Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (52 page)

In Marx’s view (
Capital
, 1:356), within the capitalist mode of production, aspects of statism and anarchism exist side-by-side in organic conjunction. Capitalism merges “anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in that of the workshop” where these principles “are mutual conditions the one of the other.”
Socialism
will resolve the conflict by transcending both anarchy and despotism, by subjecting the social production process to conscious human control, and by freeing the worker from the exploitation of capital.
Paul Thomas
observes that for Marx, statism and anarchism, “like blind obedience and blind destruction—have in common a certain specific form of false consciousness.… [They] are opposite sides of the same idolatrous coin.”
³⁵

While the content of Rand’s critique of anarchism differs considerably from that of Marx’s, the
form
of her analysis is just as dialectical. It is for this
reason
perhaps that Rand (1971T) had much greater respect for Marxists than she did for anarchists. She adamantly opposed the attempts of some libertarians who sought to conjoin her
theories
with anarchist principles and make her a “Marcuse” of the right. Rand believed that anarcho-capitalism had a much closer affinity with the outer fringes of the collectivist movement than with her own Objectivist philosophy.
³⁶
She argued that she was not primarily an advocate of capitalism or
egoism
. She maintained that her endorsement of the supremacy of reason provided the necessary epistemological basis for egoism in
ethics
and capitalism in politics. This was a hierarchy that could not be reversed. Politics was the final moment of a huge philosophical totality. Socially too, it was the product of a country’s dominant intellectual trends (1089). The anarcho-capitalists had attempted to invert this structure, and to establish a social system without any concern for historical reality or cultural context.

In the Objectivist view,
³⁷
these libertarian anarchists applied the principle of competition to the sphere of
government
. They were free-market advocates who sought to end the coercive monopoly of the state, and to institute a system of decentralized governing units. Such agencies would compete for the provision of defense and legal services, within the broad context of a universally accepted Libertarian
Law
Code.
³⁸
Rothbard
maintained that such a Law Code would enshrine the basic “axiom” of self-ownership and nonaggression. In a genuinely voluntarist world order, this Law Code would sanction a plethora of alternative lifestyles. Some communities would opt for collectivistic communes; others would be individualistic. Some would maintain religious values; others would
be oriented toward secular humanism. Some would submit to voluntary racial separatism and segregation; others would promote racial integration. For Rothbard, variations in culture and individual moral codes are irrelevant to the establishment of a libertarian society.
³⁹
His libertarian ethos seeks to protect the peaceful coexistence of all value systems within any cultural context.

Rand opposed the anarcho-capitalist attempt to fracture the intimate relationship between personal morality and social ethics. But she also opposed the anarchists because they had embraced a
dualistic
distinction between state and market. In this regard, anarcho-
capitalism
was the same as totalitarian statism. Both the anarchists and the statists saw fundamental and irreconcilable antagonism between the state and the market. The statists attempted to resolve the tension between these two spheres by placing a monistic emphasis on the state to the detriment of the market; the anarchists attempted to resolve this tension by placing a similarly monistic emphasis on the market to the detriment of the state. In the statist resolution, the state absorbs the market (or “civil society”) completely. In the anarchist resolution, the market absorbs the state, providing for all “public” goods, such as defense, and judicial services.

For Rand, this anarchist construction was “a naive floating abstraction,” a rationalist device for implementing a disjointed notion of liberty without the requisite foundations.
⁴⁰
Anarchists were guilty of committing the “fallacy of the
frozen abstraction
.” They observed that established states had always initiated the use of
force
and equated this historically specific model with the concept of government as such. They abstracted and reified historical instances and failed to grasp the true nature of government because they presumed that all governments must necessarily violate individual rights.
⁴¹
In Rand’s view, a free society could not survive without the presence of crucial moral, cultural, and psycho-epistemological preconditions, all of which are integrated and organically linked. Rand writes:

Accepting the basic premise of modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government.
⁴²

For Rand, such a competition in the retaliatory use of force would spell practical disaster. And yet the evidence suggests that Rand’s own view of
the nature of
government
incorporates significant anarchistic elements that cannot be ignored.

Rand’s political theory is highly abstract. Like her
ethical
system, Rand’s politics was geared toward defining broad principles that needed to be adapted to concrete circumstances. Consequently, one will not find in Rand’s political theory any extensive, specialized discussions of particular legal applications, constitutional principles, or legislative procedures. Nor can one find any kind words for
democracy
in Rand’s writings, since she believed that a majoritarian system would degenerate into mob rule in the absence of legally enforced rights, republican constraints, and a system of checks and balances (Peikoff 1991b, 368). Her definition of government is standardized Weberism, since she views it as an agency established within a certain geographical area, holding a monopoly on the power to enforce rules of
social
conduct.

However, Rand’s political theory is distinct in its emphasis on a nondualistic conception of government, one that is neither anarchistic nor statist in its orientation. Rand argued: “
Government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force
under
objective control
—i.e., under objectively defined
laws
.”
⁴³
Individuals necessarily delegate their right of self-defense to such an agency for the purposes of maintaining the orderly rule of law. In Rand’s view, government has a highly limited scope. Its proper functions are to provide police, armed services, and law courts for the protection of individual rights and the adjudication of disputes (107–12). No government has the right to move beyond these strictures. One can presume that any functions that transcend these narrow limits must necessarily violate individual rights, which government was designed to protect.

This characterization suggests that no existing government on earth has moral legitimacy, since, to varying degrees, each violates its citizens’ rights. And yet practically speaking, Rand did view certain governments as morally superior to others. She believed that since its inception, the United States was the only moral society in human history, despite how its evolution had progressively undermined its original libertarian principles. In the contemporary world, Rand was most apt to condemn those governments that had sustained one-party rule, executions without trial, punishment for political offenses, nationalization and expropriation of private
property
, and censorship.
⁴⁴

But it must be emphasized that Rand’s vision of a genuinely moral
government
is considerably different from all established institutions in political history. In league with her own injunction against the initiation of force, Rand opposed such standard government practices as
taxation
and the draft. She viewed taxation as theft, the coercive expropriation of justly
acquired property. She saw
conscription
as a form of slavery.
⁴⁵
Her ideal government would retain a monopoly on the coercive use of force, but this monopoly itself would be constituted by a voluntary association of citizens who contributed freely toward the maintenance of appropriate government functions. Rand offered several blueprints for such a system, including generalized charges on government-enforced contracts, and a lottery system of financing.
⁴⁶

What is most clear is that Rand viewed government as a necessary component of any
social
system, She argued: “A social system is a set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a society’s laws, institutions, and government.” These principles are usually not articulated, but they determine the social relationships and terms of association within a specific geographical area.
⁴⁷
The fundamental issue faced by every social system is its orientation toward
individual
rights
. In Rand’s view,
capitalism
is the only social system that fully recognizes the rights of the individual. It is the only social system consonant with the rational nature of human beings.

The question remains, however, that if “government” is a concept, then presumably, like other concepts, it must have existential referents. But if Rand’s ideal is anticipatory, then how can she claim any validity for such a concept when it has
no
legitimate past or current referents?
⁴⁸
In actuality, Rand created an “ideal-type” by abstracting liberal referents from historical states, while disregarding nonliberal factors that have been internal to every state in history, For Rand, such concepts as “government” and “capitalism” are socially transformative; their “ideal” character is latent in currently distorted social forms.

Thus, what is most striking about Rand’s conception of government is its ahistorical character. Despite Rand’s affection for the American, republican form of government, her own vision is less a description of historical reality than it is the projection of an ideal that has yet to be realized. Like capitalism, Rand’s voluntary political association remains an
unknown
ideal.

CAPITALISM

Rand’s defense of
capitalism
is similar in form to her defense of
“selfishness.”
In fact, Rand titled her collection of essays in
social theory
,
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
, for much the same reasons that she titled her collection of essays on morality,
The Virtue of Selfishness
:
A
New Concept of Egoism.
Both “capitalism” and “selfishness” have had such a negative conceptual
history
that Rand needed to reclaim these concepts and to recast them in a new and nondualistic framework. Branden remarks that he had
told Rand of his preference for the word
“libertarianism”
as an alternative to “capitalism,” since the latter term had been coined by anticapitalists.
⁴⁹
For Branden, “libertarianism” signified a broader, philosophical characterization and addressed the issues of social, political
and
economic freedom (Branden 1978, 60). But Rand refused to renounce the concept of “capitalism,” just as she rejected any attempt to couch her ethos of rational selfishness in more neutral terms.

In addition to such nominal problems, Rand was faced with the fact that her defense of “capitalism” differed considerably from other theoretical justifications. Rand’s approach is not
Weberian
; she did not view capitalism as an expression of the Protestant work
ethic
. Nor did she view capitalism as compatible with Roman Catholicism or any other form of religion.
⁵⁰
Though she accepted the empirical and theoretical arguments of
Austrian-school
economists who see the market as the most efficient and productive mechanism in history, she refused to defend capitalism on purely utilitarian grounds.
⁵¹
And while Rand celebrates the record of economic growth under Western capitalism, she believes that the historical reality diverged radically from a pure, unadulterated laissez-faire system. While the nineteenth-century United
States
best approximated this system, its progress was severely undermined by massive
government
intervention in the areas of finance and banking, and in the bolstering of monopolies through land grants and industrial privileges. Marx himself had viewed this nineteenth-century system as only an approximation of full capitalism, since it was “adulterated and amalgamated with survivals of former economic conditions” (
Capital
, 3:175). For Rand, as for most Marxists, this “mixed” system reached its twentieth-century climax in the neofascist and corporativist policies of the U.S.
welfare
-
warfare
state.

Rand argued that the underlying reason for this failure to achieve systemic purity was moral and cultural.
Capitalism
as a social system was an implicit by-product of an Aristotelian philosophical base, one that celebrated the rational, the secular, and the egoistic. And yet capitalism was historically distorted because the
cultures
within which it evolved had not fully emerged from the influence of mysticism, altruism, and collectivism.
⁵²
Rand saw capitalism and altruism as “philosophical opposites” that could not “co-exist in the same man or in the same society.”
⁵³
The modern age was fractured by an “inner contradiction” because it tried to combine the concept of eudaemonic man with the notion that human beings were sacrificial animals.
⁵⁴
It was for this reason that Rand was extremely apprehensive about the introduction of capitalist markets into primitive cultures. She argued that capitalism required a predominantly rational and secular orientation, and that industrialization could not “be grafted onto superstitious irrationality” without
massive distortion in the evolving structure of production.
⁵⁵
Though the United States achieved the greatest progress because it was the most secular Western country, it too had preserved significant elements of altruism and collectivism in its cultural base. And it was paying the price.