Marxist critique of "Atlas Shrugged"

[Rafiq]

Does anyone have one?

Please no one liners.

[Kiev Communard]

Atlas Shrugged:

- Ignores the social, not individual, character of creation of social wealth;

- Glorifies the minority class rule, with an open disdain to the bulk of the working population (thus, being obviously reactionary);

- Presents an idealistic understanding of the relationship between the State and civil society, with the former portrayed as something completely estranged from the latter;

- Generally espouses extreme methodological individualism in interpretation of social phenomena.

[Tim Cornelis]

Someone on a forum pointed out that Ayn Rand argued that "needs" would become a commodity under communism as it distributes according to needs... Sounds... incredibly dumb though. If someone knows more about this + a critique, please comment.

[Susurrus]

The people who produce in society go on strike against the parasites that exploit their labor.

A good plot, but someone seems to have gotten the casting wrong.

Another critique: bad writing, and no real argument against opposing ideologies, preferring instead to bash strawmen that are basically Snidley Whiplash in a business suit.

[AnonymousOne]

It even fails as a critique of Communism/Socialism at all, the working classes have no rule in the world of Atlas Shrugged, it's a bunch of smarmy bureaucrats ruling over everyone else. There is no collective ownership of the means of production, or any sign of real socialism.

[Kiev Communard]

Someone on a forum pointed out that Ayn Rand argued that "needs" would become a commodity under communism as it distributes according to needs... Sounds... incredibly dumb though. If someone knows more about this + a critique, please comment.

She has an incredibly superficial understanding the nature of commodity production. It should just be pointed out that according to Marxian economics, commodities exist only in a society of generalised commodity production, where exchange value predominates over the use-value. I would just refer you to Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, Volume 1, the substance of the matter is splendidly elucidated there.

EDIT: My mistake, though, as commodities as such obviously existed before capitalism, under simple commodity production. Still, I believe that everyone got my point.

[gendoikari]

With ayn rands new product, atlas shurgged, she has created a wonderful invention. With the deforestation of the rainforest, other toilet tissues being so wasteful, they create a hazard. However ayn rands new toilet tissue atlas shrugged comes pre impregnated with shit, so that the avid consumer needs not worry about waste.

(warning: this ad uses randian logic, side effects incluse cerebral shrinkage and oral anal leakage, if you cannot understand this warning label, you are probably suffering from the post, if you are complaining about this warning label you are probably suffering from the latter. Consult your lobotomist today.)

[Ocean Seal]

Does anyone have one?

Please no one liners.
There's a good capitalist critique of it. It was performed by the consumers who chose not to consume the garbage movie rendition of that book.

Also in all seriousness, the best critique is that the idea of the rich going on strike is absolutely laughable. The consequences of them doing so, aren't fully explained. They just leave us with all their private property, effectively giving up the class war and yet somehow socialism doesn't achieve victory?

[Susurrus]

Also in all seriousness, the best critique is that the idea of the rich going on strike is absolutely laughable. The consequences of them doing so, aren't fully explained. They just leave us with all their private property, effectively giving up the class war and yet somehow socialism doesn't achieve victory?

It's not the rich entirely who go on strike, it's the "movers" ie the people who Yan Dran characterizes as emotionless ubermenschen who can do no wrong.

[Comrade_Stalin]

It even fails as a critique of Communism/Socialism at all, the working classes have no rule in the world of Atlas Shrugged, it's a bunch of smarmy bureaucrats ruling over everyone else. There is no collective ownership of the means of production, or any sign of real socialism.

She seems to use bureaucrates as people seem to have a problem with record keepers, which is what bureaucrats are. You could say that see is agains accounts as well, as they need to keep record on the day to day active of people.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I'm usually not one to talk myself up, but I think I did a decent job critiquing it here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2204629&postcount=22)



I was never very interested in philosophy, so I'm not sure what her views are in relation to more abstract questions, but her position on political economy wasn't just false, it was objectively (no pun intended) false. The idea of the "looters" voting themselves into the government and then ransacking the hard-earned wealth of the rich would be fine and all, if not for the fact that it was the rich who in most cases constructed and fine-tuned the legislation regulating them, often to destroy competition and consolidate industry. That's what happened, for example, during the Progressive Era; much of the progressive era reform was intended to 1) impose federal regulations and standards in order to eliminate state-based controls, which were enabling smaller businesses to succeed and had the unfortunate tendency to be more effectively controlled by citizens of the state, and 2) to more effectively compete in foreign export markets, esp. Europe (this is what happened with meat packing regulations, for example). Andrew Carnegie and Elbert Gary even endorsed the idea that the federal government should fix prices in the steel market! (a proposal that a Democratic commision called "semi-socialistic").

I mean, it's hard to reconcile that with the idea that the wealthy and titans of industry are just the hardworking entrepeuners, constantly put down by the federal government through burdensome regulation, isn't it? And it's obviously not just during the "progressive era"...one can look all through history and see the exact same thing, of the state being largely composed and dominated by capital's "executive class", all the way from America's supposedly "laissez-faire" era (which was anything but) to the present day. A president of Ford becomes Secretary of Defense, a CEO of Halliburton become vice president, Joe Biden's intellectual property task force operates in conjunction with Disney and the MPAA, Goldman Sachs gets their boy Henry Paulson to the position of Treasury Secretary, the list goes on...

sorry if that seems rambling, I just hate the "Randian" notion of regulation acting as anything other than the collective capitalist laying down some law and order, individual capitalists be damned.

There are literally countless studies and books detailing how emeshed the political and economic bodies of this country are.

[Mashaka]

I haven't read the novel in a while, and remember it imperfectly, but I'll go ahead and have a go.

All wealth is created by labour. While Rand's captains of industry may, of course, do actual labour on rare occasions, or perhaps they did so in the past, their income is largely derived from their role in 'supervising' - or even just 'owning' - the process by which the labour of others produces wealth. Established customs and laws direct a share of the fruits of said labour to the supervisorial and ownership classes.

The mistake Rand and others make is to over-extend the amount of actual responsibility (in terms of labour) that such 'movers' have in the production of wealth. What is in fact the case is that even if a person were to, on their own and with great effort and ingenuity, invent an entirely new product, industrial process, and so on, and moreover that person then went on to single-handedly design and build a factory for his novel endeavor (quarrying every rock, felling every tree, laying every floor and putting up every wall), he or she [i]still[i] would have no grounds on which to claim rightful ownership of the products of the labour of those workers employed at the new factory. Rand and her lot seem to have a vague, undeveloped notion of a kind of vital connection between the products of one's own labour and the products of a labour-process that, in terms of brute causality, arise from one's own (prior) labour.

More thorough Marxist criticism is scarcely necessary, because this implied concept of, I don't know, let's call it 'vicarious labour', is untenable, and moreover, unless I am forgetting something, Rand herself never offered any argument for it.

Mashaka

[Hoi Polloi]

The best members of the ownership class, people who built up their fortunes from nothing using clever exploitation of labor via the capitalist legal system - that regards property as something gained by claiming it rather than working on it, rebel against the worst members of the ownership class who can't even maintain their robber-empires without additional funds produced by the working class extracted by government taxes and them given to them in the form of subsidies.

Like libertarianism in general; it does a good job of spotting theft from the working class and croneyism when government subsidies and regulatory monopolies are involved, but completely ignores the fact that the hierarchical ownership of land not gained through laboring upon it is a product of man's law too just as much as subsidies and regulation, and is just as much an imposition and violation on the autonomy of productive people.

Thus it is inherently reactionary/conservative as it mistakes really old civil laws for natural law/morality.

Of course if you ignore the rail barons and focus on the brilliant inventors, there you could have a real discussion. Are scientific advancements the product of society and should be protected in that role? Are scientific advancements the product of the individual and should be protected in that role? Or should scientific advancement by the individual be not infringed nor supported - no nationalization of their design but no copyright preventing others from using their wits and their hands to reverse engineer it?

From a defense of socialism on purely libertarian grounds (stick with me), one can argue that the ownership class are dependent on civil institutions of wealth redistribution; which in a democratic society would be changed as to not exploit the productive many for the sake of the lucky few. And similarly one can also argue on these same grounds that expecting the government to prevent others from copying or recreating autonomously your inventions is wanting them to violate the unalienable rights of others: if I see your invention and copy it, I'm not physically stealing or infringing upon you at all, I'm just exercising my natural ability to see and here and recreate, all of which I can do without assaulting your person or property in any way.

The fact is copyright exists for the good of society, it is a social reform actually - though a regressive one - designed to encourage invention by creating a monopoly on the rewards of invention by infringing upon the natural right of free individuals to use their wits to copy the best developments of their competitors in the great game of life. And so if copyright only exists for the good of society, it can/should be altered/abolished when it stops serving the public good.

That same argument can be applied to the capitalist laws, developed from feudal laws, that create the ownership class; stating that it is for the public good that land can be claimed by means other than laboring upon it, as that encouraged people a long time ago to go out and claim and conquer the land.

In the modern sense people can argue that if land is held in common and people aren't allowed to benefit solely from what they build upon it, they won't build upon it - beyond community gardens, that is. But describes a lawless/unjust society where, just as in the capitalist ownership system, the rights of labor are ignored.

Ayn Rand assumes the rights of labor does not exist and argues for perfect justice within the civil legal system of the capitalist ownership class; ignoring the labor ownership class posited in socialism.

As such, and as mentioned, they are not really attacks on socialism even as much as attacks on regulatory states - positing the oft used argument that deregulation and the removal of taxation on the ownership class would actually create freer and fairer competition - within that class - and lead to less subsidy-dependent/regulatory monopoly created millionaires, with their feudal deeds to the land instead absorbed by the most clever and cunning of the landowner class.

It's just as an argument that, if the stated goal of capitalism to maximize the productive exploitation of land and labor is indeed the goal, that eliminating other laws that interfere with the basic feudal system of land ownership would reach that goal sooner/quicker/more fully.

Of course I've never read the book, so please ignore me.

[AConfusedSocialDemocrat]

She completely ignores positive freedom, treats men as islands, ignores the relationship between state and capitalism, and has really shit prose.

Though, a bit interesting, the opposite of Marxist theory, the rich gain class consciousness and go on strike against the workers.

[∞]

Ignores historical examples of how market forces react to society and technoligical hinderence that free-market capitalism has on technology that is advanced but creates no profit.
Elitist view that the capitalist class is far-superior to any other class.
No understanding of formal economics nor the math behind it.
Rugged idealism, not based on actual principles or history
Half-arsed literature with no basis on anything real, pure example of philsophical pervesion. Readers should ignore the false implications the story makes.
Its a story trying to convey a philsophical principle, thats always a disaster.
Therefore it is porbably one of the most subjective outlooks in history, the irony of these so-called "objectivists".

[yowhatitlooklike]

I don't have any criticisms to offer of Atlas Shrugged per se as I didn't read it (got about a chapter into "The Virtue of Selfishness" before throwing it across the room in disgust) but didn't Ayn Rand receive Social Security benefits later in life despite her ravings against "parasites" on the government dole? There's her philosophy in praxis... a self-hating parasite I guess.

There's a great doc by Adam Curtis called "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" featuring some enlightening interviews with people close to Rand. I'd offer a link to it but I need a few more posts to afford that privilege.

[RadioRaheem84]

Doesn't Rand's whole premise rest on presupposing capitalist property rights?

The only reason why anything halts in her book is because the owners of industry "strike" and workers aren't allowed to expropiate the factories due to stringent property rights.

Without those laws, the owners of industry could strike all they want. Who needs them? The workers could take over the factories and run everything themselves.

[Charlie Watt]

....ayn rands new toilet tissue atlas shrugged....

Soft, strong and absorbent.

[RED DAVE]

I wrote this many years ago, and I posted it in one form or another every once in awhile. Apologies of you've read it.

Anyway:


Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s two similar books were published. One was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and the other was Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. The former is an immensely long (I think it's longer than War and Peace), silly book by a crack-pot, philosopher-novelist. The latter is a late-Enlightenment picaresque dirty novel more commonly known as Fanny Hill.

Both are stroke books. Both appeal to the feverish sensibilities of 17-year-old males and not very sophisticated ones at that. (Sophisticated guys back then were reading Crime and Punishment and de Sade's novels.) Anyone who takes Ayn Rand's book (or the rest of her work) seriously is still engaging in a wank, whether political, philosophical, literary or economic (this last variety is currently quite popular, endless porn on the Internet notwithstanding). Anyone using Cleland's book for what it was obvious written for is engaged in an honest act.

For readers much past 17, neither book has much merit. But both are good for some kind of a jerk-off, should you choose to indulge. I confess to have wasted a few hours when I was young and foolish trying to read Atlas Shrugged. Its style places it somewhere around the average woman's magazine fiction of its day such as appeared in Woman's Home Companion. I gave it up after about page 25. Fanny Hill was a more constant companion when I was still too uptight to approach the opposite sex.

No one has ever taken Cleland's book seriously (although any book banned for 200 years can't be all bad). But, incredibly, people did and do take Ayn Rand so. I saw her once at NYU, about 1962. She was a shrill, unfortunately mean-looking woman (her photographs don't do her justice: she looked like the Wicked Witch of the West's ugly sister). She was not well received politically when she dismissed the Civil Rights Movement as a violation of the right of employers to discriminate!

Nor was her fervent advocacy of the cause of some GE executives just jailed for price fixing on a massive scale received with much sympathy, nor was her complicity with McCarthyism, which was noted by speakers from the floor. A few months later her boy-toy Nathaniel Branden made an appearance. He was better looking, but his presentation of the philosophy of Objectivism didn't exactly set off fireworks.

Nowadays, Rand's various works are somewhat the rage. As long as self-indulgence, selfishness, racism and other neat stuff is popular, Rand will be read. How can you argue with Alan Greenspan's favorite scribe? Bill Gates probably has a copy of Atlas Shrugged by his bed like Stalin had a copy of Machiavelli.

Me, if I want to go that route I prefer Fanny Hill.RED DAVE

[∞]

I don't think Bill Gates would ever buy into objectivist philosophy imo. He is a capitalist no doubt, but he is not gung-ho about selfishness at all.

[Scrooge]

I will add that the dialogue is quite poor, and every character is a caricature.

[RadioRaheem84]

I don't think Bill Gates would ever buy into objectivist philosophy imo. He is a capitalist no doubt, but he is not gung-ho about selfishness at all.

I thought Silicon Valley was a Randian Mecca? And Objectivists are all about charity, which Gates is a big promoter of.

[∞]

They're also about absolutely no taxes or state forms of welfare. Gates supports raising taxes.

[RadioRaheem84]

They're also about absolutely no taxes or state forms of welfare. Gates supports raising taxes.

His "creative capitalism" is not objectivist or Libertarian, yes this is true.

But Gates was a big supporter of breaking teachers unions and promoting charter schools to replace failing public schools.

[∞]

Charter schools suck. Ask New Orleans.

[CAleftist]

I thought Silicon Valley was a Randian Mecca? And Objectivists are all about charity, which Gates is a big promoter of.

Not really. We have a lot of "social liberals" and "progressives" here, some other more traditional moderately right-wing capitalists, but in general, Silicon Valley types don't mind paying taxes.

Keep in mind that they have a vested interest in a stable government and infrastructure and high-performing schools. What's gonna replace those if they go "Libertarian" on their community?

If this looks like I'm defending Silicon Valley capitalists (or any capitalists for that matter), I'm not. But they certainly aren't "Randian" (well most of them, anyway).

[RadioRaheem84]

Well I was under the impression it was because Adam Curtis's latest Doc about Randians showcased a bunch of tech nerds and investment geeks that love Rand's ideas and their 90s start ups were named after some of her book characters.

[CAleftist]

Well I was under the impression it was because Adam Curtis's latest Doc about Randians showcased a bunch of tech nerds and investment geeks that love Rand's ideas and their 90s start ups were named after some of her book characters.

Oh I don't doubt that. But there are many capitalists concentrated in the Silicon Valley, so of course there will be a variety of bourgeois views within that population.

[RedZezz]

I thought Silicon Valley was a Randian Mecca? And Objectivists are all about charity, which Gates is a big promoter of.

Actually, Ayn Rand was not a big supporter of charity. She was not absolutly against it, but people need to be "worthy".



My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.


-Ayn Rand 1964 Playboy interview

[internasyonalista]

I'm interested to know the opinion of other comrades here on the argument of a Filipino Randist that what exist today is not capitalism but mixed economy with statism. In our debate in Facebook, this guy insists that capitalism is no other than laissez-faire. If its not laissez-faire, then its not capitalism. What is your opinion comrades?

[RedZezz]

I'm interested to know the opinion of other comrades here on the argument of a Filipino Randist that what exist today is not capitalism but mixed economy with statism. In our debate in Facebook, this guy insists that capitalism is no other than laissez-faire. If its not laissez-faire, then its not capitalism. What is your opinion comrades?

No point in argueing over terminology with him. Capitalism is known as a socio-econnomic system of private ownership over the means of production, exchanges of commodities based on profit and wage labor. This is not just some definition a bunch of people made up one day, but a general consensus from examining the way society functions dominated by capital.

If he wants to go against the grain and say that anything but an absolutely free economic sphere from government is not capitalism than so be it. The debate will go no where. It is an unsubstantiated claim. His opinion and nothing more.