Underpaid Workers and Unpaid Bills: Electrical Labor and the Making of the Socialist Current Economy in Maoist China

This paper examines the interplay between labor, electricity, and the planned economy during Maoist China. The first section analyzes how the construction of rural electrical infrastructure was built upon unpaid or underpaid labor in the commune system. Because labor under the electrical infrastructure was not paid or fully paid in a one-time monetary way, I suggest considering the payment of electricity bills, the property rights of the electrical infrastructure, and the remuneration of human labor together. The second section discusses the rural users’ understanding of labor and bills to reconsider the relationships between electricity, labor, and the planned economy. The third section turns to electricians, both in the power station and in the communes, to further explain the operation of the electrical infrastructure under the planned economy. The electrician in the power station or electric utility was formally employed by the state, enjoying the benefits like medicine and welfare of the working class. However, the electrician in the communes was paid as a peasant. Their contradictory role meant that they often failed to collect bills from the communes for the electric utility, and sometimes communes refused to pay or embezzled the bills. The interplay between electrical labor and electrical infrastructure illustrates the emergence of what I call the “socialist current economy,” under which rural society was reorganized, labor was reevaluated, and electricity was envisioned more like a public good and a symbol of communism. Different from the capitalist current economy, which saw that electricity would be marketized, the socialist current economy shows how the values of human labor and electricity were circulated in non-monetary or more-than-monetary ways and often resulted in the dissipation of human and electricity out of the electrical infrastructure and planned economy into nature.