: Look at Mark Da Cunha's message, for example, about capitalism and how it would liberate the society of controls if implemented properly. And this is not a unique view. Many laissez faire capitalists believe this. Oh, I looked at it. The Da Cunhas of the world are doing far more for it than the fashionable cynics who pretend to "be on the left" while forcing it into an alternating pattern of guilt and predatory consciousness. Nevertheless it will be necessary to hold the procapitalists accountable for their beliefs. If one looks, for instance, at that part of Da Cunha's link where the relationship of the individual to society is concerned, especially the passage where it says:
Or, in the famous words of John Galt,
"I swear by my life and by my love of it--that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
One wants to hold the believers in this myth of the individual unto "himself" (the pregnant "herselves" of the world who live for their fetuses, etc., being ignored here), to avoid sneaking in this ritual of asking of others to live for oneself. This asking of others to live for oneself is, of course, what capitalism does in places like China, where huge profits are to be made off of slave labor. Conditions aren't much better in Vietnam or Malaysia or India or Indonesia. Capitalists ask people to live in these conditions and work endlessly, i.e. devote their lives to Nike etc., in a sort of slavery (reinforced by several levels of patriarchy for the women, as Aihwa Ong points out in SPIRITS OF RESISTANCE AND CAPITALIST DISCIPLINE) that the Randists would despise subjecting themselves to. Is this the capitalist utopia? The profit margins are large enough...
Marx talks at length about the myth of "the individual for himself" being based on the myth of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," the novel character the old classical economists had in mind when they create economic models based on the sovereign individual, with no thought of the sovereign individual's being born of woman and raised from impotent childhood to brittle old age in families societies riven with biological, sentimental, and economic dependencies, and held together by systems, symbolic and ritual patterns, and ideologies.
The biggest beneficiaries of this web of human interdependence are those with enough surplus leisure-time to think they have "independent minds," after they have read the inspirational prose of the type Ayn Rand once produced. Meanwhile, the Fridays of the world continue existing for the sake of old Crusoe. Come on, guys, there's nothing wrong with admitting (inter)dependency. It won't hurt. It may in fact help your bargaining positions after your employees strike against your businesses. And I'll try, once more, to get people to try to find Stephanie Coontz's THE WAY WE NEVER WERE: AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE NOSTALGIA TRAP, to help debunk the myth of American rugged individualism and expose the societal interdependencies pervading American family histories.
None.
