The following is a permitted re-post from Rowland Keshena's blog, By Any Means Necessary. Regardless of what one thinks of Rowland's politics, one cannot help but be awed by the sheer volume of in-depth, meticulously researched posts on Rowland's blog. Rowland's mastery of the art of persuasive argumentation never ceases to amaze me--even (especially) when I disagree with aspects of a particular post. I hope you will spend some quality time at By Any Means Necessary! What I like about this article is how it dispels the myth that radical leftists and anarchists have any common ground whatsoever with the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists ("libertarians"). They co-opt the language of libertarian socialism, and their "liberal social views" trick many on the left into thinking they are potential allies. Nothing could be further from the truth. These people are proud social Darwinists striving for a dictatorship of the plutocracy. They are greed incarnate.
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Most people sympathetic to radical politics outside the United States have probably never heard of Ayn Rand, and a brief introduction to her ultra pro-free market views would doubtless be enough to convince them they haven’t missed anything. Yet 27 years after her death, Ayn Rand continues to be seriously debated in the US, her books sell hundreds of thousands each year, her views are propagated by right wing think tanks and foundations and – bizarrely – Charlize Theron is in discussions to turn Rand’s 1088-page magnus opus Atlas Shrugged into a TV mini-series. The Times Educational Supplement claimed in July that the Ayn Rand revival is gathering pace on US campuses. According to the TES:
“The surge in interest has also been propelled by the millions of dollars given to 25 universities by the charitable foundation of banking giant BB&T, run by one of her adherents. But even this funding, handed out so institutions can teach and study Ms Rand and to establish centres for the advancement of American capitalism, has been controversial. The faculty at Meredith College in North Carolina rejected a $420,000 (£260,000) grant because it came on the condition that Ms Rand’s work be taught there, and there was a similar uproar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Even many of the professors who now teach Rand, Dr McCaskey said, “will preface their presentations with, ‘I don’t agree with this, but you should hear it’”.
Helen Mirren in The Passion of Ayn Rand
In her lifetime Rand strongly influenced Ronald Reagan and long-time chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was part of her entourage as a young man and remained faithful to her views throughout his career (catastrophically so as far as the US economy was concerned). According to The Week magazine:
“Rand attracted a group of disciples, known, with self-conscious irony, as the Collective…It wasn’t just her ideas that inspired the group, it was Rand’s charisma. At the height of her popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s, Rand cut a highly exotic figure with her bobbed hair, Russian accent, dollar-sign brooches, and long cigarettes, smoked through a holder. She saw smoking as a Promethean symbol of creativity and regarded health warnings as a socialist conspiracy. When she died of lung cancer, in 1982, a 6-foot-high floral dollar sign was erected by her open coffin.” (April 16 2009)
Astonishingly, the advent of the banking crisis has led to an upsurge in Ayn Rand book sales, with 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged sold last year, and in January 2009 coming in at number 33 in Amazon’s top 100 US book sales. The Ayn Rand Institute argued strongly against state money bailing out the banks, and unsurprisingly Randites have been to the forefront of opposing Barak Obama’s rather mild plans to extend health care insurance.
Ayn (rhymes with ‘mine’) Rand was the pseudonym of Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, an exile from Bolshevik Russia who stayed in the United States after a visit in 1926. She started off writing film scripts on anti-Soviet themes, and her links with the film industry enabled her to get her first major novel The Foutainhead turned into a 1949 film starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neale and Raymond Massey. A film about her love life, The Passion of Ayn Rand, was released in 1999 starring Helen Mirren as Rand and Peter Fonda as her long-suffering husband Frank O’Connor. The same year she was even put on a US postage stamp.
Rand propounded her views through her novels and a series of essays and interviews, but left no major single work outlining her political and social theory. Her appeal and her cult status is based on two central ideas that chime in perfectly with key aspects of American capitalist ideology. These are a) self interest, not altruism, is the highest moral value and as a guiding thread leads to the best outcomes and b) free market capitalism is the system that leads to the best economic outcomes and allows the fullest development of individuals. It spontaneously leads to the best possible outcomes for everyone – this a version of Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’.
Free market capitalism in this version is a system where the only function of the state is to exercise the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, preventing violence between individuals thus allowing business to develop uninterruptedly. Nothing else – not healthcare, not the post office, not education of any type, not fire and rescue services, absolutely nothing whatsoever – is the business of the state. This is ultra-privatisation on a scale probably never seen in the history of capitalism, a point made frequently by Rand herself, although she didn’t understand the significance of this fact.
That self-interest not altruism happens to serve the highest good (though not any ‘collective good’ which Rand regarded as a meaningless concept) is indeed a remarkably fortunate outcome for the many right-wing adherents of her ideas. Just do what’s good for yourself, don’t care about anyone else, and lo and behold you happen to be doing the morally right thing as well!
Ayn Rand’s writings reveal a consistent and utterly naive idea about wealth. Wealth is created by the effort, intelligence and inventiveness of ‘men’ who are prepared to stand out from the crowd and be true to their own visions. For her, capitalists, whom she regarded as a persecuted minority, are always self-made ‘men’ (she was utterly consistent in never using any other pronoun to describe clever people); she did briefly discuss the issue of inheritance, but never acknowledged that power and wealth were due to class positions, rather than individual genius. Once the simple fact that most rich people are rich because they come from rich families is established, Rand’s whole system collapses.
The strivings of the talented against the holding back of the collectivist philistines is the theme of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The former’s main protagonist, Frank Roark, is an architect who from the time he is a student fights back against attempts to throttle his individuality and make him conform to stylistic fashion and consensus . In Atlas Shrugged, ‘Atlas’ is the talented, the geniuses, the clever people who ‘hold up the world’; their ‘shrug’ is a worldwide strike organised by their international champion, the mysterious John Galt, who unusually for a modern novel makes a 60-page speech explaining what is in effect Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
Rand’s Time and Context
Ayn Rand became famous through The Fountainhead in 1943, and remained prominent until her death in 1982, speaking at numerous meetings, notably the Ford Hall Forums in Boston and appearing on radio and television. Her great ideological battle was against the mixed economy welfare state model of capitalism – Keynesianism – a battle waged by the American Right during and immediately after the second world war. She described a trinity of ideological opponents – altruism, collectivism and mysticism. It was this latter that got her into trouble with many on the US Right, then as now a Christian redoubt. To give Ayn Rand her due, she loathed and detested religion as not based on reason (obviously). This led her into many battles with more mainstream conservatives, for example William F. Buckley, influential editor in the 1960s of the National Review and a key intellectual behind the extreme right-wing Republican candidate for the presidency in 1964, Barry Goldwater. Ayn Rand was vicious in her denunciation:
“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence…Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God… Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith….The purpose of man’s life…is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.” (For the New Intellectual).
Rand also annoyed mainstream conservatives with her views on abortion:
“An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)….Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”
Rand made many searing attacks on the anti-abortionists not because she saw herself as a feminist – she told a Ford House Forum that on feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment she “disagreed with all that” – but because she saw it as a matter of individual rights. Philosophical individualism is the cornerstone of her system.
Basic Fallacies
Ayn Rand’s system is made possible by a series of fallacies which underpin her system. As she herself said many times about her opponents, these errors are so glaring it’s difficult to believe anyone would make them in good faith.
Fallacy 1: Wages Under Capitalism
In her essay Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal Rand uses the following illustration of individual responsibility. Imagine, she says, a “little stenographer” (sic) who spends all her money on lipstick and not microscopes. Her choices are not irrational if her individual values accord lots of importance to lipstick. However, if she later gets sick she may regret she didn’t allocate some money to ‘microscopes’- here a metaphor for medical science and medical insurance. If she doesn’t have the health insurance it’s her own fault.
This of course is bog-standard free market nonsense. The obvious fallacy is that any waged worker under capitalism could possibly earn enough to pay privately for every good and service they might need in a lifetime. As capitalism evolved its neoliberal phase the amount of discretionary income workers have at their disposal has diminished. In Britain privatisation of transport, gas, electricity, most forms of dentistry etc has swallowed up workers’ incomes so that, unlike in Ayn Rand’s time, it needs two fulltime workers to support a household – especially with the astronomic cost of housing. The complete privatisation of healthcare would lead to millions of workers being unable to afford to have many therapies and treatments. Just like in the United States where, as Michael Moore shows in Sicko, insured people are regularly ripped off by health insurance companies that specialise in not paying.
Fallacy 2: The Source of Wealth is Individual Effort and Talent
Ayn Rand’s world, where the clever and industrious are the one’s who reap the rewards, was always a major caricature, even in her own times. In the neoliberal epoch dominated by finance capital it is ludicrous. Finance capital takes a chunk of the money paid for most commodities in the form of rents, interest etc. It’s money that makes money, and that may involve second order artfulness and gambling techniques, but it probably does not involve anything very clever, inventive or productive. To continue reading, click here.
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