Life and Times: What a contrast! (2023)

The Life and Times column from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last month’s column was entitled ‘What an example!’ and talked about a striking act of kindness and altruism by a young man working at a car wash. Round about the same time as this happened, I happened to listen to a play on Radio 4, a drama-documentary on the 20th century American writer and social theorist Ayn Rand, who was renowned for praising and encouraging just the opposite forms of behaviour, that is selfishness and self-interest. The previous column mentioned how several hundred people responded in a strikingly positive way to my relating on my local community Facebook page what had happened outside the car wash. This substantiated the idea, much supported by many recent studies on the topic, that humans, given the chance, are a fundamentally cooperative species. But the Ayn Rand programme (it was called ‘Talk to Me’) showed a person not just doubting this idea but recommending a completely different form of behaviour among humans and being lauded by many with particular opinions on politics and society.

Greed is good

In ‘Talk To Me’, we found out how Ayn Rand’s Russian parents had been rendered destitute by the Bolshevik regime in the 1920s but had nevertheless managed to send her to America as a teenager for her education. When she left, she said she would become famous, and that’s what happened. She never returned to Russia but nursed an abiding hatred of its dictatorial government, and this fed into her entirely anti-collectivist, anti-cooperative theory of society which argued that all interaction should be conducted by what she called ‘rational self-interest’ and in practice meant advocacy of and dedication to the idea of a society governed by the free market with minimal state intervention. Initially Rand produced books of fiction which, though attracting little attention at first, later became famous and sold in their millions. Her two major novels were The Fountainhead (1949) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), the latter famously referred to as ‘the bible of selfishness’. These depicted heroic individuals who prospered or won out through egotistic behaviours regardless of any negative impacts their actions might have had on others. In fact, if the weak fell by the wayside, then this could only make the world a better place. For this kind of depiction, and through her later writings, Rand is often seen as the inspiration behind the slogan ‘greed is good’.

A gateway drug?

After these novels she focused largely on works of social and political theory putting forward what is often referred to as her philosophy of ‘objectivism’, whose essence is that a person’s individual happiness via ‘rational self-interest’ should be the moral purpose of their life and that any consideration of ‘society’ or altruism can only obstruct this (one of her books was entitled The Virtue of Selfishness). Rand’s ‘objectivism’ emphasised individual rights, including property rights, seeing laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system, because in her view it was the only system based on protecting those rights. And the radio play showed how appealing these ideas became to a significant number of people and how, in her later years, many – some of them high up in the US establishment – sat at her feet and venerated her. And even though she herself rejected the label ‘libertarian’, that has not stopped her becoming a kind of cult figure on the libertarian right of American politics. Historian Jennifer Burns has referred to her as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’.

The radio play also showed how unsatisfactory this view of life and the world made her personal relationships, how she never seemed able to connect on a truly human level even with those closest to her. One scene, for example, showed how, when a close relative spent a significant period in hospital, she never visited, the implication being that to do so would not have served any purpose for her and would therefore go against her philosophy of a human being needing to put their own perceived happiness and pleasure before everything else. Given her view of egoism as virtue, should we be surprised that, in more recent times, she is mooted as Donald Trump’s favourite writer?

Car wash kindness

What a contrast then to what happened outside the car wash close to my home a short time ago. There a complete stranger chose to use his specialist knowledge to resolve in an entirely cooperative way a potential dispute between two drivers and then to adamantly refuse any monetary reward for what he had done. Then, following that, close to 700 people on social media took the time to congratulate him for his act of kindness and human solidarity. Instead of following Ayn Rand’s famous dictum that ‘altruism is evil’ and that all that counts is the interests of the individual (ie, yourself), he had chosen the opposite path, of kindness and collaboration, showing it to be a more ‘natural’, perhaps a more ‘instinctive’ human reaction. He refused to accept any material gain, but his gain was that he felt good about himself and no doubt good about seeing the approbation of his fellow human beings.

This kind of helpfulness and generosity without thought of material gain is something we see on a daily basis in so many interactions between people – and this despite the fact that we live in a system of society – capitalism – that has built into it an ethic of competition and individualism. Of course little of these daily interactions gets talked about or considered newsworthy in the information media, and this precisely because it is so common, normal and everyday. Rather what does get reported is the other kind of news, ‘bad news’, ie, those far less common instances of negative behaviour such as selfishness, unkindness, violence or ruthless maximisation of self-interest.

This is one of the things that socialists are at pains to point out in response to the common objection that the moneyless, wageless, free-access society we campaign for could not work because people are uncooperative, lazy, selfish, violent, etc. Well, actually, they’re not, and this is all the more reason why the society we advocate, based on cooperation not competition, would work. The coercion implicit in having to ‘get a job’ would go and human not monetary transactions would prevail.

Howard Moss

Rear View: Die young (2017)

The Rear View Column from the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Die young

‘Wealth and health are intrinsically linked in the United States, with rich Americans living between 10 to 15 years longer than their poor counterparts, a study has found. A series of five papers published in the medical journal The Lancet found that a widening income gap, structural racism and mass incarceration are fuelling growing health inequalities’ (newsweek.com, 7 April). Bernie Sanders’ diagnosis cannot, for once, be faulted: ‘the USA is one of the richest countries in the world, but that reality means very little for most people because so much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny sliver of Americans’. Tragically, his treatment plan, as outlined in Our Revolution, if followed, amounts to yet another spin on the reformist misery-go-round. Dr. Marx’s observation, published 150 years ago, that ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital’ remains valid. His cure is possibly best summarised as workers of the world unite!


Utopian capitalists

Dr. Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, asked recently ‘Is Ayn Rand still relevant 35 years on from her death?’ This resulted in some feedback, the most outrageous example being that ‘Ayn Rand will remain relevant till the end of time for the same reason as Newton, Michelangelo, Copernicus, or any other brilliant mind who discovered eternal principles.’ One blogsite, theobjectivestandard.com (5 April), is slightly less effusive: ‘It’s great to see such a prominent thinker at such a renowned think tank recognizing the nature and importance of Rand’s ideas. I suspect that if Adam Smith and Ayn Rand were alive to see it, they would greatly appreciate this development.’ Smith would likely be horrified by the Institute which bears his name, by Rand and by capitalism today. One of his admirers was none other than Marx. Smith held that ‘labour… is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities,’ noted ‘the masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen’ and, tellingly, ‘wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many’ (Wealth of Nations, 1776).


Philosophers have only interpreted the world

Noam Chomsky is listed as one of the ten most quoted writers of all time, but the description of him as the ‘most dangerous man in the US’ has surely been Trumped. Chomsky is more cognisant of capitalism than Sanders but shares his reformism, alas. During a recent interview titled ‘Chomsky: Why Trump Is Pushing the Doomsday Clock to the Brink of Midnight’ (alternet.org, 4 April), Noam stated ‘.. a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining that the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it’s a global system and of course he didn’t say it, it’s an intervention force under US command, as we’ve seen in case after case.’ Whether he means Anders Fogh Rasmussen or the incumbent Jens Stoltenberg does not really matter – this is surely the first time that socialists are in agreement with Chomsky and a head of NATO.


Waiting for the last Chechen?

‘I haven’t had a single request on this issue, but if I did, I wouldn’t even consider it, Kheda Saratova, a Chechen activist who is on Kadyrov’s human rights [sic] council, told a Russian radio station. In our Chechen society, any person who respects our traditions and culture will hunt down this kind of person without any help from authorities, and do everything to make sure that this kind of person does not exist in our society’ (theguardian.com, 4 April). Examples of such primitive prejudice – in this case towards homosexual men – and practices abound. Will the lack of social progress delay the establishment of socialism? No. Developments in communications technology allow for the near instantaneous dissemination of ideas everywhere, as well as the circumvention of state censorship. Further, globalisation leads to the increasing uniformity of conditions and experiences and convergence in thinking. Socialists can use such factors in targeting our arguments.

Mixed Media: The Ayn Lady (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ayn Lady written and performed by Emma Kilbey, with Lennard Sillevis was produced at the Oval House theatre in Kennington, South London last year. Kilbey and Sillevis play three roles each: as Barker and Larkin, 'objectivist' management consultants attempting to crack through the Russian-doll layers of Ayn Rand, also as Ayn Rand and her husband Frank O'Connor and also as Rand apostles Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Kilbey is mesmerizing in all three roles.

Rand is notorious as the author of Atlas Shrugged which promoted her 'objectivist' philosophy which boils down to: individuals need to pursue their own self-interest and their own happiness, that is their moral duty. She was anti-altruism, anti-self sacrifice, anti-welfare, big on laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation of the markets, and zero empathy. She wrote that the individual should 'exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself' and extolled egoism as 'the virtue of selfishness.' The play shows how personal relationships suffer in the absence of empathy when Rand and Nathaniel Branden begin an open affair with the reluctant permission of their spouses. Kilbey also includes statements from Tory politicians such as Boris Johnson and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher which resonate with Ayn Rand's philosophy.

One of Rand's apostles was Alan Greenspan who would later become Chairman of the US Federal Reserve 1987 to 2006. In the 1980s Rand became the Reagan administration's 'novelist laureate', and her ideas influence today's economic world stage. The Tea Party in the USA was described by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker as a collection of 'Atlas Shruggers', and in fact according to an American survey, Atlas Shrugged was ranked second only to the Bible as a book that had most influenced their lives.

Gore Vidal in his review of Rand's book New Intellectual in Esquire in July 1961 had warned that 'the muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.' Vidal dissected Rand's rancid philosophy as 'attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self-interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the 'freedom is slavery' sort. She has a great attraction for simple people who object to paying taxes, who dislike the 'welfare' state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you're dumb or incompetent that's your lookout.' Vidal concludes that Rand 'has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ' and he believes 'altruism is necessary to survival.'

Anarchist Communist Peter Kropotkin in his work Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution concluded that cooperation and mutual aid are the most important factors in the evolution of the species and the ability to survive. Kropotkin wrote 'the mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.' He also writes that in The Descent of Man Darwin 'pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.'

For Rand the best social and economic system for realising human potential is capitalism. But as the Socialist Standard pointed out in December 2010, it is a 'not really-existing capitalism, more a utopian vision of what a free market, laissez faire future might be like if only people acted rationally and according to their own interest, and the state got off people’s backs. Marx's Capital shows that capitalism, even when it is operating perfectly well, without corruption or unnecessary state interference, must necessarily produce misery and exploitation; and that the state, far from standing in the way of free markets, was an absolutely essential tool for creating and maintaining them.'

Steve Clayton

Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? (2010)

From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right-wing Tea Party movement is, according to some commentators, turning into a mass, ‘grassroots’ movement and revolutionising politics in America. Is it?

If the ‘lame-stream media’, to steal an appropriate phrase, is to be believed, then there has been a ‘massive’, indeed ‘historic’, change in the biggest economy and the most powerful country on the planet. The United States’ mid-term elections, held last month, midway between the four-yearly presidential elections, saw the biggest swing to the Republican Party for 72 years. The Republicans now hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and fell just short of control of the Senate, only four years after voters handed both chambers of the US Congress to the Democrats. A conservative revolution has swept the nation. At least, that’s the lame-stream view. But in truth, nothing much has changed.

The Republicans and the Democrats are essentially two wings of the same party – the Business Party – and there’s very little to choose between them. During election campaigns, significant policy differences are downplayed or ignored completely – largely because they don’t exist – and which wing wins depends on which has succeeded in attracting the most investment from sections of the capitalist class, spent the most money, and delivered the most effective PR/advertising campaign.

As for what voters themselves might be thinking, the election results don’t tell us all that much, as Stefan points out on our American party’s website (See here). The truth is that most voters, and a disproportionate number of Democrat voters, stayed at home, and that the success of the more ‘progressive’ Democrats was at least as noteworthy as the success of the more-right-wing Republicans – in fact, a lower proportion of Americans voted Republican in 2010 than in 2008. In any case, as a result of the way the electoral system works, the votes of just 3 percent of citizens make all the difference between a Democratic and a Republican landslide. So much for the rise of conservatism.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the election, and the campaign leading up to it, was the growth of the so-called Tea Party movement. This is a network of hundreds of supposedly ‘anti-establishment’ conservative groups across the US, which, if nothing else, energised the Republican Party and made the election campaign slightly more interesting. No one knows just how many Tea Partiers there are – it’s not a single organisation with a membership or leadership – but it has had a significant impact on American politics, if only because the lame-stream media has obligingly given it a voice and credibility.

The relatively lame performance of the Tea Partiers in the election would seem to draw into question the common claim that the Tea Party represents a significant popular force, with a mass ‘grassroots’ following. But last month more than half of Americans in a Rasmussen poll said they view the Tea Party favourably – that’s despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the Tea Party has no manifesto, no clear policies, and no clearly expressed ideas about what it would do should it win power. Instead, the party makes its stand on reducing the deficit without specifying how, cutting taxes, ‘taking back’ America from a supposedly corrupt ‘establishment’, and abolishing vast swathes of government, including such evils as environmental protection legislation, subsidised healthcare for the poor and elderly, and unemployment benefit.

To the extent that this is a grassroots movement, then, it is a movement of people organising against their economic interest. The reasons why this happens are many, not least of which is that people have been conned into it by a PR campaign funded by billionaire businessmen. But the Tea Party is also saying things – about the bankruptcy of the economy, about the rottenness of government and other institutions – that ordinary people are increasingly interested in hearing.

Why has the Tea Party risen to prominence now?
The context for the rise of the Tea Party is a profound and deep crisis – economic and ideological. Let’s take the economic aspect first. It is certainly true, as apologists for capitalism will be quick to tell you, that capitalism has continued to be very good at creating massive amounts of wealth. But whose wealth? The wealth of the nation is now concentrated in fewer hands than it has been for 80 years, says Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and former secretary of labour under Bill Clinton (See here). Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 per cent; and the top one-tenth of one per cent of Americans now rake in as much as the bottom 120 million. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is 300. That’s what they mean when they say nothing can match capitalism for creating wealth.

At the other end of the scale things are getting pretty desperate. Wages for the majority of the population have stayed flat since 1973, while work hours and insecurity have increased. And that’s for those ‘lucky’ enough to have a job. America is facing ‘the worst jobs crisis in generations’, says Andy Kroll in a report for TomDispatch.com (5 October), with the number of unemployed exploding by over 400 percent – from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million this June. As a result, 11 million borrowers – or nearly 23 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage – now find themselves ‘underwater’, that is, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. In June of this year, over 41 million Americans were relying on food stamps from the Federal government to feed themselves. That’s an 18 per cent year on year increase. Thirty cents of every dollar in personal income now comes from some form of government support.

In short, capitalism is in its biggest crisis since the Great Depression. This means that wealth is returning to its ‘rightful owners’, the capitalist class; the workers, meanwhile, must make do with austerity.

The American Dream
Meanwhile, the related ideological crisis is presenting itself as the ‘end of the American dream’, or, as Edward Luce in the Financial Times (30 July) puts it, a crisis in the consciousness of the middle class. Lame-stream media commentators often have lots to say about the ‘middle class’, but they will very rarely define what they mean by the term. This is very wise on their part, because it would quickly become obvious that the ‘middle class’ includes just about everybody, which would make people think about just what it is they’re supposed to be in the middle of. The ‘middle-class’ couple Luce interviews for his article work as a ‘warehouse receiver’ (he lugs stuff around a warehouse) and an ‘anaesthesia supply technician’ (she makes sure nurses and doctors have the stuff they need) – surely working-class jobs by any definition. Hilariously, Luce cannot even bring himself to describe the woman’s father – an uneducated miner – as working class without wrapping scare quotes around the term. ‘Working class’ is clearly a taboo term – the working class is not supposed to exist.

Still, it’s not a taboo socialists respect. As working -class people, with jobs, living in the richest country on the planet, and with a joint income about a third above the US median, Luce’s interviewees could think themselves not too badly off, relatively speaking. They lived in a house on a nice, tree-lined street, never went hungry, and turned on the air-conditioning when it got too hot. Once upon a time, says Luce, ‘this was called the American Dream’. Now, it’s a different story. Their house is under threat of repossession, their son was kicked off his mother’s health insurance and only put back on at crippling cost, and, as the couple say themselves, they are only ever ‘a pay cheque or two from the streets’. Who isn’t? We’re all middle class now, after all. This ‘economic strangulation’, as Luce puts it, began long before the recession – as we pointed out above, wages have been flat since 1973 – but is only now being really felt as the credit cards are cut up, jobs lost, and state spending on social services cut back.

But it’s not just that things are bad. Americans are also losing confidence that things will get any better: a growing majority of parents do not think their children will end up better off than they are, for example. Another important ingredient in the American Dream has gone off. It is this growing majority of disaffected working-class people, who had been convinced that they were middle class and doing pretty well, who are looking for answers. And unless they look very hard indeed, beyond the lame-stream, the only answers they’re hearing with any coherence at all are coming from the Tea Party.

The appeal of the Tea Party
It can’t be denied that Tea Party ideas have some superficial appeal. The Tea Party was described by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker as a collection of, among other things, “Atlas Shruggers”. No doubt McGrath could be confident that his American audience would understand what he meant by this. Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand and, according to an often-quoted American survey of readers, was ranked second only to the Bible as a book that had most influenced their lives. It was a tiny, unrepresentative and biased survey, but still, there’s no doubt that the book provokes strong feelings among its readers and admirers and is a best-seller in the US – no small achievement given the book’s length and the fact that it is explicitly a novel exploring abstract philosophical ideas. The strong feeling it provokes in most socialists is revulsion – it is a manifesto for unrestrained capitalism, proclaims the virtues of selfishness, and the characters we are supposed to look up to as models of human moral virtue are vile, self-serving monomaniacs and workaholics.

But it’s not hard to see the appeal of Rand’s ideas either. She is committed, at least in theory, to individual freedom, independence from all authority, and writes inspiringly of human achievement – in Rand, human life is not a pit of despair, but an exciting adventure, full of possibility. The best social and economic system for realising human potential, according to Rand, is capitalism. But not really-existing capitalism – more a utopian vision of what a free market, laissez faire future might be like if only people acted rationally and according to their own interest, and the state got off people’s backs. Rand was interesting, but wrong. Marx’s Capital shows that capitalism – even when it is operating perfectly well, without corruption or unnecessary state interference – must necessarily produce misery and exploitation; and that the state, far from standing in the way of free markets, was an absolutely essential tool for creating and maintaining them.

The truth is that, whatever the appeal of the Tea Party or Ayn Rand to working-class people, the ideas are unlikely to have the desired impact for one good reason: the business elite and the capitalists, who Rand and the Tea Party hold up as models of human virtue, don’t like them either. As Lisa Lerer and John McCormick put it in a cover story in Bloomberg Business Week (13 October), Tea Party ideas:

“… may sound like a corporate dream come true – as long as the corporation in question doesn't have international operations, rely on immigrant labour, see the value of national monetary policy, or find itself in need of a subsidy to boost exports or an emergency loan from the Fed to survive the worst recession in seven decades. Business leaders who favour education reform, immigration reform, or investment in infrastructure can likely say goodbye to those ideas for the short term as well.”

So there’s little danger of capitalists going too far in supporting “free market” or “laissez faire” capitalism – they understand their own business interests too well. The only remaining danger is that these ideas will continue to have a poisonous appeal for the working class, and to radical movements genuinely searching for answers to social problems. It’s up to socialists to provide better answers and get them out there. Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? Probably not. Socialists certainly hope not. The American Dream has always been just that – a dream. Now, though, the dream is turning into a nightmare. It’s time to wake up.

Stuart Watkins