First –we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here– the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts. What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.Anonymous
About This Quote
The statement above is a message from the writer of the book, Ayn Rand, a Russian-American philosopher and writer. In this quote, Ayn Rand presents her views on the future of capitalism. She believes that capitalists of today have failed to see the darkness of their work and have failed to recognize that if they continue with their capitalist ways, it will destroy society. For this reason, she believes that the capitalists should be replaced by capitalists with Asian values.
Ayn Rand believed that capitalism is based on self-interest and self-interest leads to selfishness. She believed that mankind had reached a point in history where selfishness was destroying our world and moral laws had been broken. Capitalism is a system that was designed for a world where the individual human beings were not going to exist in this world.
It is a system where you can create your own means of survival at any moment in time and you can decide whether you are going to be good or bad at certain times in your life. She believed that capitalism has destroyed our values and it has led us to such apathy but she also believed that we could change if we knew what was right and wrong and if we were willing to work together as humans rather than against one another.
Source: Trouble In Paradise: From The End Of History To The End Of Capitalism
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