The majority of South Africans are young, with two-thirds of the population under 34. The labour force is made up of 22.3 million people who can be employed, but more than 11.4 million of them (even if you only take the government’s estimates) are unemployed. This number would be higher if you included those who have given up looking for work and homemakers who are categorised with the 17.1 million people who are labelled not economically active, even though they would take any job.

The unemployment crisis is not fundamentally due to a skills shortage, as some technocrats and academics argue. In the course of the pandemic more than 2.8 million workers have lost their jobs, many of them highly skilled – not to mention growing unemployment among Technical Vocational Education and Training and university graduates. In our current economic system, not even skills can protect you from unemployment, poverty and inequality.

This proves that under capitalism unemployment is a permanent reality – which countless agreements, strategies, consultancy reports, “affirmative” laws and “active labour market policies” will not resolve because it is intrinsic to this economic system. This is why we must test ideas about work and learning and livelihoods that exist outside conventional economic categories of capitalist production systems.

Skills are important to all human beings because they help to build a good society in which many types of work are required, reducing dependence on importing goods and skills. A good education system will do that – not one that reproduces the skills required by capitalism, which is highly dependent on the unpaid work of women and domestic labour. Then there is how we understand the word “skill”. We have to talk about skills for what, for whom and how they are developed and related to society. Talking about skills the way labour market analysts do is deceptive because the purpose of so-called skilled work is capitalist reproduction.

Who owns and controls the skills is another key question. In capitalism, the worker only owns a skill nominally – in name, not substance – because she/he cannot use it for socially useful purposes, except when the very system and structures of the economy change. Until then the worker must sell the skill for money – just like other goods (bread, sugar, tea, building material, a car). It only attaches to the worker for sale to the boss, not for its creative value. Even the creative work in households – hundreds of simple and complex jobs – is done mainly to support the labour bought by the capitalists on a daily/weekly/contract basis.

Improving one’s skills under capitalism is necessary to get a better capitalist price unless you can break away from capitalism through an alternative system. Yebo, workers need higher wages, etc, and are therefore obliged to improve their skills. But how much greater would the benefit be if they also controlled them and used them for social purposes, not for the profit of someone who owns and controls their skills and knowledge?

A result of this unemployment crisis is hunger. In South Africa, more than 10 million people go to bed hungry every week. Three million of them are children. The price of food continues to increase, resulting in the average cost of monthly household groceries rising to R4,135. How paradoxical when the very farmworkers who produce our food cannot afford it.

According to the Household Affordability Index compiled by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group, the cost of household food baskets in Durban, Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg rose marginally this month by R31.87, R51.28 and R12.04, respectively, while in Johannesburg and Springbok they declined marginally by R28.45 and R21.03. Given these figures, the food unrest we saw in some parts of the country makes sense.

People have formed community farms and linked them with community kitchens so they can eat together – a form of solidarity in a time of despair. We have also seen people in working-class communities creating backyard gardens and exchanging their yields.

We have seen many community health workers giving produce from their gardens at community clinics to patients who are defaulting on treatment because they do not have food to complement treatment. And at the fences of community farms, people are buying vegetables they can afford.

In this time we have also seen the role spaza shops play in working-class communities, packaging sugar in plastic and selling it for R1, selling loose tea bags for 50c, or slicing bread to sell at very low prices. They do this with oil, beef stock, beans, rice, vegetables and meat, too.

We have also seen how they let people take goods on credit, while street hawkers do the same. This is not something you find in supermarkets and malls; it is based on spaza shops and street hawkers understanding the struggles of the community in which they operate – an act of solidarity to accommodate the market.

We have also seen the role of stokvels, savings clubs and amafela. The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group reported that payments into stokvels are not being skipped. In fact, more members are taking loans from stokvels to buy extra staple foods outside the usual end-of-year payment window. Women with extra money saved in stokvels can withdraw it. Although there is little money available in most stokvels, there is enough to lend, which is also why members are being asked to continue paying in, the group reports.

We have seen how communities like Sali-Tubali in Kwazakhele, a cooperative of 36 houses, generate their own renewable electricity and sell it to the municipality and Rubicon, and how many informal settlement communities like Rolihlahla are finding alternative ways to get electricity into their houses using their unrecognised energy skills. 

We have seen how community construction workers collaborate to extend people’s houses, retrofit rooftops and make brick fences at affordable prices. Some create bricks collectively to sell to community markets at reasonable prices, while others use their mechanical skills to fix cars at affordable rates, or use their plumbing skills to fix burst pipes and drains, geysers and water leaks during the Eastern Cape drought.

We need to respond to the question of how, in addition to the many social justice and citizenship purposes, skills can support the development of useful livelihoods and income generation based on collective and cooperative work that is socially useful.

These are the principles of a solidarity economy that are necessary for sustaining and reproducing societies and protecting the environment. DM