Youth Month 2025 finds us in the midst of a deep and unfolding crisis, one which embeds itself further with each passing year. South Africa’s official unemployment rate now sits at 32.9%, and the expanded rate, which includes discouraged work-seekers, sits at a crushing 43.1%. For young people between the ages of 15 and 34, that figure climbs to a staggering 46.1%. Behind these statistics are real people. 8.2 million officially unemployed, 291,000 jobs lost in quarter one of 2025. The hallmarks of a deepening crisis.
But even these numbers, as alarming as they are, fail to capture the full picture. Because what they hide is a lived reality of precarity, informalisation, and exploitation. They fail to show that even among those counted as “employed”, many are earning poverty wages, working multiple jobs without contracts or protections, and surviving in a gig economy that strips them of power, dignity, and any hope of building a stable future.
This is not simply a crisis of governance. It is a crisis of capitalism.
Under capitalism, work does not guarantee a decent life. More often than not, workers are paid just enough to reproduce their labour, to keep them alive, barely, just so that they can live to be exploited another day. But not enough to live a life of dignity, self-determination, or meaning.
To explore the beauty of life, to create and rest, to participate in political, cultural, or family life… these are luxuries under capitalism. Privileges reserved for the upper strata of class society. For most, including the vast majority of young people in this country, to even dream of such a life would be an exercise in futility.
To understand youth unemployment and the multitude of crises confronting young people, we must reject the tired excuses peddled by the administrators of a broken system, which, perhaps paradoxically, works exactly as intended. Unemployment is not a mistake. It is not an indicator of policy failure. It is not a gap to be fixed through better training or a “more stable investment climate.”
Unemployment is a necessary feature of capitalism, built into its very logic.
Capitalism has always relied on what Marx called the “industrial reserve army”, a surplus population of would-be workers deliberately kept unemployed or underemployed in order to suppress wages and discipline those who dare to organise or demand too much. It’s a system of production that relies on a degree of desperation, in order to keep workers replaceable and expendable.
The colonial and apartheid labour regimes in South Africa perfected this logic, creating a racialised and gendered reserve army of cheap black labour, used and discarded at will. Post-apartheid, that structure has not been dismantled. It has simply been brought under new management.
Importantly, however, as capitalism evolves into its current parasitic and crisis-ridden stage, the terrain of accumulation has shifted.
Historically, exploitation has been concentrated in production. Profit was extracted from the mines, factories, and farms and thus, the realisation of surplus value required the exploitation of labour, which in turn required people to be employed. Today, even though production remains a central site of accumulation, it no longer delivers the same levels of profitability it once did. In response, capital has increasingly turned toward financialisation, giving rise to a system that generates profit not through making things, but by moving money.
This shift has been driven by falling profit rates in the productive economy, oversaturation of markets, and intensified global competition. Rather than resolve these contradictions, the capitalists have sought out new sites of accumulation in speculation, debt, and asset trading, unleashing a wave of fictitious capital and hyper-financialised economic life.
While production remains essential to capitalism, capital increasingly turns to financialisation as a strategy to restore or supplement declining profit rates, feeding off past accumulation while deepening social inequality and instability.
Today, profit is extracted through banks, hedge funds, real estate, private equity, fintech platforms, and digital financial services. Even when capital does engage labour, it often prefers to do so via platforms like Uber, Bolt, Takealot, and the informal gig economy, extracting maximum value under minimal obligation, and subjecting workers to the most precarious and dehumanising conditions.
It is a shift that is not neutral. It has weakened unions, destroyed stable jobs, and turned millions into “self-employed” hustlers with no protections, no power, and no prospects to better their future. The rise of financialisation and circulation have deepened unemployment because capital no longer requires the same volume of labour in the same way. It would rather automate production, outsource it to low-wage economies, or invest in financial instruments that produce profit without even producing a single commodity or item of use value.
The consequences of this are manifest all around us. I recently sat on a panel in the Soweto community of Snake Park for a youth dialogue. There, some so-called entrepreneurs insisted that young people just need to “think creatively,” “save their pennies,” and “hustle harder”, assuring them that the money is out there for the taking so long as you are bold enough to get yours.
But these are not solutions; if anything, they are insults.
These self-styled motivational speakers are saying that poverty is your fault. The problem is not the system, but you. That if you can’t beat unemployment, it’s because you are lazy or you lack imagination.
They completely fail to account for the reality in which you can sell kotas, cut hair, clean sneakers, build a side hustle, run a spaza, learn forex or push Bolt, and still go to sleep hungry. Not because you didn’t try hard enough, but because the system is designed that way. Because capitalism survives by making sure that people hustle to stay poor.
In spite of the optimism espoused by the uninspired motivationalists, the conditions confronting young people are made worse when inflation hits, when the cost of bread, electricity, rent, and transport shoots up, and in response, the Reserve Bank doubles down in its role as the guardian of financial capital.
Neoliberal monetary policy tightens the noose around the neck of the poor, while preaching the tools of stability.
One of the consequences of deindustrialisation in this country is that we import more than we produce. So when supply chains are disrupted, or there are bottlenecks (for whatever reason), the imbalance between supply and demand causes prices to go up.
Importantly, instead of addressing the structural supply crisis by rebuilding local industry, the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) responds by targeting demand. This is neither a neutral nor a homegrown response. It is rooted in an ideological framework championed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the so-called central bank of central banks, which sets the tone for monetary policy across the globe.
The SARB follows this orthodoxy religiously. It raises the policy rate, triggering increases in interest rates across the economy. Its aim is to raise the cost of borrowing, reduce spending, make saving more lucrative and thus, cool inflation. In real terms, however, this means that ordinary people, especially black working-class households, carry the cost of inflation.
Bonds increase, and rent goes up. Car payments increase, and the cost of transport along with it. Small businesses close shop or are bought up by the monopolists because they generally don’t own their assets and don’t have the reserve capital to withstand sudden increases to operating costs. The result is that township economies hollow out even further, more people lose their jobs, income-generating schemes and dignity.
By reducing the circulation of money in the economy in an attempt to curtail demand and thus combat inflation, the Reserve Bank actually further entrenches the interlocking crises of unemployment, poverty and a soaring cost of living. But we must understand that these monetary policies are not merely misguided. They are a class weapon which is used to protect investors and creditors, while punishing the poor and enriching the bankers.
Policy rates strangle, while austerity strikes with surgical cruelty.
All of this is compounded by the violence of austerity. Year after year, the national budget is cut. Education, healthcare, housing, public transport, and youth development programmes are gutted. In very real terms, life itself becomes privatised and financialised.
You need money to access every basic necessity. If you don’t have money, you don’t have rights, and certainly, you don’t have opportunities or prospects for bettering your material conditions.
Young people in this world, the unemployed youth, the township hustlers, the unemployed graduates, the matriculants who have no hope for tertiary, the first years facing academic and financial exclusion while sleeping in libraries and toilets and the pre-teens who are dropping out to take care of their siblings or their parents are not just poor, they are made to feel useless, invisible, and entirely disposable.
It is what Frantz Fanon meant when he spoke of a system that turns the colonised into waste. A people to be chewed up and spat out.
Is it any surprise, then, that under such conditions we are experiencing a social rupture of profound proportions?
The rise of gangsterism, gender-based violence, mental health breakdowns, drug abuse, and political apathy are not isolated social issues. They are symptoms of a society in decay.
Millions of young people are living without hope. They are trapped between joblessness and the futility of hustle culture. They are invisible and yet carry the crushing boot of the BEE fat cats, the multinational oligarchs and the political opportunists squarely on their shoulders.
Capitalism produces not just economic poverty, but social and spiritual poverty. It destroys the community. It corrodes relationships. It kills the future.
And yet, this system has the audacity to blame young people for their own suffering. Tells them to “innovate”, to “pull themselves up”, “the youth of today are lazy, spoiled and want everything for free”. Worse still, it misleads them in its attempt to veil its true character, pointing deceitful fingers at African migrants, in its attempt to mask the criminals in Sandton, Stellenbosch, and Europe.
This system not only misleads, blames and abandons young people, but also brutalises them. When young people rise up to demand better, to assert themselves as legitimate stakeholders in their world and to organise for their most basic rights, they are met with rubber bullets, stun grenades and repression.
In Potchefstroom, this past Youth Day took a particularly sinister and sardonic turn as young people were shot by police simply for attempting to attend a Youth Day commemoration event addressed by Deputy President Paul Mashatile. A Youth Day rally, a celebration supposedly held in their name, where they were barred entry, shot and hospitalised by the state.
But this is nothing new. From the Fees Must Fall uprisings to the annual clampdown on student activists, the message is loud and clear. If you are young, poor, black, and unafraid, the state will meet your demands with its deadly strong arm.
And when resistance is not crushed under the boot of militarism, it is carefully pacified. Mass discontent is absorbed into technocratic reforms, pilot projects, and NGO programmes that speak the language of ‘opportunity’ and ‘inclusion’ while evading the system at the heart of the crisis. These initiatives effectively defang resistance by framing social problems as gaps in funding, skills, or coordination, not as products of capitalist exploitation. They offer the illusion of change without ever threatening power.
Still, against this wreckage, we carry with us the blueprint of a different future.
We need more than slogans. We need socialism, not as an abstract ideology, but as a concrete vision for rebuilding this country in the image of the working class and the poor. A society where the economy is driven by human need, not private profit. Where the land, mines, banks, farms, factories and energy systems are owned collectively and governed democratically. Where work is guaranteed, dignified, and socially useful.
We must fight for a massive public works programme to provide jobs and meet urgent social needs. For universal public services, housing, education, and healthcare that are decommodified and democratised. For a social wage and basic income that guarantees dignity for all. For community-run spaces of culture, safety, and care that offer young people real alternatives to gangs, drugs, and despair.
This is not utopia. It is the only rational, humane response to a system that knows only brutality, exclusion and exploitation. Such a project will not be delivered from above. It must be built from below through mass organisation, working-class leadership, and a fighting youth movement forged of the stubborn will to make our mark on history.
Capitalism has declared war on us. It is time we returned fire – with solidarity, struggle, and a revolutionary programme for socialism in our lifetime.
Zaki Mamdoo is an executive committee member of the Workers’ and Socialist Party (WASP) and the Socialist Youth Movement (SYM).
