This is how capitalism works. It generally operates on the basis of supply and demand. So, when there is a high supply of any product, the price of such a product falls. When there is a high demand, the price goes up.
Labour power in capitalism is a product for sale. To make of us workers who must sell their labour to the capitalists, in order to have something to eat, they take away our land. Part of the driving reasons for taking our land was to force us to work for them. Go check the land policy of the settlers with the “discovery” of gold and diamonds. They took our land and forced us to leave our homes, to go and work for them.
As late as 1906, they still wanted us to be detached from the little land we had, they imposed those crazy taxes which could only be paid by money they owned. How are you going to pay the cat and dog tax if you don’t have their money, which they demand from you for your things? King Bambatha went to war essentially against these evil taxes.
The point I’m making is that if we follow the capitalist logic of supply and demand, then we shall understand why Stellenbosch actually wants a high unemployment rate. It forces workers to compete at the labour market on the basis of who can provide the cheapest labour.
The battle between the immigrant workers and the SA workers is essentially about cheap labour. That’s why you need to be careful when agents of Stellenbosch talk about opening the borders, without accounting for workers’ rights. They need the cheaper immigrant labour to come into SA and make profits for Stellenbosch and London, then on the other side of the same Stellenbosch evil coin you have Mashaba turning our attention on the immigrant, not the WMC employer who is making a profit out of the unprotected immigrant labour; which adds to the pool of over-supply of labour.
In fact, imperialism is happy to destroy the economies of Zimbabwe, Mozambique etc. to force people to flock south and be slaves.
So, when you see Ramaphosa not concerned about high unemployment, or you see the government paying lip service to the immigration problem, you need to understand that it’s a “thumamina” and “mazzoti” agenda to make profits from cheap labour, which is in over-supply when unemployed is high.
It is not in the best interest of WMC that there must be jobs for all. The fact that over 20 million people are unemployed is heaven for Stellenbosch.
So beware, high unemployment is good for white monopoly capital. It’s plain stupid to think those who benefit from our misery of unemployment can address a problem they have created and benefit from.
This also explains why they don’t want us to get our land back, because we shall stop being workers and become self employers and producers.
We must understand how this racist anti-Black capitalist system works, if we want to defeat it.
