What often presents itself as “plain speaking” or “common sense” is, in fact, one of the oldest ideological manoeuvres in bourgeois political economy: blaming the poor for their poverty and the unemployed for their unemployment.
Historically, bourgeois political apologists have always worked to obscure the real causes of mass poverty. Rather than confront exploitation, dispossession, and the violent reorganisation of society in the interests of capital, they shift attention to individual behaviour. Poverty is explained as laziness; unemployment as passivity; inequality as the outcome of poor choices. In this way, a system built on domination and exclusion is recast as neutral, even fair.
But history does not support this fiction.
People did not become poor because they failed to show initiative. They were made poor. They were forcibly separated from their land, their livestock, their tools, their communal economies, and their ways of producing material wealth and sustaining life. This separation was not accidental. It was imposed through colonial conquest, racialised capitalism, taxation, enclosure, migrant labour systems, and state violence. Only once people had been stripped of independent means of livelihood were they compelled to sell their labour power in order to survive.
Unemployment, therefore, is not a moral condition. It is a structural feature of capitalism, and in South Africa a specifically CST capitalism. Capital requires a surplus population of unemployed and underemployed (or precarious) workers to discipline wages, weaken labour, and protect profitability. Mass unemployment is not evidence of individual failure; it is evidence of how the system functions.
It is against this background that the recent remarks by Comrade Gwede Mantashe must be understood. When unemployment is understood as a problem of insufficient effort – when the state is said to have “given a fishing rod” and individuals are told they must simply catch fish – the implication is clear: those without work have no one to blame but themselves.
This is not a progressive argument. It is a classical bourgeois myth, recycled in contemporary language.
In a country with world-record levels of unemployment, particularly among the youth, such language performs a precise ideological function. It diverts attention away from monopoly capital, deindustrialisation, capital flight, financialisation, and the failure to restructure ownership and production. Instead of asking why the economy systematically excludes millions from productive work, responsibility is displaced onto the unemployed themselves – who are instructed to queue better, search harder, and expect less.
The language of a so-called “parcel society” is especially revealing. It articulates legitimate demands for work, income, and social protection as dependency. Yet the working class is not asking for charity. It is demanding its right to work and to live in dignity in a society where wealth is socially produced but privately appropriated. This right cannot be left entirely to the fluctuations and exclusions of the capitalist labour market. Access to work cannot depend solely on whether capital finds it profitable to employ labour. A democratic society committed to socio-economic transformation must guarantee work through conscious public policy, social ownership, public employment, and cooperative forms of production.
This is not a new or radical demand. It is a foundational democratic commitment, clearly articulated in the Freedom Charter, which affirms that “there shall be work and security” and that all shall have the right to earn a living. To reduce this historic demand to a matter of individual hustle is to abandon the Charter’s meaning and intent.
Marxism has never rejected effort or initiative. What it rejects is the fiction that effort alone determines outcomes in a capitalist system that structurally limits access to work. Skills without jobs, education without an industrial strategy, and entrepreneurship without access to capital are not solutions. They are alibis – ways of appearing to address the crisis while leaving its foundations intact.
What bourgeois political economy always hides is the violence that produced the present. Capitalism in South Africa did not gently offer opportunities that people failed to seize. It destroyed existing livelihoods and then failed to provide stable employment in return. To now tell the descendants of the dispossessed that their unemployment is a personal failing is to invert history and erase exploitation.
This matters politically. At a time when millions of working-class people are withdrawing from electoral participation, such language does not inspire initiative. It confirms alienation. It signals that structural crisis will be met with moral lectures rather than transformation.
A Marxist political economy position is clear:
Unemployment is not a moral failure. It is the outcome of a system that does not require the labour of the many in order to enrich the few.
The task of a progressive movement is not to discipline the unemployed into self-blame, but to confront the class structure that produces mass unemployment – and to reorganise ownership, production, and work around social need.
When bourgeois myths masquerade as common sense, the result is not clarity. It is ideological retreat.
Tebogo Phadu is a member of the SACP central committee
