Chapotraphouse

Y'all know me, still the same OG

But I been low-key

Hated on by most these revisionists

With no cheese, no deals, and no G's

:marx-wave:

It hasn't even been 20 years since the great recession, which was a problem of overproduction where we never fixed any of the issues that caused it, and we are currently sitting in an AI bubble that is the bubble of all bubbles. But other than that, yeah, maybe we learned some lessons about overproduction.

China didn’t forget marx, they used marx to beat the capitalists at capitalism

These governments have let wages rise

No the fuck they haven't. They're really just going to lie straight to our faces and expect us to ignore what we can see with our own eyes

To be fair this is what @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net has been talking about for years on here - China does need to boost domestic consumption. Obviously the idea that "capitalist countries have avoided Marx's epidemic of overproduction" is totally ignorant, but the rest of it isn't all wrong

This article builds a whole narrative out of selectively framed ratios and then treats that as proof that China “forgot Marx.” It doesn’t hold up once you put the numbers back into their actual context.

Starting with the core claim about labour share in the “real economy” falling from 21% to 15%. That is not the whole economy. China is no longer an agriculture and factory-only system. Services accounted for 56.3% of GDP in 2023 and nearly half of employment, so isolating agriculture and industry and calling that the decisive measure of workers’ position is a narrow slice presented as a total picture. The article even admits service-sector wage shares are stable, then quietly sidelines that fact.

The same problem shows up in the manufacturing wage share numbers. Saying wages fell from 6.3% to 3.3% of output sounds dramatic until you ask what changed. China’s industry moved from labour-intensive assembly to capital-intensive production with far higher input costs, more automation, and longer supply chains. Of course the ratio shifts. That does not automatically mean workers are worse off. It means the composition of production changed. If you want to argue workers lost out, you have to show deterioration in their material conditions, not just one accounting ratio.

And on that point, the article quietly concedes the opposite. It admits incomes and living standards rose dramatically. That is not a footnote. That is the central fact. Official data show average annual wages in urban non-private units reached 120,698 yuan in 2023 and 124,110 yuan in 2024. China also built the largest social protection system in the world . Basic pension coverage exceeds 1.07 billion people, and basic medical insurance covers about 95% of the population. Nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty. You cannot wave that away and then claim workers have been “squeezed” in any meaningful historical sense.

The international comparisons are even weaker. The UNIDO wage share figure the article relies on is from 2016. Using a single year of manufacturing-only data from nearly a decade ago to rank China today is already questionable. Then it compares countries at completely different stages of development and industrial structure as if those differences do not matter. That is not a serious comparative method.

The minimum wage section is simply wrong. The article claims Vietnam’s 2024 minimum wage was $692 per month. In reality, Vietnam’s regional minimum wages were roughly $137 to $197. China does not have a single national minimum wage, but in Shanghai it was around 2,690 to 2,740 yuan in 2025, roughly $370 to $380 depending on exchange rates. If the basic numbers are off, the conclusions built on them are not reliable.

The productivity argument is also misleading. China’s output per hour is lower than advanced economies. That is not surprising. It is a middle-income country still catching up technologically. The article jumps from that to saying China’s strength comes from “labour extraction” through longer hours. That is a leap. Productivity gaps reflect development level, capital stock, and technology. They do not automatically prove exploitation.

The BYD case is real and serious. Brazilian authorities reported “slavery-like conditions” at a construction site and filed a lawsuit. That should be condemned. But using one overseas incident involving contractors to generalise about an entire national system is not evidence. Chinese labour law explicitly requires wages to be paid on time and prohibits withholding. Violations exist, as they do everywhere. They do not define the system.

The argument that wage compression is the “root cause” of China’s manufacturing strength ignores how development actually works. China’s growth was driven by reinvesting surplus into infrastructure, industry, and public goods at a scale no developing country has matched. High-speed rail, mass electrification, universal basic healthcare coverage, and large-scale education expansion are not side effects. They are where a significant share of that surplus went.

On consumption, the article again treats a contradiction as a failure. Yes, China’s consumption share of GDP is lower than in advanced economies. Chinese policymakers openly acknowledge this and have been pushing to expand domestic demand. Retail sales reached 47.15 trillion yuan in 2023, and new policy plans in 2025 target consumption and services.

The claim about state-imposed wage ceilings is also overstated. Local wage guidance has existed, but it has been indicative, not a rigid nationwide cap suppressing wages across the economy. At the same time, minimum wages have been adjusted regularly at the provincial and municipal level based on local conditions. The idea that the state systematically froze wages while privileging officials is presented without serious evidence.

Finally, the Ford analogy is simplistic. You cannot raise wages arbitrarily without considering productivity, employment, and inflation. China’s approach has been to raise incomes through industrial upgrading, expansion of social security, and gradual increases in labour standards. That is why wages rose in absolute terms alongside massive improvements in living standards and social provision.

What this article does is take one dimension of distribution, isolate it from the rest of the system, and then declare that the entire model is fundamentally flawed. It ignores structural transformation, ignores social redistribution through public goods, uses outdated or incorrect comparisons, and treats contradictions as proof of failure rather than normal features of development.

China has real issues. Uneven development, regional gaps, and tensions between growth and consumption are all there. But those are being addressed through policy, not hidden. If you actually look at the full picture, what you see is not a country that “forgot Marx,” but one that transformed its productive base, improved material conditions for hundreds of millions of people, and is still working through the contradictions that come with that scale of change and the socialist transitionary period.

Capitalist countries have avoided Marx’s epidemic of overproduction because they have come to recognize that workers are also consumers.

To the extent that capitalist countries even avoid overproduction it is when they have ceased to produce industrially and have come to rely extensively on imperialism. But of course, the business cycle continues with massive bubbles and troughs, with the bubble being massive over-investment of capital in the expectation of profits that doesn't pan out. It's a financialized scheme. The "product" fails to sell because it was a monopoly-seeking scheme where the overproduction was on the level of entire companies all scrambling to become a monopoly on a milquetoast app-based service that could be provided and maintained on a budget of $5 million per year for billions of people. The extra money is just for fighting over "market share". Then these companies crater when the chips fall.

Of course, even in rich imperialist countries, overproduction happens constantly. Food rots in dumpsters and fields. This loss is partially absorbed through subsidies funded by imperialism, by the petrodollar's ability to let the US print money, by the state absorbing the hit through ill-gotten gains and (in theory) putting a stop to it faster than the market would.

The poor capitalist countries do not have this option, they are the exploited, not the imperialists. They face constant classic overproduction problems and shortages, particularly when producing for export. They are entirely beholden to sanctions, tariff regimes, shifting currents. Food, oil, textiles, toys, basic electronics. They make huge quantities expecting a sale to imperialists. What happens if the imperialists renege? Firings, of course, and the 100,000 Superbowl 57 t shirts are sold to the poor of other imperialized countries and burned.

These governments have let wages rise to drive up demand.

This author is about 60 years out of date on how capitalist countries operate. Real wages have been decreasing.

Anyways, this article seems to be about transiting China to more domestic consumption, which is a good idea. But if you do it based on false faux-left framings praising imperialists, you will either fail or end up advocating for China to itself become imperialist. And look like an absolute loser stuck-up in the process.

Imagine even considering entertain the thought that China has anything to learn from other countries, lol

Please don't make me search for the article link myself every time. Lemmy has an URL field for posts for a reason...

"Governments let wages rise"

:|

There isn't enough death in the universe for all the death i wish on the savagely ignorant liberals who say shit like that

If that article substituted China with "The World" it would be more accurate title.

And yeah they have a consumption issue, but like, wouldn't a better solution be to guarantee jobs and reduce inequality? Why is it that the best solution these writers come up with is: Increase this number, decrease that number. Guaranteed jobs would also encourage people to pursue education rather than grinding hard for your diploma that contests with thousands, millions of other people with the same diploma, making it worthless and now you're phd working for food delivery driver with 0 prospect of a future, of course you won't consume or strive at all in that situation.

Just get the lowest entry job, earn enough to afford food and be happy. Of course consumption is going to be low, but the problem is more complicated than just consumption. I'm not very smart though I'm just a random online person who reads a lot of books, did the person who write that article actually read Karl Marx?

But shit's like bad. I've been chatting with Netizens all over the world and there's so many people in this position where they feel it's pointless to compete, they just earn the bare minimum to survive and that's it. Has anyone actually tried to approach them? Thousands of youth in their 20's and they've already given up on life, this is like so frustrating. They could be turned into productive members of our society and a lot of them are quite bright and love to learn, they just end up spending the learning hours on shit like vidya games, which is fine on moderation, but like they obviously want to be good, so many of them feel ashamed of themselves, their self-esteem is just obliterated and nobody seems to understand that beating them with a stick won't fix it, they need a healthy environment, firm, but fair.

Why can't real life be made as exciting as a videogames that people seem to love learning about and love working towards? I guarantee there's a way to turn all these young depressed people into powerful force for good, but people just want to call them lazy and scold them. Make the real world more fun, guarantee some sort of achievements for people who live in it, make it more exciting. I finished my education? Nice now I get to do X for sure, tried harder? Have a bonus. Instead you do all this shit and for what? Buy labubu and be happy? I am what I do and i don't wanna be a consumer while my boss gets to live. Fuck that shit.

According to official Chinese statistics, in the real economy—that is, agriculture, industry, and utilities—the share of labor compensation relative to the value of all economic inputs, such as raw materials, production components, and capital, fell from 21 percent in 1987 to 15 percent in 2023, the last year for which data are available.

Does anyone know the source for this statistic and how it was calculated?