TLDR; We are worthless essentially.
Recently I participated in an union conference in Sweden (where I live) where we learned about the collision between the capitalists and workers throughout history. All the way from hunter-gatherer society to todays capitalist society.
The only sustainable society for workers was the hunter-gatherer society where you had original communism with no one profiting from your labor but you and your family.
As soon as man learned to plant seeds and start farming, humanity took a quick turn towards the inevitable capitalism, because now you could harvest more than you needed to fill your plate for the day which changed the power structure totally. Because now people with great land and farming could pay people to farm for them, and in the end hire enforcers to keep your crop and land safe, which is the beginning of policing.
The positive thing about this change was that you were able to settle down in one place, and didn’t have to move throughout the seasons to provide food.
This opened up for more complex building structures that people could build because they could focus on different crafts without ever worrying about food.
With time, the lords and kings figured out that it was unhandy to trade items directly, especially if you needed larger volumes of goods, so instead of trading item for item, they came up with currency as a middle hand so you now could sell your items for currency, and then buy your needed item for same currency. Much easier, right?
This was the birth of capitalism. Because now people started to understand investment theory, that if they bought something now, it could be worth much more in the future. Speculation. Basically it went from item-currency-item to currency-item-currency. A good example for this is buying real estate in hopes for it to rise in value in the future.
So what is different now? Except for democracy, not much. Workers are still pawns for the greater capitalists, where our lives is replaceable with other workers or even machines.
What the workers of the world needs is to change their hegemony to a more worker friendly mindset, because if we stand together no one can stop us.
Or they will kill us all and replace us with other workers.