Workers Need Communist Production for Need
“China is quickly drawing the line that U.S. sanctions on one of their oil partners will no longer be tolerated, and that the proxy war between the Petro-Dollar and the up and coming Petro-Yuan is coming closer to home,” wrote an analyst when on Sept. 21 China sailed a destroyer through the Straits of Hormuz and docked it at an Iranian port not far from the US Fifth Fleet in the United Arab Emirates.
Under capitalism the market and in whose currency goods are traded are a question of life and death for the capitalists-imperialists. It is in the market place where the surplus value the capitalists extract from our labor power is converted into profits. These profits are the sole purpose of capitalist production.
Communism will eliminate the capitalists, money and markets. Nothing will be bought or sold. The products of our labor will have only one value: use value, to satisfy the needs of our class on a worldwide scale.
Some people doubt we can live without money, but humanity lived without it for over 80 thousand years. What is more, the concept of money did not even exist. Nothing was sold or bartered, but shared collectively.
By eliminating money, the market and production for profits, communism will also eliminate imperialist wars which are an inevitable result of capitalist competition for market share. To win this competition, the capitalists strive to control the sources of the cheapest natural resources and labor power.
Crucial to this is the currency in which financial transactions are carried out. The group of capitalists-imperialists whose currency is most used in world trade will dominate the market and the world itself.
This has been the case ever since the Spanish dollar became the dominant world currency in the 17th century. It held this position until the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), when British imperialism became the dominant power, and the British pound became the reserve currency of the world, backed by England’s gold reserves and naval power.
After World War II, which marked the rise of US imperialism as the world’s dominant imperialist power, the US dollar officially replaced the British pound as the world’s reserve currency. It was also backed by gold reserves and military might.
But, by the late 1960s the dollar’s position began to erode. US imperialist rivals in Asia and Europe, back on their feet, were successfully vying for greater market share. They began to accumulate a great deal of dollars.
Seeing that the US gold reserves were disappearing in the Vietnam War, these imperialists began demanding gold for their dollars. Thus, in 1971, US president Richard Nixon was forced to take the US dollar off the gold standard. Now it was only backed by US military power.
This was not enough. In 1974, US strategic thinkers decided to back the dollar with Middle Eastern oil. They forced the Organization of Oil Producing Countries(OPEC) to sell their oil only in dollars. Now, all oil-importing countries had to keep dollars in reserve to buy oil.
This has given US imperialists a tremendous advantage. Printing dollars cost them nothing; in return they get other capitalists’ currency which US imperialists then use to demand goods and services from them. It allows the US to be the biggest debtor in the world.
But China’s economy overtook the US in terms of purchasing power in 2014 and is about to overtake it in 2018 in terms of Gross Domestic Product. This will lead inevitably to the Chinese Yuan replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
To accomplish this, Chinese imperialists launched their One Belt, One Road project. It will connect China by road with Central Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and by sea to South-East Asia, Africa and Central Asia. With faster and cheaper access to resources and markets, China’s more competitive goods will capture greater market share.
But, most crucial, China must replace the US petro dollar with the petro Yuan. Thus, the Chinese imperialists have just introduced petro-Yuan oil futures contracts which can easily be converted to gold. Russia, the world’s biggest energy exporter, embraced it. Venezuela began reporting its oil prices in Yuan this month. Iran might be next. This sharpening fight between the imperialists for control of oil and power, not concerns about “democracy,” account for Trump’s fury at Venezuela.
However, the big prize is Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer and main bulwark of the US petrodollar. China has become Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil market and its main trading partner. Also, Chinese influence is growing in this oil rich region.
The attack on the dollar via the petro dollar is accelerating faster than that of the US dollar against the British pound, which took two World Wars to complete. The rise of the Yuan will not be peaceful. US imperialism is trying to impede China’s rapid advance–they are on a collision course and are accelerating war preparations.
Only communism with its production for need can create a world free of exploitation, racism, sexism and war.
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