When anarchists claim that life without the government would be generally better and less exploitive, their opponents are so quick to point to Somali, a country without a government and with mountains of human misery. But behind this misery that everyone seems to only see, there's some truly fascinating things happening in this stateless country. Somali is also a radical social experiment. For example, what happens to money when there's no government to back it? Does, as so many economist believe (on this head, read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years), the country regress to barter? Somali offers a possible answer:

(The Economist) USE of a paper currency is normally taken to be an expression of faith in the government that issues it. Once the solvency of the issuer is in doubt, anyone holding its notes will quickly try to trade them in for dollars, jewellery or, failing that, some commodity with enduring value (when the rouble collapsed in 1998 some factory workers in Russia were paid in pickles). The Somali shilling, now entering its second decade with no real government or monetary authority to speak of, is a splendid exception to this rule.

Maybe it's not the exception. Russia, remember, did not totally collapse. It never really reached the end of the road. Somali has, and so what's happening there may not be exceptional but what naturally unfolds in a social climate that lacks state controls, management, and reinforcements.

Why, then, are Somali shillings, issued in the name of a government that ceased to exist long ago and backed by no reserves of any kind, still in use?

One reason may be that the supply of shillings has remained fairly fixed. Rival warlords issued their own shillings for a while and there are a fair number of fakes in circulation. But the lack of an official printing press able to expand the money supply has given the pre-1992 shilling a certain cachet. Even the forgeries do it the honour of declaring they were printed before the central bank collapsed: implausibly crisp red 1,000-shilling notes, with their basket weavers on the front and orderly docks on the back, declare they were printed in the capital in 1990

The other reason is that, even in these poorest of conditions, without the backing of a bank, money is much too useful to be done away with. What might this mean? Money is not just the root of all evil but at the root of all human social relations.