Unemployment is a direct result of the profit motive in a capitalist economy.
When does unemployment happen? What does it actually mean for unemployment to exist?
Unemployment does not mean that there is nothing to do!
For example, there can be homelessness, there can be sick people, there can be starvation, at the same time as there is unemployment.
The streets can be dirty, with lots of trash laying around, the infrastructure can be crumbling or inexistent, etc.
One would think that if that as long as those issues exist, there is work to do, and therefore there should not be any unemployment.
But if a poor person is starving, or homeless, or whatever, this does not lead to employment opportunities, because in a capitalist system, the economy is run by private owners, for the profits of the private owners.
The poor person has nothing. They are not an owner. So their needs do not lead to employment opportunities.
In a capitalist system, it’s almost like those people don’t even exist at all.
The market is completely blind to a poor person starving.
Demand for goods and services is not when people actually need things for survival.
Demand for something is only recognized by the market system if it can be expressed in terms of willingness to pay.
Poor people who can’t pay for housing don’t create a demand for housing.
Only people who have money can express their needs and desires in the market system. You vote with your money, and when you don’t have money, you don’t get to vote, your voice is silenced.
It’s only when a wealthy person can be made even wealthier, when there is a profit incentive for the wealthy, that there are jobs.
If the wealthy cannot be made any wealthier right now, then there is just nothing more to do as far as markets and capitalism is concerned, everything is already running at peak efficiency, since the only criteria taken into account for deciding if something is efficient or not, is whether it is profitable for the owners.
This is something that people don’t seem to notice, or understand.
As a worker in a capitalist economy, the only thing you have to sell is your body.
If nobody wants to buy you for a couple of hours to use for their pleasure or power, then you don’t have anything at all.
Your wages are not based at all on what you actually do, or what is produced. Your wages are entirely a result of supply and demand.
In other words, you don’t get paid based on what you do.
You get paid based on the ratio between how many desperate poor people there are, and how concentrated wealth ownership is.
If there are lots of desperate poor people that can do something, and few owners, then the wages will be low.
You could be well educated, and doing something extremely productive, it doesn’t really matter. If there are many other people who can do it, you can all forget your dreams of living a decent life, put away your master’s degrees, and start looking for unpaid internships and min wage jobs.
Likewise, the amount of jobs available is not a result of how much work there is to do, but is based on who controls the wealth and the money.
In the regular recession/depression cycles of the market economy, people have no money, therefore there are almost no jobs available because average people can’t pay for anything, therefore there is less employment, and less money available, and so on.
A recession doesn’t mean that there is nothing to do.
It doesn’t mean that everyone is healthy. It doesn’t mean everyone has housing, it doesn’t mean that every kid has quality education.
It just means that there is no profit motive to provide any of those things, because the people have no money.
There is no market demand for anything when the people don’t have money.
Only unemployment:
An oversupply of poor people with nothing to do but sell themselves by the hour, competing against each other to see who can accept the worse conditions.
