Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (54 page)
In Rand’s conception of the free market, however, she reserves for the dollar sign the same reverence that Christians project in the sign of the cross. It is interesting that in the above passage, Rand implies an identity between
reason
and
money
. She states that “money is your means of survival,” recalling her epistemological conviction that
reason
is one’s means of survival. While Rand emphasizes that money is a material means for human sustenance, she is also tracing a much more profound connection between money and the rational process, which underlies its accumulation and use. For Rand, money “is a frozen form of productive energy,” and cannot be severed from the rational activities that make its existence possible.
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The role of money in
capitalist
economy is crucial, in Rand’s view, because it is both a tool of exchange and a tool of savings, enabling people to delay their own consumption, and to purchase time for all future production. While consumption is the final cause of the production process, savings is its efficient cause. Savings represent future goods that have yet to be produced and consumed. The dynamism of the process is driven by the law of supply and demand. This economic law embodies a normative principle since it involves the same people in two different, though inseparable capacities, that of producer and consumer. While a producer can support a limited number of nonproducers, Rand argued: “
The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether he is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy.
”
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Interestingly, Rand enunciated a principle that Marx would have accepted in starkly different terms. For Marx, capitalist
“exploitation”
is a direct outgrowth of the separation of the product from the producer. In the production process, the laborer endows the product with its value and receives in return only enough for his or her own subsistence. The extraction of surplus value makes possible capitalist accumulation. But it is symptomatic of a condition in which the capitalist consumes value without producing it. In this regard, Marx views the capitalist qua capitalist as a parasite on the production process.
Paradoxically, Rand’s criticism of the Marxian doctrine of exploitation illustrates her own endorsement of a form of the labor theory of value. Rand presents a caricature of the classical labor theory, when she argues that in Marx’s view, “the material tools of production” (that is, “machines”), determine thinking, and that it is “muscular labor” which “is the source of wealth” (
New Intellectual
, 33). As we have seen, Marx’s conception of human labor was far richer than Rand presumed. Nevertheless, Rand criticized Marx for obscuring the intellectual praxis at the foundation of production. For Rand, an innovation, an idea, is the
creative
force behind the production of material values. The implementation of creative ideas are a permanent benefit to the day laborer, much more valuable than the hourly expense of
merely physical work that extends no further than the range of the immediate productive process.
Rand presented a view of the capitalist as creator, inventor, and entrepreneur.
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It is the creator who stands at the top of the intellectual pyramid of ability, contributing “the most to all those below him,” but receiving far less in material payment than his or her innovations make possible. In Rand’s view, even though day laborers contribute their energy to the production process, they would starve outside the wider
social
context because they depend for their employment on the innovations introduced by those above them. Even the machines that laborers use are “the frozen form of a living intelligence,” expanding the potential of the laborers’ lives by raising their productivity (
Atlas Shrugged
, 1064–65).
Contrary to Rand’s assumptions, Marx did not endorse a vulgar version of the labor theory of value. Marx postulates all sorts of complex labor-time derivatives, such that the labor-time expended by a skilled worker, even by a capitalist in his capacity as a skilled innovator, is a multiple of simple labor-time. And for Marx, it is obvious that the material forces, the “machines” as Rand puts it, do not strictly determine
consciousness
. In Marx’s view, “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are
organs of the human brain, created by the human hand
; the power of knowledge, objectified” (
Grundrisse
, 706).
Rand grossly distorted the mature Marxian perspective. But in contrast to Marx, she offered a more sophisticated view of the creative process. As I have suggested in previous chapters, Rand saw creativity as a constellation of rational and emotional, conscious and subconscious, articulated and tacit elements that cannot be quantified as complex multiples of simple labor-time. Creativity is the lifeblood of human action. It is the very fuel of the capitalist system. It is an expression of the individual’s integrated nature as a rational being, and it is the source of
values
for human consumption and enjoyment. Indeed, as
Barry
(1983, 109) remarks, there are times in which Rand seems so awestruck by the creative qualities of the innovator and the entrepreneur that she occasionally “slips into a crude intentionalist explanation of the free economy; as if it were the virtues of capitalists that produced the system.” This, however, is not Rand’s view, but it does underscore Rand’s conviction that
capitalism
as a
social
system
rewards
such virtues, raising people to a higher standard of living, and challenging them to greater knowledge and greater achievement. Such a system enriches the efficacious, self-esteeming individual. It promotes the
mastery of particular skills, even as it beckons the laborer to expand his or her capacities and earn the values that sustain life.
This creativity-driven conception of the capitalist production process is also manifested in Rand’s discussion of the objective value structure that the system embodies. She argued that market trade is never disconnected from the essential question of objective value theory: “of value to whom and for what?” Economically, the value of an individual’s work is determined by the voluntary consent of those who choose to exchange their work or products in return. Prospective participants evaluate the exchange on the basis of those values which they seek for their own benefit. There is an intimate connection here between the actor and the action, such that the actor benefits from the exchange. Hence, Rand’s ethical egoism finds social expression in the simple act of trading value for value, as evaluated by each actor within his or her own specific context.
But Rand emphasized that the market itself cannot be separated from the
culture
in which it functions. The market can perpetuate a kind of duality between “philosophically objective values” and “socially objective values.” The market value of a product reflects the latter. A “socially objective value,” in Rand’s view, is “the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what
they
valued, each in the context of his own life.”
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Hence, if people sought to purchase cocaine for their own enjoyment, the “socially objective” market value would be reflected in the relative supply and demand for that product. But Rand argues that it is reality that will serve as the “ultimate arbiter” of human decisions on the market. For if people en masse choose to purchase narcotics within the context of their own goals, they will ultimately pay the price of their
irrationality
. While capitalism can be accused of leaving people free to indulge their irrational whims, such “whim-worship” cannot be pursued with impunity. In Rand’s view, the market
localizes
the self-destructive implications of irrational action. Rather than rewarding irrationality, capitalism leaves to individuals the choices that only they must make.
The market process, however, does make possible the discovery of “philosophically objective values.” Rand maintains that such a value is “estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man, i.e., by the criterion of the most rational mind possessing the greatest knowledge, in a given category, in a given period, and in a defined context.”
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Since nothing is a value-in-itself, and since values are not the result of subjective fancy, the free market will tend to enrich those individuals who see the wider context in the long run, and who introduce radical innovations that benefit human life.
This distinction between the socially and the philosophically objective focuses attention on Rand’s conviction that no economic system can be
extracted from the wider cultural totality within which it functions. An
unimpeded
market that rewards astrologers, coke dealers, and prostitutes is not Rand’s goal. A culture that enriches such self-destructive behavior has a profoundly anti-conceptual, anti-life orientation. No social system on earth could survive such irrationality.
This
is why Rand argues that self-esteem is a precondition of freedom.
This
is why Rand refuses to abstract her political theory from its foundations in ontology, epistemology, psychology, and ethics.
This
is why Rand sees an inseparable relation between the personal and the political, between reason and freedom.
In Rand’s view,
capitalism
is the only social system that makes possible a triumph over social
fragmentation
.
Dualism
is as old as recorded history. The bifurcation of mind and body, the moral and the practical, the spiritual and the material predates capitalism by thousands of years. Capitalism is the first social system in history that points toward a genuine integration of human being. It makes the actor the beneficiary of his actions. It spiritualizes the secular and materially rewards the creative synthesis of innovative rationality.
This
is capitalism, ideally understood. But it is also the
radical
potential that lies dormant in a contemporary social system that mixes elements of freedom and unfreedom. For even in this unstable mixture, capitalist principles have exhibited their revolutionary and progressive character.
The
synthesis
of
theory
and
practice
has been one of the most significant themes in the history of Russian thought. Nearly every great Russian writer embraced a critical praxis as the central, motivating task of
philosophy
. Theoretical contemplation was considered incomplete and one-dimensional; it required consummation in the quest for truth-justice (
iskaniye pravdy
). This cultural predisposition toward political criticism and action provided fertile ground for the implantation of Marx’s revolutionary doctrine, encapsulated in the credo: “The philosophers have only
interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to
change
it” ([1845] 1967, 401–2).
Ayn Rand gave full expression to this radical impulse in Russian thought. She recognized that philosophical contemplation was insufficient. Her initial theoretical musings emerged as a response to the dualities she confronted in the Russia of her youth. Her positive formulations constituted a critical revolt against Russian religious mysticism and communist politics. Just as Marx’s
dialectical
method was “in its essence critical and revolutionary,”
1
Rand’s dialectical sensibility led her toward a comparable, radical resolution. But Rand’s project was neither theocratic nor communist in its political implications; it was profoundly secular, humanistic, and libertarian.
Like her dialectical forebears, Rand refused to disconnect any part from the totality that gave it meaning. Rand’s critical method recognized the fundamental relatedness of all
social
phenomena. She adamantly opposed reification in social inquiry. Where some attempted to universalize a historically specific concrete, Rand saw “frozen abstractions.” Where
others asserted certain premises as true and without need of proof, Rand saw “frozen absolutes” and “false axioms.” Where still others sought to combine two or more issues that needed to be analyzed and considered separately, Rand saw “
package-dealing
.” She rejected the modern tendency to
“think in a square,”
the contemporary disposition to accept a constricted, narrow definition of a social problem without understanding the principles underlying the issue, or the various links between issues.
2
Everywhere Rand looked, she attempted to identify the principles that unite seemingly separate and fragmented spheres of
human
existence. She observed facts, identified the essential issues, integrated the data from diverse areas of inquiry, and articulated the basic principles at work.
3
Her dialectical methods uncovered startling connections between economics, psychology, sex, art, politics, and ideology.
In her political theory, Rand suggests that the initiation of
force
is a crucial component in the genesis of social dualism. Force creates a lethal contradiction between the mind and reality, thought and action. But in Rand’s view, just as freedom and reason presupposed each other, so too do force and
faith
. Faith (that is, irrationality, unreason) produces the same lethal contradiction between the mind and reality, thought and action. Force and faith, like dictatorship and determinism, “are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries.” In Rand’s view, enslavement requires an attack on the validity of human volition. Those who see reason as impotent necessarily accept the rule of force in its stead.
4
For Rand, while the initiation of force nullifies an individual’s cognitive capacity, human inefficacy is both the precondition and by-product of sustained coercive action. Though Rand recognizes the initiation of force as the only existential practice that can violate rights, she focuses just as much attention on the cognitive practices and conditions that subvert individual autonomy and predispose us to accept our own subjugation.