unemployment is a direct consequence of employment and the fact that work is tied to profit within the capitalist mode of organising work for production. that old locution “monkey dey work baboon dey chop” is a perfect description of the capitalist mode of production. the monkey is the employee/worker or wage-slave who toils while the baboon is the employer/bourgeois or capitalist who turns profit by extracting surplus value from the work of the monkey.

1. unemployment isn’t a natural occurrence as per the laws of the material world.

2. unemployment is not a spiritual phenomenon — you are not unemployed because of a witch or some ancestral curse.

3. unemployment is a systemic and structural characteristic of the capitalist mode of organising work — you are not unemployed because you are supposedly lazy and lack enthusiasm or creativity. and the problem isn’t that there isn’t work, the problem is that profit comes before work.

the capitalist system is a giant monster of employment that bestows on a select few private property; thus, creating an employer class while the rest of the population who form the majority by their lack of property become the employee class. employment is waged-labour, and it is this organisation of waged labourers or employees who produce the goods and services that employers’ profit or surplus value comes from, because the means necessary for the production of those goods and services such as factories, land, offices, tools and equipment are by bourgeois jurisprudence their private property.

It is important to note that other than the naturally occurring means of production such as land, the tools and equipment were made by other employees. the wages of the employee class and the profit of the employer class are the total product of the labouring class of employees or workers and this is why profit is theft or exploitation.

the employer is able to turn a profit because bourgeois jurisprudence makes it legal for him or her to expropriate from the workers the full value of their labour because of private property laws and pay workers a small fee or wage. the dictatorial nature of the transaction between the working-class and propertied or employer class is one of the ways unemployment is engineered. those with the power to employ only do so when it benefits them, and it’s that simple. another reason that accounts for unemployment is the very fact that the capitalist system is a system only concerned with profit for the employer.

unemployment has been a feature of the capitalist system since the english government violently dispossessed masses of people of land, privatising it, and violently opening the legs of the earth for the rape and the subsequent birth and flourishing of the capitalist system. the english masses were massacred by unemployment and those who found waged labour were massacred by factory work, while the transatlantic slave trade was a more brutal method of extracting profit for the european bourgeois.

one of the ideological functions of the unemployed is that they exist as a threat to the employed i.e. the reserve army of labour, as karl marx called them, exist to drive fear in the hearts of the employed. wages and profit are two sides of the same coin, and the unemployed exist to drive down employee wages and maximise the profit of the employer, it’s that simple. this is a global problem, because the capitalist mode of production was globalised through colonialism.

today, entrepreneurship is spoken of as a new idea and the answer to unemployment by ken ofori atta and other bourgeois politicians and vulgar economists, but it is neither new nor the solution to poverty and unemployment. entrepreneurship is captured within the framework of capitalism and it’s what we have been doing for the past 4 centuries, if it was going to solve unemployment we wouldn’t be talking about unemployment at this point in its history.

capitalism is a system of employment and unemployment is a direct result of this idea that by their violent conquest of property a few individuals form a class of employers and thus, should have the power to choose who lives and who dies from the mass of the population who by their lack of property become the employee class. thus, to end unemployment and poverty, abolish employment itself.