Xenophobia; The Phenomenon
Capitalism has brought us where we are; no point beating about. The wave of xenophobic sentiments, attacks and policies that have characterised the past five years especially across the world have one main thing in common; Economic Despair. This is not to discount other factors such as "cultural purism" that prevail in many societies around the would.
Often when socialism is touted as a remedy, the predictable question is asked; "where has socialism worked?". Frankly that's a ridiculous question and I think everybody knows it. Keep reading, maybe I'll explain why.
Capitalism is a failed system for too many reasons. The basic rationale for defending capitalism is that open unfettered markets promote competition which leads to innovation which then results in either creating more jobs elsewhere and serving as a catalyst for the diffusion of said innovation or making profits for employers to employ more people. This theory is called the "trickle down effect", but I'd like to call it a "trickle down assumption" because after all, it is a "theory". The existence and rise of the world's biggest tech giants is probably the biggest evidence to support the assumption.
Before I say anything else, let me just make it clear that the moment innovation in a particular system shifts from being motivated by humanitarianism and social necessity to being motivated by business profit making, that system has been set on a path to unpleasant chaos and destruction.
So why has something that sounds reasonable in theory failed so badly in reality? Well for a number of reasons, one of which I've already said. The dangers associated with having innovation being aimed at profit making are that you may end up having an economy infested with dishonest business practices, and/or you are likely to have the kind of crises we do with our planet's climate because marketing isn't so concerned about what is healthy/pro environment as long as sales are assured. The term "need" as used in marketing just refers to anything that people in a market segment might have a taste for - and maybe that's part of the problem.
Now to the assumption that capitalism somehow results in more jobs. This argument is at least unfortunate. The generations that have seen the most capitalist advancements are also the generations that have seen unemployment rates rise and wealth gap numbers become scarier than ever. This just means capitalism has failed to correlate the rates of population growth to the rates of job growth. Capitalism, like many outmoded systems is a default way of doing things and it's up to societies to restructure themselves to bring about some order. Unfortunately this has proven difficult.
The idea of employers being able to employ more and more people may look good until you observe and think about a few things.
For businesses to run efficiently, productivity must be at a maximum at the cheapest possible cost. What this means is that as much as possible, employers must ensure that whiles good profits are made, the resources used to make those profits are kept at a minimal cost - these include human resource.
This partly accounts for why wealth gap statistics may worsen even as unemployment rates reduce in certain economies. As CEOs make bigger profits they often expand their corporations and employ more people; they do not increase the salaries of their existing employees whom they probably were already exploiting. This means a certain class gets significantly richer and another class either sees no significant change in their general purchasing power or becomes worse off because costs of housing and other essentials in the market are trying to keep up with the rate of change of income of the rich.
Before Donald Trump's election in the United States, there were huge debates over the role of immigrants in the US economy. The debates still continue thirty-one months into his presidency. Candidate Trump appealed to United States citizens who believe(d) that jobs they should've been entitled to were being taken by latinx immigrants at their expense. The narrative has been that immigrants are aggressive invaders who come in with all their conspiratorial might to claim the economic opportunities that rightfully belong to "true Americans" and that it would take a war on illegal immigration to secure jobs for the American people.
Perhaps the frustration may have been horribly misplaced. The whole reason undocumented immigrants have been the preferred demographic for employment by many big corporations(including some belonging to Donald Trump) is that with these immigrants, the dynamics during bargaining favour the employers way more. Immigrants being undocumented means the options for income earning available to them are as many as the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials they are friends with. This coupled with the fact that they are very unlikely to report mistreatments meted out to them to the appropriate authorities puts them in the worst position possible to negotiate fair wages.
Bernie Sanders' efforts to make sure minimum wage in the US is risen to fifteen dollars an hour look to be yielding some good results. The adjustment may however make it even more difficult for employers to repent unless illegal immigration is decriminalised and undocumented immigrants currently living in the US are put on a path to citizenship.
United States Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has as his flagship policy, the idea of a Universal Basic Income for all Americans. He explains that need has arisen for this as a result of the rate of automation in the country - and world. He even suggests that machines are a bigger threat to job security and availability than immigrants; and he's right. Right-wing skeptics might be put off straight away by the idea of giving people "free money" because they are insensitive sociopaths who believe "people are poor because they are lazy". The idea behind the "Freedom Dividend" - as Yang calls it - is to give people who have been disadvantaged by the US economic system a fighting chance at survival. Giving people a fixed income they can rely on even if they are unemployed empowers them to be able to plan more realistically and invest as many times as they can in whatever ventures they may deem profitable. Frankly, telling an unemployed person to find something to do without empowering them to do so just sounds a lot less smart.
Okay, so it looks like the Americans know what their problems are and are trying to find ways to resolve them; what is going on in Africa?
Before I say anything on the situation in Africa, let me make it clear that the violence that have gone on in Ghana and South Africa aren't an "African thing". Indeed, many of the terrorist mass shootings that have occurred in the United States including the one in El Paso - Texas about a month ago have been inspired in many ways by the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants.
In Africa, a lot of the xenophobic aggressions have been expressed in respect of "foreign" retail businessmen and women; most of whom happen to be Africans from other countries. This is quite different from the situation in the United States because a lot of the labour in Africa are casualised. What this means is, you can't necessarily hold corporations directly responsible, right? Well I think you still can. Many SMEs get frustrated not because there are too many other SMEs, but because there are monopolies in the market who make it difficult for many SMEs to survive. So when xenophobes go attacking small business owners in Central Businesses Districts of Kumasi or Johannesburg, they are merely going after easy targets who's absences aren't necessarily going to make things any easier as long as the monopolies - who refuse to hire people and pay them fairly - keep growing.
I believe Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend should be adopted by as many African countries as possible. This is one of the truest ways to diffuse innovation as many small scale entrepreneurs would be empowered to reach parts of their respective counties that are considered very deprived and slowly gain market shares for themselves as they help those communities "advance" by sending products and services to them that they otherwise wouldn't have had access to. This is always better than having them congest what's left of the CBDs after big companies have made things difficult.
I'm going to end here and talk about how Socialism solves the hard problems in our economy in another post.
I wish fellow Africans who are outside their countries and in South Africa well and hope that solutions are found soon.
Often when socialism is touted as a remedy, the predictable question is asked; "where has socialism worked?". Frankly that's a ridiculous question and I think everybody knows it. Keep reading, maybe I'll explain why.
Capitalism is a failed system for too many reasons. The basic rationale for defending capitalism is that open unfettered markets promote competition which leads to innovation which then results in either creating more jobs elsewhere and serving as a catalyst for the diffusion of said innovation or making profits for employers to employ more people. This theory is called the "trickle down effect", but I'd like to call it a "trickle down assumption" because after all, it is a "theory". The existence and rise of the world's biggest tech giants is probably the biggest evidence to support the assumption.
Before I say anything else, let me just make it clear that the moment innovation in a particular system shifts from being motivated by humanitarianism and social necessity to being motivated by business profit making, that system has been set on a path to unpleasant chaos and destruction.
So why has something that sounds reasonable in theory failed so badly in reality? Well for a number of reasons, one of which I've already said. The dangers associated with having innovation being aimed at profit making are that you may end up having an economy infested with dishonest business practices, and/or you are likely to have the kind of crises we do with our planet's climate because marketing isn't so concerned about what is healthy/pro environment as long as sales are assured. The term "need" as used in marketing just refers to anything that people in a market segment might have a taste for - and maybe that's part of the problem.
Now to the assumption that capitalism somehow results in more jobs. This argument is at least unfortunate. The generations that have seen the most capitalist advancements are also the generations that have seen unemployment rates rise and wealth gap numbers become scarier than ever. This just means capitalism has failed to correlate the rates of population growth to the rates of job growth. Capitalism, like many outmoded systems is a default way of doing things and it's up to societies to restructure themselves to bring about some order. Unfortunately this has proven difficult.
The idea of employers being able to employ more and more people may look good until you observe and think about a few things.
For businesses to run efficiently, productivity must be at a maximum at the cheapest possible cost. What this means is that as much as possible, employers must ensure that whiles good profits are made, the resources used to make those profits are kept at a minimal cost - these include human resource.
This partly accounts for why wealth gap statistics may worsen even as unemployment rates reduce in certain economies. As CEOs make bigger profits they often expand their corporations and employ more people; they do not increase the salaries of their existing employees whom they probably were already exploiting. This means a certain class gets significantly richer and another class either sees no significant change in their general purchasing power or becomes worse off because costs of housing and other essentials in the market are trying to keep up with the rate of change of income of the rich.
Before Donald Trump's election in the United States, there were huge debates over the role of immigrants in the US economy. The debates still continue thirty-one months into his presidency. Candidate Trump appealed to United States citizens who believe(d) that jobs they should've been entitled to were being taken by latinx immigrants at their expense. The narrative has been that immigrants are aggressive invaders who come in with all their conspiratorial might to claim the economic opportunities that rightfully belong to "true Americans" and that it would take a war on illegal immigration to secure jobs for the American people.
Perhaps the frustration may have been horribly misplaced. The whole reason undocumented immigrants have been the preferred demographic for employment by many big corporations(including some belonging to Donald Trump) is that with these immigrants, the dynamics during bargaining favour the employers way more. Immigrants being undocumented means the options for income earning available to them are as many as the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials they are friends with. This coupled with the fact that they are very unlikely to report mistreatments meted out to them to the appropriate authorities puts them in the worst position possible to negotiate fair wages.
Bernie Sanders' efforts to make sure minimum wage in the US is risen to fifteen dollars an hour look to be yielding some good results. The adjustment may however make it even more difficult for employers to repent unless illegal immigration is decriminalised and undocumented immigrants currently living in the US are put on a path to citizenship.
United States Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has as his flagship policy, the idea of a Universal Basic Income for all Americans. He explains that need has arisen for this as a result of the rate of automation in the country - and world. He even suggests that machines are a bigger threat to job security and availability than immigrants; and he's right. Right-wing skeptics might be put off straight away by the idea of giving people "free money" because they are insensitive sociopaths who believe "people are poor because they are lazy". The idea behind the "Freedom Dividend" - as Yang calls it - is to give people who have been disadvantaged by the US economic system a fighting chance at survival. Giving people a fixed income they can rely on even if they are unemployed empowers them to be able to plan more realistically and invest as many times as they can in whatever ventures they may deem profitable. Frankly, telling an unemployed person to find something to do without empowering them to do so just sounds a lot less smart.
Okay, so it looks like the Americans know what their problems are and are trying to find ways to resolve them; what is going on in Africa?
Before I say anything on the situation in Africa, let me make it clear that the violence that have gone on in Ghana and South Africa aren't an "African thing". Indeed, many of the terrorist mass shootings that have occurred in the United States including the one in El Paso - Texas about a month ago have been inspired in many ways by the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants.
In Africa, a lot of the xenophobic aggressions have been expressed in respect of "foreign" retail businessmen and women; most of whom happen to be Africans from other countries. This is quite different from the situation in the United States because a lot of the labour in Africa are casualised. What this means is, you can't necessarily hold corporations directly responsible, right? Well I think you still can. Many SMEs get frustrated not because there are too many other SMEs, but because there are monopolies in the market who make it difficult for many SMEs to survive. So when xenophobes go attacking small business owners in Central Businesses Districts of Kumasi or Johannesburg, they are merely going after easy targets who's absences aren't necessarily going to make things any easier as long as the monopolies - who refuse to hire people and pay them fairly - keep growing.
I believe Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend should be adopted by as many African countries as possible. This is one of the truest ways to diffuse innovation as many small scale entrepreneurs would be empowered to reach parts of their respective counties that are considered very deprived and slowly gain market shares for themselves as they help those communities "advance" by sending products and services to them that they otherwise wouldn't have had access to. This is always better than having them congest what's left of the CBDs after big companies have made things difficult.
I'm going to end here and talk about how Socialism solves the hard problems in our economy in another post.
I wish fellow Africans who are outside their countries and in South Africa well and hope that solutions are found soon.
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