Stop loathing capitalism and strive to create wealth
I sense so much anti-capitalism antagonism on social media but I am not able to get a sensible account for the animosity. The dictionary definition of capitalism reads: “An economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.”
The last part still puzzles me because no business is ever run for anything but profit. Apartheid SA was capitalist. It allowed private citizens to run their own businesses and benefit from the profit.
However, to a large measure Africans were not allowed to run their own businesses. The misery that was caused was not caused by capitalism but the shutting out of Africans from participating in capitalism. Whether we like it or not, innovation and creativity is motivated by doing it for yourself.
Marcus Garvey said: “…the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation. Take away industry from a race, take away political freedom from a race and you have a slave race.”
“Solid industrial foundation” here means that owned privately by the race not a government.
Most technological advances we use such as computers, cellphones, internet, social media are all results of the innovations of individuals allowed by a capitalist system to own their means of production (brains) and benefit from that.
Liberal dogma has confused people to think of apartheid only as deprivation of human rights and little of it restricting the ability of Africans to think for themselves. Some who brand themselves “revolutionaries” are least concerned with the damage to the psyche of Africans but are instead obsessed with the notion of the evil of capitalism. They want to see the solution of their problems in terms of Karl Marx, a European who never experienced antiAfrican prejudice. We are where we are as Africans because the system has been very powerful in making us ignore our own philosophers with clear and progressive ideologies. Anton Lembede said: “Freedom is an indispensable condition for all progress and development. It will only be when Africans are free that they will be able to exploit fully and bring to fruition their divine talent and contribute something new towards the general welfare and prosperity of mankind; and it will only be then that Africans will enter on a footing of equality with other nations …; and … occupy their rightful and honourable place among nations of the world”.
Before him Garvey said: “The race needs…men and women who are able to create, to originate and improve, and thus make an independent racial contribution to the world and civilisation.”
It does not mean that those that have acquired while shutting out Africans are the only ones who can achieve. It does not mean the way forward is to harass them to part with their material achievements. That would be an inadvertent admission that Africans have no capacity to create for themselves to achieve material benefits. Neither is moaning about capitalism ever going to deliver solutions. The world grinds around money.
Depriving yourself of courage to make money will leave you in squalor and at the behest of those who have money. It is money that brings out greed and selfishness in those so inclined, it is not being allowed to own and run one’s own business (capitalism) that does it.