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Suicide is a moral indictment of contemporary capitalist society, which has failed to create dignified conditions viable for human life. The brutality of alienation, discrimination, exploitation, and inequality in various forms drives people to take their own lives. Women are alienated from their own bodies and labour under patriarchal capitalism, where they are controlled in every sphere of their lives.
There is no life of their own. Constructed moral standards burden women, forcing them into domestication and control under the guise of sexual purity and the reproductive culture of patriarchy. Indigenous communities are displaced and alienated from their livelihoods, land, and resources in the name of mining-led industrialisation and development.
Working people are estranged from their labour, lives, and society in their everyday struggle to sustain daily existence. Young people are detached from their youthful spirit and creative abilities, pressured to be "productive" and "successful" at the cost of their mental, emotional, social and physical well-being. Such enforced alienating conditions are inherent to all forms of capitalism, driving both the young and old to suicide.
The privatisation of public resources—such as healthcare, education, parks, sports grounds, recreation grounds, beaches, riverbanks and other spaces for individual enjoyment—erodes public spaces in pursuit of profit, turning free pleasure and recreation into commodities for profit. This process promotes individual loneliness, as access to these essential experiences becomes dependent on one’s ability to pay.
It privatises stress within individuals to steal creative abilities of labour for profit. Therefore, suicide is not merely an individual problem; it is a product of a society that values monetised commodities more than human life. In capitalism’s use-and-discard culture, a person’s worth is determined by their utility. This essentialist and functionalist approach to life under capitalism fosters suicidal thoughts, as individuals struggle with crises that are not of their own making but are instead created by the capitalist system.
The enforced universalisation of capitalism in its various forms has created conditions of crisis, uncertainty and fear in both lives and livelihoods. The only means of negotiation is to engage with the unfair systems of capitalism and its culture of commodification, where life itself becomes a commodity. Capitalist society is further structured as an orderly object in the marketplace of human beings, where actions are driven by utilitarian principles of individualistic utility, pleasure, and satisfaction.
Such a society breeds entrenched hopelessness, making suicide appear as an easier option to escape despair conditions of capitalism. Such a Nietzschean capitalist reality embodies the idea that 'the thought of suicide is a powerful comfort; it helps one through many a dreadful night' (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 91). There is no liberation in suicide.
The Nietzschean concept of the will to power forms the foundation of capitalism and its individualistic culture of competition, where human beings compete to consume and dominate one another within an exploitative system. In this system, exploitation is deeply entrenched. Therefore, individual or mass suicide cannot be a weapon against capitalism, as it is a system that produces cultures of suicide and suicidal thoughts.
People turn to gods, goddesses, and religions to escape suicidal capitalism, but this fails because there is no metaphysical or spiritual solution to the material realities of life under capitalism.
The death of capitalism and its immoral and asocial culture is the only alternative for ending the alienating conditions that breed suicide. A dignified and egalitarian life for all can break the capitalist culture of enforced loneliness. By rebuilding society, culture, the economy, and human lives on collective foundations, society can address the suicide pandemic that robs society of its idealistic youth and students.
The question of whether life is worth living under an unfair system like patriarchal capitalism is no longer merely an existential or clinical issue of mental health. It is a philosophical challenge—one that calls for overcoming suicide by rejecting all forms of capitalism, along with its systems, processes, institutions, and narratives about individuals, relationships, society, family, culture, the nation-state, government, and the economy. The idea of 'my life, my body and my choices' is a false campaign of individual freedom under capitalism.
Such narratives fragment life, eroding the collective foundations of existence, happiness, and sorrow. Therefore, the collective foundations of happiness and shared sorrow can dismantle individualist claims over life and death. Life is a beautiful journey between the organic processes of birth and death. Let us enjoy and celebrate life by challenging the capitalist culture that alienates the pleasures of living. No to suicide, no to capitalism, and yes to celebrating life with solidarity.
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