarization of contemporary society. On one side are the wealthy and powerful, owners of vast means of production, keeping wives and concubines by the dozen and mistresses in gilded cages,[note 4] in effect restoring a form of polygyny and personal dependency. On the other side are proletarian men at the bottom who, owning no property and no home, are pushed into bachelorhood in vast numbers and lose entirely the biological and social right to courtship, marriage and even offspring.

Bourgeois thinkers love to drape marriage in the tender veil of romanticism, pure love and free contract. But Engels long ago pointed out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

Monogamy was not a triumph of love and morality, but the product of radical changes in the mode of production and the system of property ownership. With the first great social division of labor (the development of herding and agriculture), men gradually came to control the means of production and the principal surplus wealth. To ensure that this private property would pass without error to their own biological children rather than remain within the maternal clan, men had to force women into strict chastity and exclusive fidelity.

The essence of monogamy, therefore, is a male-dominated instrument for securing title to assets and property once private ownership had been established. It marks the complete victory of private property over the communal property of the primitive clan.

With the establishment of private-property monogamy, women, who in the primitive clan had held an exalted position and managed the communal household (matriarchy), were stripped of their leading role in social production and reduced to dependents within the family. Housework lost its public character and became private service; women were forced to become tools for producing heirs and the private property of the family. This pattern of oppression became the prototype, within the microcosm of the family, of all later class exploitation: of slave by master, tenant by landlord, proletarian by capitalist.

Moreover, the strict constraints of monogamy, such as the harsh punishment of adultery, were aimed chiefly at women, to guarantee purity of bloodline and security of property. Men, by contrast, enjoyed a tacit tolerance, with adultery and prostitution as monogamy's supplements. While society nominally upheld monogamy, money and capital in fact sustained a vast apparatus of adultery and prostitution.

In a society of private ownership, then, marriage has never been a purely emotional union. It is a deep-rooted economic institution and a mechanism for the reproduction of class. What does it mean to be "a poor man's wife"? Amid the material scarcity at the bottom of society, a poor man's wife carries a double burden: she must take part in low-paid wage labor out in society while also performing, unpaid, the labor of social reproduction at home (childbearing, child-rearing, housework). On top of that, she shares the debt risk and existential anxiety that come with sliding down the class ladder. This is the true meaning of "for a poor couple, every sorrow comes at once."[note 5] It is an institutionalized partnership in hardship, with no capital to defend itself.

"A rich man's mistress" represents the other extreme. It tears away, without pretense, the tender veil cloaking the marriage contract and exposes its substance as personal dependency and commodity exchange. In the logic of capital, everything has a price and everything can be leased.

Some young women attempt, by surrendering partial ownership of their bodies and emotions, to insert themselves directly into the wealthy class's chain of surplus-value distribution. In essence this is a distorted strategy, in a society of hardened classes, for achieving upward class mobility or a hedge against hardship through irregular channels.

It declares, with ruthless utilitarianism, that before the absolute power of capital, traditional morality, legitimate status and a love built on mutual support are no match for a ticket into capital's inner circle. The phenomenon vividly bears out Marx's classic judgment in The Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."

III. The Attention Economy and Digital Labor: The Platform-Capital Logic Behind Edgy Livestreams

With the rise of internet platform capitalism, "better an edgy livestream than a proper job" has become another spectacle of the new era. Millions of young women have flooded onto short-video and livestreaming platforms, harvesting tips and traffic from countless isolated, alienated members of the modern working class on the other side of the screen, through "edgy" content that skirts the boundaries of law, ethics and regulation.

In traditional industrial society, capital extracted the surplus labor that workers performed upon the means of production. In the era of the platform economy, capital goes further, sweeping human emotion, beauty, privacy, social life, even bodily sensation, into the vortex of valorization. Platforms, as a new form of digital monopoly capital, hold algorithmic power, the power to allocate traffic, and the power of financial settlement.

In a traditional "proper job," the worker faces office politics, endless overtime and a fixed salary ladder. The vast surplus value she creates is overwhelmingly appropriated, unpaid, by the capitalist, while she receives only enough in wages to barely reproduce her labor power.

On the edgy-livestream track, however, some young women use their biological attributes (youth, beauty, the body as sign) as means of production, monetizing them directly in an "emotional and visual gig economy" aimed at an atomized male audience gripped by intense loneliness and voyeuristic desire. This monetization, too, is subject to the platform's exploitative revenue cut, ruthless algorithmic elimination and enormous psychological strain. Yet for many young women at the bottom who lack social capital and hard skills, it offers the illusion of "instant cash" and "cutting out the middleman."

The phenomenon reveals that when legitimate, dignified, decent work is in short supply and its rewards keep diminishing, the vast ocean of capitalism forces people to alienate the body itself into the ultimate commodity, staging in cyberspace one public, digitized carnival of self-commodification after another.

IV. The Relative Surplus Population and Capitalism's "Death Spiral": Micro-Level Rationality, Macro-Level Irrationality

Why do these seemingly deviant, paradox-ridden choices command such a vast following of supporters and practitioners among today's young people?

Marx pointed out that as large-scale capitalist industry develops, capital grows ever more massive and production technology keeps advancing, so that relatively less labor is required. The capitalist mode of production inevitably generates an unending relative surplus population, in excess of capital's average needs for valorization and cast down to the bottom of society. This is capitalism's "industrial reserve army."

Squeezed now between a cyclical global economic crisis and technological substitution (the great wave of artificial intelligence and automation), society's relative surplus population is ballooning. Youth unemployment is high, formal jobs are shrinking fast, and the labor market is in an unprecedented state of "involution"[note 6] and extreme saturation. In this cutthroat market, where supply vastly exceeds demand and labor power is drastically devalued, the individual's survival instinct gives rise to all manner of seemingly baffling survival strategies:

When the ladders of upward mobility through regular channels are completely blocked, and the rewards of legitimate labor cannot cover basic subsistence and the cost of reproducing one's labor power, individuals spontaneously seek the most efficient, least resistant path to cash.

Becoming a mistress, running an edgy livestream, or selling one's body outright: at bottom, each is a tragic and desperate act of "self-rescue," an individual's attempt to resist relative impoverishment at a moment when capitalism's general crisis has erupted and the value of labor power has hit rock bottom.

Each individual choice is the "optimal solution" or "rational trade-off" available within a given oppressive structure. Yet the combined force of countless individuals each trying to escape their plight further erodes society's moral foundations and deepens the reification, indifference and alienation between people, providing one vivid footnote after another to capitalism's cyclical decay. Under private ownership, individual free will and rational choice invariably end up as instruments of capital's blind drive to valorize itself. (Everyone calculates cleverly, but all that cleverness added together pushes society as a whole irreversibly toward loss of control and chaos.)

Capital does not need any particular person, but every person, in order to survive, must actively trim himself or herself into the shape capital needs for its valorization. To win favor with investors, managers must follow capital's cold logic: layoffs, cost-cutting, "efficiency gains." To win traffic and tips, influencers must spontaneously pander to the algorithm, commodifying their beauty, their bodies, even their emotions. Individual "rationality" does not serve the individual's own all-round development; it is reshaped by the laws of capital into a tool for capital accumulation.

V. The Way Out: True Liberation Beyond Private Ownership and the Logic of Capital

Faced with the bizarre social paradoxes of a society of private ownership and the existential nihilism spreading among some young women, if we stop at moral criticism, lamenting that "hearts are not what they were and the world goes from bad to worse,"[note 7] or pin our hopes on tighter internet regulation, moral preaching and patriarchal discipline, we will be climbing a tree to catch fish, or marking the side of the boat to find a sword already lost to the river.[note 8] The systemic disease of capitalism will never be cured by a few herbal cooling remedies in the form of moralizing essays.

Marxists have never pitied victims in the abstract, still less sat on the bench of moral judgment looking down on the survival strategies of ordinary people. Our task is to strike at the heart of the problem and point to the real path to genuine liberation.

First, private ownership of the means of production must be thoroughly superseded. So long as the means of production remain in the hands of a few monopoly-capitalist oligarchs, the products of labor will inevitably be alienated into a force ruling over the producers, and human bodies, emotions and dignity will inescapably be branded as commodities and reduced to tools of valorization. Only public ownership of the means of production, founded on socialized large-scale production, can abolish class oppression and economic inequality at the root, and make labor once again life's prime want rather than a servile means of earning a living.

Second, fair mechanisms of social reproduction and the liberation of women must be rebuilt. As Engels argued, the emancipation of women is possible only when domestic labor is eliminated on a nationwide scale and replaced by public, large-scale production. Women must be freed from the shackles that bind them, within private-property marriage, as dependents and childbearing machines. They must be given full economic independence and full social equality, so that love and marriage can return to their true nature as free unions rather than marketplaces for trading money and class.

Third, the value of truly dignified, decent work must be vigorously restored and upheld. Through a fair distribution of surplus value, a resolute defense of workers' rights, and institutions designed to share the fruits of science and technology among all, every ordinary person who works hard and honestly must be able to live a life of dignity, security and hope. Only when a "proper job" provides decent pay, adequate security and real room to grow will the social deformities born of desperation lose the soil in which they breed.

The seemingly absurd, paradoxical survival choices some young women make amid the torrent of capitalist society are a mirror, clear and cruel, reflecting the internal contradictions and deep crisis of the monopoly-capitalist system.

The public debates over mistresses, "edgy" livestreams and the refusal to work in factories are, at bottom, the defining question of our age: should human beings live as subjects with dignity, or struggle on as objectified tools in the chains of capital?

Translator's notes

[note 1] Caili (彩礼), the "bride price," is a payment traditionally made by the groom's family to the bride's. In recent years it has risen steeply in many parts of rural China, often alongside expectations that the groom provide a home and a car, and has become a major social issue.

[note 2] 宁做富人妾，不做穷人妻 is a well-known saying. "Concubine" (妾) here evokes the traditional secondary wife of imperial China; in today's usage it points to the kept mistress.

[note 3] This echoes Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): consciousness "must be explained from the contradictions of material life."

[note 4] 金屋藏娇, literally "hiding a beauty in a golden house," derives from the story of Emperor Wu of Han, who as a boy promised to build a golden house for his cousin Chen Ajiao if she became his wife. It now means keeping a mistress in luxury.

[note 5] 贫贱夫妻百事哀 is a line from the Tang poet Yuan Zhen's elegy for his late wife. It has become a proverb for the hardships of a poor married couple.

[note 6] Neijuan (内卷), "involution," is a widely used Chinese term for zero-sum, ever-intensifying competition that exhausts participants without producing real gains.

[note 7] 人心不古、世风日下 is a stock expression lamenting moral decline.

[note 8] Two classical idioms. 缘木求鱼, "climbing a tree to catch fish," comes from Mencius and means using a method that cannot possibly achieve one's goal. 刻舟求剑, "notching the boat to find the sword," comes from Lüshi Chunqiu. In that story, a man drops his sword from a moving boat, carves a mark on the side where it fell, and later searches for it below the mark. The idiom means clinging rigidly to an approach that circumstances have made useless.