Is your Boss the master and you the Slave in the 21st Century India?
I have been dabbling in Western philosophy since June this year. I had never considered it of any value until I fell into the rabbit hole. The most impressive are the German ones, like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hagel. The only English philosopher I would like to read is David Hume.
Hagel came up with the dialectic theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Hagel is the OG of philosophers who came up with the Master-Slave morality philosophy from which Karl Marx got inspired and applied the same to the economic reality of the early capitalistic Western world and invented Marxism, which perhaps led to the death of more than 10m people in Russia and China only. Nietzsche inverted the entire master-slave morality on its head, saying we should have master morality and avoid slave morality. Those who are uninitiated about this philosophical concept can listen to my deep dive podcast here.
The master always looks at his employees as objects.
Hagel claimed the master and slave relationship is such that the master always looks at the slave as an object whose fruits of labour he will consume while the slave has no agency in his creation. Whatever the slave toils to create is usurped by the master. This leaves the slave without a self. But eventually, the master depends on the slave for his labour, and now it is the master who is dependent on the slave rather than the slave, this is when the power balance starts to tip in favour of the slave. The slave rebels, there is a fight, and a new order is born.
Modern workplaces make us all zombies
Though Hagel wrote about the Master slave morality in the 18th century, human psychology remains the same. Even in the 21st century, almost all Bosses look at an employee as a means to an end (goal). They don’t want to see the employee as a whole; they only want that part of the employee which will meet the production target to get the work shipped. The rent of the labour (credit for the work) is always snatched by the Boss. It is his business, his baby, his invention. The employee was just a cog in the wheel. An object.
The abolition of work.
Rob Black wrote this anarchistic book called “The Abolition of Work”. He says all businesses are dictatorships; an employee is dehumanised and objectified. He claims there is more violence in workplaces than in any other place; he says workplaces are like a police state where informants (now CCTV cameras) snoop on you. It removes all autonomy and dehumanises you.
There is a huge moment called “Lying flat” across China where young people refuse to take up a job. In the 1970s, some Autonomist theorists viewed “precarious work as good”, but Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist associated with the Autonomia movement said it was escapist and nihilist.
Today, I heard former Chief Justice Makrand Katju say that every year India adds 12M workers to the workforce, but there are corporate jobs for only 0.5M. The rest become hawkers, kidnappers, etc lol.
India does seem to be in crisis, with the GDP growth slowing down to 5.4, we seem to be ready for rough waters. The upside of precariousness is that we can no longer remain isolated, we need to cooperate and help each other to get through the tough times.
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