HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Those who defend capitalism are often forced to extremes of distortion
and special pleading in support of a system which exploits and
oppresses so many. As apologists for class privilege and the profit
motive, they attempt to convince us that capitalism is good for
everyone, that even the poor and downtrodden live better lives than
would be possible in any alternative form of society.
Rarely, however, have capitalism's defenders gone to such lengths of
misrepresentation as the Russian-born American writer Ayn Rand
(1905-1982). Though she saw herself as both novelist and philosopher,
Rand is best remembered for two massive novels, �The Fountainhead�
(1943) and �Atlas Shrugged� (1957). The latter in particular presents
her ideas on society, and on how human beings can and should behave.
To a large extent, Rand was just another advocate of laissez-faire
capitalism: the r�le of government should be drastically reduced, and
it should not interfere in the economy; people should live on the basis
of voluntary exchange to their mutual benefit; any form of welfare
state involves unfair transfer of wealth from those who have earned it
to those who haven't. Industrialists should be left to produce and sell
whatever they can at whatever profit they can obtain: nobody is forced
to work for a particular employer or buy their products. Capitalism has
enabled a standard of living for all which far surpasses anything
available under feudalism. Production for use, in contrast, removes all
motivation, as it requires people to work for others rather than for
themselves.
Hymn of praise
Rand, however, added a twist of her own to this, in that she glorified
the r�le of the "prime movers", as she called them, the creators
without whom society could not function or move forward. She had in
mind partly top writers, architects and composers, but primarily
capitalists and entrepreneurs. One character in �Atlas Shrugged�
describes the American industrialist as "the real maker of wealth, the
greatest worker, the highest type of human being".
Again and again, this book sings a hymn of praise to the capitalist
class. For instance, it is claimed at one point that workers in a steel
factory could produce by their own muscles only what a blacksmith in
the Middle Ages could produce: their higher income is a free gift from
the factory owner, who invented the production technique they are
using.
One of Rand's essays describes the businessman as the great liberator,
making use of scientific discoveries, using machines to increase
productivity, creating employment, and saving workers from toil and
starvation.
The plot of �Atlas Shrugged� concerns what happens when these prime
movers withdraw from the rest of society and refuse to run companies.
In short, they go on strike, proclaiming, "We do not need you." Without
them, the economy goes steadily down the drain, leading to more and
more government intervention, which only makes things worse. At the end
of the book, production has virtually ceased, and the way is left open
for the prime movers to return and run things on their terms.
Of course, this bears little if any relationship to the way capitalism
actually works. Most capitalists are not brilliant inventors, and
scientific and technological progress depends on large research teams
consisting of highly-trained workers. The profit motive hampers, rather
than promotes, innovation, as it requires that new ideas be profitable,
not useful.
The increased productivity of modern-day workers, compared with a
couple of centuries ago, is not due to individual geniuses (let alone
to the generosity of their current employer) but to the ideas and wok
of countless people, only a tiny number of whom became millionaires.
Capitalists need not even run their companies, they simply own and
control, and that is the source of their wealth and power.
The creed of the "strikers" in �Atlas Shrugged� is: "I swear - by my
life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another
man, nor ask another man to live for mine." But capitalists require
(not ask!) that their workers work several hours a day purely for this
profit. It is they who need, us, not we who need them. Let them go on
strike (from what?), and see if anyone notices the absence of such a
bunch of parasites.
Given Rand's distortions of capitalism, it will come as little surprise
that her attacks on Socialism are equally wide of the mark. Anyone who
can say, writing in the United States in 1946, that production for use
not profit is accepted by most people as a desirable goal can at best
have a weird understanding of production for use. In one of the most
objectionable scenes in �Atlas Shrugged�, there is an account of a car
factory which switches over to "from each according to ability, to each
according to need".
Apart from the absurdity of an individual factory operating on this
precept, what emerges is a complete travesty. In Rand's presentation,
the principle means compulsory unpaid overtime for the best workers and
unearned hand-outs for the rest. One of the factory owners decides who
needs what, and is free to put people on a basic pittance only. Again,
this has nothing at all to do with the Socialist idea of free access to
what has been produced, in a society where all reasonable needs can be
met and nobody is forced to work harder than others or to take less
from the stock of goods.
No non-smoking
The freedom and individualism which Rand so trumpeted consisted of
freedom for the capitalist class to exploit the working class - and she
wanted them to feel good about it while doing so. Her real concepts of
free inquiry and free discussion can be seen in the organisations which
grew up around Rand, especially in New York, in the 1950s and 1960s.
She was intolerant and arrogant, demanding that everyone agree with her
on every point, and insisting on conformity even in personal behaviour.
For instance, Rand herself smoked heavily, and her followers were
expected to smoke as well (not smoking supposedly meant acceptance of
altruists' interference in personal pleasure). It was this kind of
intolerance that led to splits in the organisations in 1968 and then to
their decline.
Rand, then, was concerned with justifying capitalism and the r�le of
the capitalists, with telling them that they should be proud of their
wealth and success, and with telling workers to be grateful for the
benefits allegedly conferred on them by the bosses.
Her atheism makes her views uncongenial to many other defenders of
capitalism who otherwise might now be glad to refer to her. Perhaps,
too, it is hard for them to present her heroic prime movers as
plausible descriptions of most members of the capitalist class. But it
is as a disreputable apologist for capitalism, rather than as the
author of turgid novels, that Ayn Rand deserves to be remembered.
jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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