Two Suicide Attempts this Month at Polish Telecom and Open Letter from Workers

very sad, but really good article, thank you for posting and writing it.

Do you have an author pseudonym you are happy with? Because it would be good to credit your pieces with an author tag...

one question though: What do you mean by "mobbing"? You mean bullying?

right, that's funny, because "mobbing" in English English doesn't really work here, the only meaning in English would be something like forming a huge group or "mob" in the street or whatever.

With your name, do you mean Akai, or your full real name?

This is an international phenomenon in all the major states. There's always been bullying at work, always been repression and grief from the bosses to some degree or the other, but there's never been the expression of suicide at work as there is now - in this respect and research into this phenomenon, see the ICC's website for an article translated from its French section on suicides at work.

Bullying and intimidation at work has increased during the last two decades but is now ratcheting up to new levels with the development of the economic crisis, the need for capital to sharpen up its attacks and the disorientation of the working class, ie, the latter is allowing it to happen. Suicide at work (where's the no mistake about what the cause is, rather than being "hidden" at home or elsewhere) is a last, desperate, individual and forlorn attempt to rail against the system and maintain one's dignity in the face of intolerable circumstances. We should all feel these injuries.

At a renowned scientific research firm near Montpellier in France, there have been 3 successful suicides within 6 months in a building containing 3 research teams of about 25 personnel each - about 4% of the workforce for that particular building. None of this in the media.

In the library, at the end of the text I put there on the history of the British miners, I put this about the atmosphere in parts of the UK two decades after the defeat of the miners struggles. It's perhaps a bit over -abstract and meandering, but nevertheless more pertinent than not (actually the library version has the 2 last sentences missing for some unknown reason):

Suicide is painless

Not surprisingly, there's mass depression, a semi-suicidal gripping onto the edge of life that is driving millions, probably billions, to bad restless nights and tired tiring days. Everywhere people feel defeated - often at the simplest level (in their friendships, for example). Admitting defeat is not necessarily the same as resignation. Admitting defeat is not necessarily the same as accepting defeat as an inevitability. Accepting defeat doesn’t help: in fact, it can only help intensify suicidal and/or psychotically murderous feelings. Admitting defeat, however, should mean a recognition of what has happened, a recognition of reality which is a necessary basis for any consideration of a future attack on this brutal money terrorist reality.

We waver between the semi-suicidal exhaustion that defeat brings and the dream of some future total revolt. Hasn’t it always been the case for the survivors (the vast majority)? – after Spartacus, after the Paris Commune, after Kronstadt.? Probably not, for the most part, in the case of the Commune and Spartacus: the will to self-destruction is borne not just out of the impotence but out of a profound sense of isolation following defeat, a sense arising not merely from the feeling that destroying hierarchical power is an impossibility but above all from the lack of a communal consciousness that alienation is social (the rise of Stalin, however, was accompanied by a big increase in suicides, particularly amongst those who had placed their faith in the Bolsheviks).

Why be so morbid? Surely one cannot hope to inspire revolt if one talks about these desperate feelings. And yet not acknowledging them, and trying to uncover their material bases in the all-pervasive alienation of the Economy and its images makes people even more isolated in these feelings. These feelings are everywhere not admitted in the rulers’ overwhelming show of the possibility of happiness exclusively within the production and consumption of this society; these feelings are everywhere considered to be solely your fault, an aberration.

In the mid-1960s a revolutionary of that time said, “The will to live is a political decision”. We can see now that the project of destroying political social relations, the only political decision ever worth making, was effectively defeated – at least in the immediate epoch - in the mid-to-late 80s. Which is why the victory of political decisions over the will to live has never been so great - just look at the whole post-9/11 world. The intensification of political-economic power and of hierarchy at every level of life (in your relationships also, dear reader), in every part of the world has reduced the will to live to the will to survival. And mere survival makes death seem like a release, the ‘freedom’ of nothingness, the end to pain. In the end, the will to mere survival makes suicide seem a possibility.

Nowadays the etiquette is not to admit defeat and to sneer at those who readily admit to being defeated (for the moment). Isn’t this a bit like the way Christianity, after Spartacus, turned the crucifix, and the reality of defeat, into a symbol of defiance, but not the reality. The American comedian Lenny Bruce said that if Christ had existed today, everyone would be walking around with little electric chairs round their neck. Nowadays almost everyone hides their defeat beneath an ideology of defiance every bit as perverse as wearing an electric chair round your neck. This basic self-pride undoubtedly expresses a real desire to subvert daily life in some way but unless people recognise how far defeated they are, and the history of this defeat, this real desire can only be symbolic, as symbolic as an electric chair round your neck. Or an @narchist T-shirt.

What are we getting at here? It’s no use pretending we’re taking charge of even a little bit of our lives, or at least of the struggle to transform our lives, if all we’re doing is hiding from ourselves how much we have been forced to repress and how much insanity we are having to put up with. This goes as much for those who consider themselves revolutionary as for anyone else. The inability to attack the present, the only time revolt and revolutions are ever made, makes some people, whose significance is mainly in their heads, adopt a timeless theory borrowed from the specialists of the past which they hope one day the working class will realise the eternal truth of. But all the clichés about creating a global human community beyond the economy etc. can’t hide an essential retreat into an almost transcendental abstraction as cosily safe, and as dogmatic, as hope in its religious forms. To really re-discover the revolutionary energy of the past one must first despair of this world. One must face the enormity of the results of defeat and the history of why past struggles were defeated. The path to the end of alienation follows the straight and narrow path of alienation itself.

if you could put anything in our news section about those suicides in France you mentioned Sam that would be great - then at least there would be something in our "media"

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/3/suicide. How does one make the link so that you just click on it? I'd welcome some instruction on this.

There was a short, poignant interveiw on TV last night with an Irish paramedic. He said not only did he and his collegues have to cope with a 20% wage cut but that they had to deal with many more suicides and attempted suicides which were the direct result of the economic crisis.

edit: OK, it's done it.