Mein Lebenswelt :: A Brotherhood of Suffering

In a post from September 2021, four years ago, I placed a link to Hugh Graham's Philosophy in Rags: The Individual: Houellebecq and Gnosticism where he quotes our poor misrepresented philosophical brother and (closet) Schopenhauer Disciple:

For Nietzsche it is the awaited ”new man”,  the Übermensch, a “half saint, half genius” whose misrepresentation as a tyrannical Nordic superman he himself predicted.

Are you accomplices in the present madness of nations which desire above all to produce as much as possible, and to be as rich as possible? […] But where is your internal value when you no longer know what it is to breathe freely; when you have scarcely any command over your own selves […] when you look enviously at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions; when you no longer believe in philosophy in rags, or in the freedom of spirit of a man who as few needs; when a voluntary and idyllic poverty without profession or marriage, such as should suit the more intellectual one among you, had become for you, an object of derision?

Is wage-slavery "slavery" ?

It sure felt like slavery to me.   See our Why Work forum, the one we are in right "now" :

http://whybother.freeboards.org/why-work/

European Insurance companies in the late 19th and early 20th century often refused to sell their products to the Chinese because they often tried to take their families out of poverty by dying voluntarily.

People of many nationalities were recruited to build the Panama Canal, the working conditions were very hard . The Chinese workers often chose to hang themselves from the nearby trees instead of continuing to work as slaves.

When some Chinese workers were taken to Peru, the employers often used guards to prevent the workers from throwing themselves into the sea.

When the workers from China were taken to Cuba to work on the plantations,while the employers found them to be gentle,they also found that they did not value their own lives very highly.

Chinese Workers Foxconned

Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today’s planet of slums.

The suicide nets are still there. Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturing subcontractor, installed them in 2010, a year when fourteen workers died after jumping from the ledges and windows of crowded dormitories. In addition to the wide mesh nets, stretched low over the streets of Foxconn’s company towns, the corporation has twenty-four-hour “care centers,” “no suicide agreements,” and a psychological test to screen out potentially suicidal workers, charged to the job applicant. It has raised wages significantly, but only in the face of runaway inflation, steep hikes in the minimum wage, and mounting worker unrest.

https://dissentmagazine.org/article/chinese-workers-foxconned/

From 2017: iSlave:

Foxconn makes most of its money from assembling iPhones, iPads, iMacs and iPods. Its notorious “military management” was blamed for causing a string of 17 worker suicides in 2010.

See A bloody decade of the iPhone

Also, A suicide survivor: the life of a Chinese worker