JUNE 17 2016, 05:00
Picture: THE TIMES
IRVIN Jim's piece (Jobs crisis marked by false solutions and indifference, June 14) is useful, compared to asking society to believe that the ANC created inequality, unemployment and poverty in alliance with the South African Communist Party and Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Capitalism is based on, and cannot exist without, class inequality.
Capitalism is responsible for unemployment and poverty.
The accumulation of wealth on a capitalist basis is based on capitalists privately appropriating workers' labour in the form of the surplus value that they produce, without giving them a cent!
The wages received by workers are to the capitalists nothing but a cost. This is why the capitalists develop strategies to maximise profit by reducing, or suppressing, the amount of money that goes to wages and so-called benefits. Retrenchments, labour brokers, casualisation and social insecurity affecting workers come about in this way.
As these strategies show, unemployment - as with inequality, poverty and social insecurity - is the basic condition, product, lever and a bargaining tool for the accumulation of wealth on a capitalist basis. Internationally, the reason, for example, unemployment is historically low in Britain is that British colonialism exploited our resources, as it did that of its other colonies, to build a large productive base and create employment in Britain.
Similarly, the low unemployment rate in other centres of imperialism is based on unequal international relations in which they dominate other countries such as SA.
Inequality, unemployment and poverty cannot be understood in isolation from their international aspects including the crisis that broke out in 2008. Jim (pictured) presents socialism as an "alternative" that will "bring some dignity to our people". Socialism is rather a necessity, and will bring about full dignity by eliminating capitalist class exploitation and imperialism.
Alex Mashilo
Johannesburg
http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/letters/2016/06/17/letter-capitalism-creates-unemployment