For the past three weeks, French employers and politicians have been denouncing Shein, the Chinese commercial platform specialized in low-cost fashion.
It’s obvious that Shein makes workers and undoubtedly children slave to produce its junk. And as long as the company can cash in money, it is willing to sell every horror imaginable. But under capitalism, this isn't an exception, it's the rule. And it's certainly not specific to China!
This campaign doesn't denounce capitalists as an exploitative, greedy and destructive class. It aims to denigrate Chinese competition and unite French consumers, who are also workers, behind French capitalists. And, in the end, we’ll be forced to accept new taxes, since the government and the European Union are preparing to tax small parcels.
With their usual class contempt, leaders lecture Shein's customers. They claim they are compulsive and selfish buyers, responsible for the decline of the French textile industry and the closure of stores. As if working-class families wouldn't prefer quality clothing if they could afford it! As if they enjoyed eating cheap food and polluting the environment by driving their old cars!
As always, the capitalists, who control everything, are of course responsible for nothing, and the workers, who never have a say, are blamed for everything! Yet, it's very simple: if bosses and their political lackeys don't want consumers to chase low prices, why don't they raise salaries and bring the minimum wage above 2,000 euros!
And how hypocritical they all are! The issue of unemployment and the closure of businesses are the least of their concerns. 450 redundancy plans are underway in France and hundreds of thousands of jobs are under threat. It wasn't Shein that ordered those job cuts, but very French employers such as Michelin, Stellantis and Valeo, with the complicity of politicians who give them free rein.
Besides, who turned China into the world's workshop if not our kind-hearted capitalists who went there to exploit poorer workers and pay them even less? As a result, they have closed their factories here and turned entire regions into industrial wastelands. Today, they cry foul over unfair competition, but they were the first to take advantage of it, and they continue to do so.
In Asia, children, women and men who work themselves to the bone on their sewing machines to earn just enough to survive, are not only working for Shein but for many other brands found in stores such as H&M, Pimkie, Kiabi and Celio. Carrefour and Decathlon source their products from Bangladesh, where workers are paid 100 euros per month, even less than their Chinese counterparts. These two retailers are also suspected of profiting from the forced labor of Uyghurs.
As for commercial platforms, it isn't just Shein, Temu and Alibaba that need to clean up their act. There's also eBay, Amazon and Leboncoin, as well as all the social networks where drugs and weapons are sold freely and where traffickers even recruit their killers!
This anti-China propaganda shouldn't be taken lightly. It's part of a fierce trade war in which workers in every country are being exploited even harder, made more precarious and impoverished in the name of competitiveness.
Protectionism, so highly praised by politicians across the board, isn't stopping this trade war: on the contrary, it's fueling it. Just look at how Trump is using “Made in America” to crush his competitors. And this protectionist escalation is a step toward outright war.
Today, the Chinese are portrayed as unfair competitors. “The Chinese invasion” regularly makes headlines in newspapers. When will they be portrayed as enemies?
We mustn't allow the ruling class to deceive us: this campaign has nothing to do with ecology, human rights, workers’ and children's rights. It revives a protectionist propaganda that is as misleading as it is dangerous for workers.
No matter how patriotic they claim to be, capitalists have no homeland other than their wallets. They want to turn consumers against Chinese companies to defend their interests, not ours! And tomorrow, for those very interests, they will be capable of throwing us into a war against China.
Internationalism is the workers' weapon. It's the idea that, beyond borders, Chinese, Bangladeshi, French and other workers have the same enemy: the global exploiting class.
Nathalie Arthaud