Song Dynasty: Yuan Dynasty, you didn't expect this, did you? I'm still alive.

As the largest capital entity in the Eastern Song Dynasty, the Royal Chamber of Commerce profoundly influenced the domestic industrial and commercial landscape from its inception. If you don't know how to do business, you can't go wrong by simply copying the Royal Chamber of Commerce's methods.

Therefore, when the Royal Chamber of Commerce introduced three reform measures, most capitalists chose to follow suit.

Among them, the first and third articles have the most imitators.

Thus, the Song people officially entered the era of "extensive overtime work" and "piece-rate wages".

As it turned out, Mas's theory was extremely correct. Excessive overtime work directly increased capitalists' profits by 20%.

The principle is simple and straightforward: if workers used to work ten hours to produce one hundred buns, now they can work overtime to produce one hundred and twenty, thus increasing their profits by 20%.

But over time, workers aren't made of iron. Working overtime every day inevitably wears down their enthusiasm, and they start to slack off and daydream, resulting in a decrease in work efficiency.

Piece-rate wages cleverly reversed this situation.

The more you do, the higher your salary.

You're no longer working overtime for the capitalists, but for yourself.

The workers, who had never experienced struggle, were simple-minded and found this statement very reasonable.

If he works a little more each day, his salary will be higher, and he might be able to buy that beautiful car sooner.

They were thrilled just imagining themselves sitting in the car, surrounded by envious glances.

Even when someone criticizes this wage system in the newspaper, some workers still stand up to defend it.

They claimed that this system was the fairest: they were strong and healthy, able to work twelve hours a day, and were undoubtedly the strongest, deserving of higher wages.

If you don't like piece-rate wages, then do less work. Nobody's forcing you to work.

If you can't buy a car in the end, you can't blame anyone else.

Workers are powerless to challenge the capitalists' dominance, but they can establish a hierarchy among their colleagues.

By claiming "I am stronger, more hardworking, and more deserving of higher wages," they gain a reverse compensation of "relative deprivation": since they cannot become capitalists, they become "the best workers" in the eyes of capitalists.

This mentality is like prisoners vying for a higher feeding spot in a cage—true freedom is escaping the cage, but many choose to race within the cage and gain dignity by winning the race.

With the help of these two "divine skills", the factory's output increased significantly.

Large quantities of steel, chemicals, petroleum, textiles, food, and automobiles are being produced continuously, and all production capacity data are "skyrocketing".

Capitalists' pockets are getting fatter and fatter.

By the fifth year of the Mingzhang era, the output of all industrial products had almost doubled.

The abundance of industrial goods prompted capitalists to instinctively engage in price wars. The Royal Merchant Guild, once again, fired the first shot.

The other capitalists had no choice but to follow suit and lower prices.

However, large corporations such as the Royal Chamber of Commerce had already accumulated substantial capital by extracting excess surplus value through "piecework + overtime".

Small capital is tight on cash flow, and losses occur as soon as prices are lowered, quickly depleting the principal.

At the same time, the industrial chain of large capital is spread all over the country, and losses in one place can be made up for by profits in another.

For small-capital businesses with limited operations, factory shutdowns would be tantamount to annihilation.

This price war was not a fair competition in essence. It was a war of attrition initiated by the Royal Merchant Guild with the aim of eliminating its competitors.

When other capitalists went bankrupt, their capital chains broke, and creditors besieged their doors, large corporations like the Royal Chamber of Commerce appeared as saviors. They acquired the bankrupts' factories, equipment, and even teams of skilled workers at extremely low prices—sometimes simply by assuming their debts.

Both are capital entities, and should have been teammates.

But noble families don't need teammates.

However, the large capital group led by the Royal Chamber of Commerce soon faced a dilemma: how to effectively manage the factories scattered across the country with different brands.

Zhao Zhao had heard Ma Sheng preach up close and quickly came up with a solution.

A brand new core organization was established – the "Royal Trust". Most factories still displayed their old signs, but legally they all became members of the "Royal Trust".

Shareholders of all factories under the Royal Chamber of Commerce must exchange their shares for new shares of the "Royal Trust" and willingly hand over the management rights of their factories to the Royal Chamber of Commerce—that is, Zhao Zhao.

In order to avoid being swallowed up, some other struggling medium-sized capitals also decisively joined forces with large capitals to form trusts.

In the fifteenth year of the Mingzhang era of the Eastern Song Dynasty, the era of monopoly capitalism was fully established.

Reaching this stage means that the market has completely failed.

The pricing power of goods is entirely determined by people, not by the market.

No matter how hard the workers work, the wages they earn are barely enough to make ends meet.

The idea of ​​accumulating capital through thrift, as described in "The Wealth of Nations," has become a laughing stock.

Monopoly capital will ruthlessly empty every penny from the workers' wallets.

The workers wanted to resist, but they discovered that because some of the more ambitious workers were doing the work of three, two other workers had lost their jobs. When the workers prepared to strike, the capitalists could easily replace them.

If you don't do it, plenty of others will.

Productivity has developed, but workers' wages have been suppressed, and the total social consumption capacity has not kept up with the speed of production expansion, resulting in a serious shortage of effective demand.

And so, the economic crisis arrived.

Unlike previous localized or industry-wide economic crises.

This time, it's a systemic, comprehensive economic crisis affecting the entire industry.

The Great Depression arrived.

No one expected that the Eastern Song Dynasty would decline so quickly, so quickly that people had no time to react.

Zhao Zhao then realized that he had messed up.

"Ma Si is too bad. He only said it would lead to an economic crisis, but he didn't say it would happen so soon."

Indeed, when the two of them talked all night, Ma Si estimated that the Song Dynasty would not experience a major economic crisis for another seventy or eighty years.

Unexpectedly, Zhao Zhao's reverse training of the divine skill greatly accelerated this process.

Overtime work and piece-rate wages would not normally be implemented so quickly; only royalty has the influence to promote them so rapidly.

Even so, Zhao Zhao, who practiced Capitalism in reverse, knew what the solution was, but he did not accept it, at least not while he was alive.

So what should I do if I mess it up?

The answer is to shift the blame.

I'm done playing, you guys can play now.

Zhao Zhao handed over all the power he had seized over the years through various means of imperial strategy.

"I am ill and unable to govern. From now on, the Wenhua Pavilion will be in charge of all government affairs."

Although the Song Dynasty had ancestral precepts, it still retained the emperor's immense power. In addition, Zhao Zhao used tactics such as stirring up dissenting opinions, leveraging external forces, and dividing and weakening the court. Coupled with the powerful capital of the Royal Chamber of Commerce, the court officials were driven to the brink of despair by Zhao Zhao and could only resist with great difficulty.

Upon learning that Zhao Zhao was ill, the scholars and officials smiled knowingly.

Indeed, governing a country still requires these scholar-officials.

As a result, the chief minister of the Wenhua Pavilion, who followed Zhao Zhao's lead without question, stepped down, and the Wenhua Pavilion was dissolved and reorganized.

After several rounds of negotiations, Hu Fu, a master from Tsinghua University, was finally appointed as the Grand Secretary of the Wenhua Pavilion.

He has a high level of expertise in economics.

Upon taking office, he immediately convened a meeting with industrial and business leaders, demanding that they commit to not cutting wages and to increasing investment in order to maintain the purchasing power of the people.

He called for mutual assistance among businesses and individuals, promoted a "neighborhood mutual assistance plan," and even implemented a work rotation system and paid leave in the government in an effort to create more jobs.

Whether it will be effective or not is unknown, but the many students who want to enter officialdom are overjoyed.