- Capitalism and Alternatives -
Somalia: Anarcho-Capitalist Paradise
Posted by: Samuel Day Fassbinder ( Citizens for Mustard Greens, USA ) on August 23, 1999 at 10:42:58:
NBC Dateline ran an article on the state of affairs in Somalia, an anarcho-capitalist paradise of no government, no police, and property. Theft is rampant, guns are everywhere, people starving left and right, the transportation infrastructure barely works, people worship the power of the warlords before they can say thanks for a scrap of food.Somalia should teach us some basic lessons. The ideology of capitalism comes with its very own social pathology, the intersubjective outgrowth of possessive individualism, where publicity and human social relationship is synonymous with the motive of acquisition common to advertising. It is as Horkheimer and Adorno said:
Against the will of its leaders, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this kind took place at the expense of the individuality in whose name it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve to pursue one's own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both with enthusiasm and abuse; or a modern city-dweller who can now only imagine friendship as a "social contact"; that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact. The only reason why the culture industry can deal so successfully with individuality is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society.
-Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.People will be ready for no government only when they have learned to share fairly.
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