The Simple Truth of Exploitation
as old as civilization
As Marx emphasized, exploitation is the problem. As he made clear, it is a problem as old as civilization, not just industrialization. It has been the heartless core of civilization since, according to the Bible, Cain — yes, that Cain — “built the world’s first city.”
I agree with the position that capitalism, as Marx knew it, did what he said it would do: it suffered a crisis from which it was unable to recover. It’s called the Great Depression.
In responding to that societal catastrophe the central government and central bank evolved together in capitalist nations to form a life-support mechanism for the capitalist economy (a system that has overtaken the world since the fall of the Soviet Union — to include ‘Communist’ China). As described in ‘Modern Monetary Theory’: sustained by taxation (paid as much as possible by economic lessors), that two-headed Leviathan uses money, the lifeblood of the economy, to keep capitalism alive via unceasing infusions of it, pouring unlimited money into the entities at the top of the economy.
Money has thus replaced property as the most necessary economic object. Whereas in Marx’s day (as had been the case forever in civilization) income was a function of property, today the distribution of property follows from the distribution of money. (‘Bonuses’ in the form of stocks for people high up in corporations are a hybridization of property and money that corporations can literally create ‘out of thin air’). The transition from bondage slavery (in which laborers were property) and its sibling, serfdom, to wage slavery, in which people are paid to be used as machines — or draft animals — was part and parcel of that historical shift.
Workers obtain money through income: wages and salaries. It is a simple, undeniable fact that in all businesses there are people who determine what the distribution of remuneration within a business will be. Their express goal is to minimize the remuneration of all other employees in order to maximize the remuneration of a few. That is where and how exploitation occurs (with governments mimicking that arrangement in paying public employees).
That does mark an obvious path for the battle against exploitation to take. It involves pivoting away from property as the locus of exploitation, and therefore the focus for its elimination, to recognizing that money/income is now in that position.