ABSTRACT
The pest-Mao leadership realised that success or failure in the endeavour would have considerable influence on the political viability and economic effectiveness of their new development strategy. The freeing of labour-power to be sold as a commodity in the market to capitalists is one of the main definitive characteristics of the capitalist mode of production. Factory pay-rolls swelled through push and pull: the pull was the incentive within the planning system to overstock and hoard labour; the push was from the unemployed and their families transmitted through urban labour bureaux which pressurised enterprises to take on more labour. Most importantly, the political impetus behind the effort to alleviate unemployment through economic readjustment has been greater than that to rationalise the labour system through reform of the economic management system. Policy incompatibility aside, clearly the political impetus behind the employment drive was greater, and the political constraints less, than that for reforms in the labour system.
