“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Suicide and Economics

...economics being how you organize your enjoyment. And if it's only organized anthropocentrically, you are limiting it already, right? Anyway, I had written that thing about what Juncker so insensitively said to Greece--given that the actual suicide rate has skyrocketed since “austerity” (which sounds so serious, like the way a sadist looks so serious). Anyway, I had literally just read a sentence or two in Bifo's book Heroes. Have you read it yet? It's really really nice. Anyway, Foxxconn--the factory where the Apple stuff etc. happens and where there is a very large number of suicides. The company tried to prevent the suicides by--guess what--cutting off compensation payments to the families. Their propaganda about it? “Life is precious”--aka you can't even kill yourself, your life is precious to us, we own you.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Where is the factory located? Were workers killing themselves to get money for their families? Some company life insurance policies can be as much as $100,000. If your life is miserable, "benefit" can take on more shadowy meanings than some in the west might understand.