The gigantic oil tanker seized by Somali pirates today is perhaps to become the first in a line of seizures of the system's favorite, most precious commodity. Somali pirates could potentially disrupt the entire global economic system by their attacks on shipping lines; a suitable revenge for the international community's abandonment of that country in the past years because of its low saleability. An Auschwitz's worth of starved Africans every day (20,000 persons) isn't considered an economic crisis, perhaps it will now begin to have to be.
Starvation pushes people into a corner, and when they finally fight back everything's fair game. The oil cartels, speculators, and oil corporations kill and steal daily; now it seems that at least some people have had it, and are taking a radically new kind of action, interrupting the dialogue of commodities (free trade) with the clatter of pirate gunfire. In the pirate haven of Eyl, pirate money seems to be the only thing financing any infrastructure or services, since no government exists and the capitalists don't care about the people any more than the Islamic Court system does.
Contrary to anarcho-capitalist rantings, anarchic Somalia is certainly not a free country; it is a country in chaos -- but it is indeed finding non-coercive self-organization and a kind of civil self-governance through Xeer 'law', which pre-dates the arrival of 'civilization,' and keeps society functioning (to a degree) without a central government. Cooperation from what little 'government' exists in Puntland (perhaps friends of the pirates) apparently helps them sell off their bounties.
Military vessels, oil tankers, chemical ships have all been seized; but many more of them have repeatedly spilled their 'goods' into the ocean anyway, polluting it irreversibly as the commerce they were intended to be integrated into pollutes all life. It's no great loss when the captain of the ship fouls the job and spills oil across hundreds of miles of coastline, and they certainly won't take responsibility for it; will they pretend to care now? Will they negotiate with these pirates for their precious, world strangling 'product', thereby recognizing the real seizure of political power these hijackings imply? 11 ships are currently held by Somalian pirates.
Hostages don't do the trick anymore; you can't use them for bargaining, since people don't matter in the society of the spectacle -- only commodities do. Perhaps they should just give up and figure it in as an "externality;" after all, they've externalized life itself.
From the BBC (bullshitters broadcasting cliches)
"In the past week alone:
• A Russian warship in the Gulf of Aden drove off pirates who tried to capture the Saudi Arabian merchant ship Rabih
• Pirates hijacked a Japanese cargo ship off Somalia
• A Chinese fishing boat was seized off the Kenyan coast
• A Turkish ship transporting chemicals to India was hijacked off Yemen
• The UK's Royal Navy shot dead two suspected pirates attacking a Danish cargo-ship off the coast of Yemen"
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