Something I’d like to focus on is worker exploitation, specifically, wages. Wages, under a commodity production form, will be suppressed. When broken down, a commodity’s profit margin is roughly what the commodity sells for minus what it costs to make the commodity. To maximize profits, those costs must be reduced to the lowest possible, while the selling price must be raised to the highest possible. While this can be done by changing resource management, a much easier way to control costs is to control the labor cost per object. The two ways to do this is to either raise hours for the same pay, or lower pay for the same hours. This leads to wage suppression, theft, and garnishment. All things that hurt the working class.
The Owning Class understanding of money is that it’s a community that can be manipulated and used to make a profit, just like any other commodity. The working class, however, needs to protect itself from this attitude. Lets take, for example, a common lease stipulation: inflation rent increases. While landlords often have clauses in their leases stating that rents will rise a certain percentage due to inflation, we see less and less of the same attitude towards wages. This leads to exploitative relationships, as workers need to spend more and more of their paychecks just to live in their house, while the landlord is able to both pass off his costs to the renter as well as deduct the depreciation of the housing itself from taxes.
Let’s also talk about Imperialism. When you think of empires, most likely you imagine the roman empire, or some other old kingdom lost to time. While those are still empires in a classical sense, we can see the new empires of today take a different form. Currently, the United States rules the world with a pretty strong grasp, whether it be through friendships with other nations, or through strong military action. Economically speaking, the United States’ dollar is stronger than any other money in terms of spending power. You can use a dollar in more places than anything else, whether it be through a currency exchange or through a bank. There will almost always be a stock of US dollars being held by other countries for this exact purpose. But therein lies the question, how do they get those dollars and why do they do it?
While a country is welcome to create and use their own currency, there are some very strong economic factors that push the US dollar to supremacy. In a practical sense, that country’s money has to compete with other money on a global scale in terms of exchanges, and its value and strength is tied directly to how it compares to these other monies. The US dollar, which already holds a monopoly in key commodity tradings, such as oil, can outrank other currencies if the respective nations do not fall in line through trade war tactics, such as embargos, tariffs, and sanctions.
Another fact of economic imperialism is pegged currency. There are many currencies that are pegged to the US dollar, which, in essence, means that that currency exchanges at a fixed rate to it. This relationship between the two monies is completely unbalanced. A currency crisis, or a drastic loss in value, in the pegged currency would do nothing to affect the US dollar, while a slight change in the US dollar’s value would drastically change the pegged currency.
So what can we, as normal people, do about this? Well, for one, class unionism is a path that would unite the working class under one coordinated union, which would be able to command the real authority of society. Union activity in general will create conditions that will decrease the difference in between the working class and the owning class, but to truly fix this situation, a massive reset would be required. The common people of not just one country, but the world would need to unite to take down this ultimately global system. We have to remember that race, sexuality, gender and a ton of other identities are a part of who we are, but the most common connector between people is their suffering under capitalism.