Creation: Historical Materialism Group of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
The most important and fundamental reason for the outbreak of the capitalist economic crisis is the contradiction between the trend of capitalism’s infinite expansion of production and the relatively shrinking demand of the working people who have the ability to pay. In imperialist China, in such a barbaric country where the ruling class directly implements fascist rule, the poverty level of the broad masses of workers is very severe. However, China’s manufacturing value added already exceeded that of the United States in 2010, becoming the world’s largest manufacturing country. Among 500 industrial products, more than forty percent are the world’s number one in output, possessing unique advantages of being large, comprehensive, and diverse. In 2023, China’s manufacturing industry maintained its global first place for 14 consecutive years. Due to the relative surplus of social production in China, a large number of surplus products are unsalable and cannot be sold. To sell these surplus products and realize surplus value, private monopoly bourgeoisie mimicked the US Thanksgiving sales promotion and established the “Double 11” shopping festival in 2009. The initial discounts and offers attracted some consumers, and in the first few years, the transaction volume of “Double 11” was very high. But as Chinese social contradictions become increasingly sharp and absolute poverty deepens, the essence of capitalist accumulation is “wealth accumulation at one pole, while at the other pole… there is poverty, labor torment, slavery, ignorance, barbarism, and moral decay.” In recent years, the transaction volume of “Double 11” on major Chinese e-commerce platforms has been decreasing, and in 2022, Tmall and JD.com did not announce the final transaction volume for 2022. In 2024, the Chinese government introduced subsidies for old appliances trade-in policies. Throughout 2023, the national output of household refrigerators reached 96.32 million units, a year-on-year increase of 14.5%; air conditioners reached 244.87 million units, up 13.5%; and household washing machines reached 104.58 million units, up 19.3%.[^2] According to the 2020 China Statistical Yearbook from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, the average number of washing machines per 100 households at the end of the year was 96.0; the per-100-household ownership of refrigerators (cabinets), air conditioners, and color TVs exceeded 100 units, at 100.9, 115.6, and 120.6 respectively. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang personally admitted in 2020 that “600 million people have a monthly income of only 1,000 yuan.” China’s household appliance production is seriously surplus; even if one believes the data on appliance popularization provided by the Chinese government, the increasingly impoverished working people will not respond to the “old-for-new” policy, and only a very small, relatively wealthy petty bourgeoisie will participate. However, China’s household appliance bourgeoisie is very cunning; after consumers use subsidies, they secretly raise prices or even remove products from shelves, narrowing the scope of products eligible for subsidies so that the prices after subsidies are almost the same as the original prices, effectively offering no real discount. The purpose of subsidies by the Chinese government is to sell off large quantities of surplus household appliances, not to provide welfare to the people as claimed. Therefore, it is natural that the subsidy policy does not restrict price fluctuations of participating products. These capitalists’ unrestrained price hikes are tacitly approved by the government; only after people’s protests does the government say it will strictly investigate illegal practices like “price gouging” to collect subsidies. The funds used for subsidies can only come from the exploitation and oppression of China’s vast working class. Major e-commerce capitalists are not just “collecting subsidies,” but are actually bleeding the working people. In the “national subsidy + Double 11” event, the Chinese government is aligned with the major household appliance bourgeoisie; the so-called subsidies are merely a deception to encourage consumer spending, which is insignificant for the government. However, the existence of the “Double 11” shopping festival and the subsidy policies already reveal the severe surplus of Chinese household appliance production. Under the continued existence of capitalism, neither “Double 11” nor China’s subsidy policies can solve the problem of overproduction. An economic crisis characterized by overproduction will occur, and the death knell for the Chinese government will ring in the near future.