The 1976 June uprising opened the floodgates for popular struggles, which ultimately made racial capitalism unprofitable. In response to this, Zac de Beer, the then-director of Anglo American, said: ”We all understand how years of apartheid have caused many blacks to reject the economic and political system … We dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bath water of apartheid.”
De Beer’s response was a call for reform and defence of capitalism as a system run by capitalists or entrepreneurs who, like parasites, prey on the working class. His vision was of a post-apartheid rainbow parasitism in which the race, gender and age of parasites must be reformed. From this perspective, the process of ”transformation” is meant to incorporate women and black people in the capitalist structures of production, distribution and consumption.
Indeed, the post-apartheid South Africa has thrown away the bath water of apartheid and retained the baby of capitalism, resulting in the current high levels of poverty, which adversely affect young people.
Amid this abject poverty, a clarion call has been made for young people to be entrepreneurs (read capitalists) and embrace the spirit of entrepreneurship (read capitalist ideology) as an integral part of the ”transformation” process under the rubric of black economic empowerment. This bolsters capitalism as a system driven by profit as opposed to people’s needs.
A capitalist needs capital and labour in order to make profit. The cost of these must be lower in order to make more profit.
In our country, the emergence of young entrepreneurs depends on the state and white monopoly capital.
State institutions/funds, such as the National Empowerment Fund, Micro Agricultural Finance Scheme, Ntsika and Umsobomvu Youth Fund, have been created to provide money for youth to buy resources in order to exploit labour. The Department of Trade and Industry website is full of tips on how to be a good parasite. Nothing on youth co-ops!
Since capitalism is based on -competition over access to capital or resources, there is also a battle among young capitalists over the control of state institutions that control state capital. It is not accidental that the fight for the Umsobomvu fund and other youth entrepreneurial agencies is mainly about class struggle among young capitalists. This may even take the form of graft where the entrepreneurs corrupt state officials in order to access ”tender capital”.
There is an entrepreneurship myth that everyone can be a capitalist under capitalism. By its nature the capitalist system can only have a few capitalists, and other people must provide labour as the source of their livelihood. This labour must also be cheap. In the recent past there has been a call for deregulation of the labour markets so that buying of labour by capitalists should be cheap in order to grow the small capitalists.
There is a myth that it is only through capitalism that we can -create jobs. But, capitalists stole the means of work through the 1843 vagrancy law, the 1857 Kaffir Act and 1913 Land Act, and black people were left with no economic resources, except their labour power to sell to capitalists. If the working class could reclaim the means of work, they could work for themselves. It is not the aim of capitalists to create jobs. If it were possible to make profits without -creating jobs, capitalists would do it.
The working class youth cannot live on a diet of Marxist theory. For this reason they must struggle for anti-capitalist transitional reforms to meet their basic needs. The immediate task of the working class youth is not to build capitalists, but to build co-operatives as a basis for a socialist future. State and private capital must be used to fund this.
Capitalism is a like a poison— it kills. It preys on death and the poverty of the working class. The clarion call for the building of young capitalists is tantamount to a call for the creation of more poverty.
If the future is the youth, and the youth are capitalists, then our future will be that of the majority getting poorer and the rich getting richer.
David Masondo is national chair-person of the Young Communist League