Forward to greater working-class unity, forward ever!
7 October 2020
Over 2 million jobs were lost in our country between April and June this year, 2020. The number of unemployed people is over 10 million. Inequality and poverty deepened because of the capitalist crisis of Covid-19 and the system’s interrelated crisis before the current crisis. This is among the many reasons, in the launch of our Red October Campaign 2020–2021, we reiterated our call for a minimum income guarantee, among other measures. A universal basic income grant should be part of the minimum income guarantee.
However, we also need grants in the form of productive interventions, aimed at building access to the right to work for all. If truth be told, many of our unemployed people can thrive if supported with incentives for productive activity, for example in agriculture/farming, with seeds, implements and technical capacity building, as the Freedom Charter calls for. There are many other sustainable livelihood activities in which many of our people can thrive if given adequate support. The development of a thriving co-operatives sector is a key solution as well.
Private wealth accumulation forces, global and national, oppose many of the working-class interests. Those forces stand in our way to address the systemic features of inequality, unemployment, poverty, and the corruption pandemic. They include those who cling to an increasingly discredited neo-liberal fundamentalism. Unfortunately, they have their ilk in the National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank. In court papers, for instance, the National Treasury has even gone so far as to say that it would be “immoral” to honour the government’s public sector wage agreement.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and huge economic and social distress, the South African Reserve Bank has been prepared to inject significant liquidity into the private banking oligopoly. A developmental central bank can play a strategic role towards the much needed transformation of the financial sector. But the South African Reserve Bank is not and does not do so. It is fixated on neoliberal orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the publicly owned sections of our economy are under distress. There is just no permanent reason, in principle, why the South African Reserve Bank should not make direct state bond purchases to support our economy and broader social transformation and development.