May 1999 : Dave Botting
MEDITATIONS ON RAND
I have also read the books by Ayn Rand mentioned by Nigel Perks and found them ultimately impressive but also flawed as both literature and philosophy. The former is of no concern to this publication so I shall confine myself to the latter.
The major flaw is the amalgamation of several beings into a few, the 'Atlases' of the title. These are the industrial giants out of whose genius (and ego) progress comes. In Rand's work these supermen invent something new, manufacture it, sell it, and profit from it. In real life, these are distinct phases with typically a distinct person in charge of it. The people who are good at inventing things are not usually the same as the people who are good at selling them. More fatally, the latter can prosper without the former, because, the public being infinitely suggestible, they can be sold the image of a product with no actual product; the man ploughing the field may come home not with loaves of bread but with magic beans. In one place, Mr. Perks seems to acknowledge the adverse effect of advertisers without realising what a mess it makes of the simplistic system of exchange he describes.
In the same place Mr. Perks talks about 'doing the work we love'. Rand makes a great song-and-dance about the morality of working for the profit motive, but the fact is her characters work because their work is their overwhelming and arguably single, passion. Which is, of course, fine for them. But there is nothing that I am so passionate about that I want to spend forty hours a week for the next fifty years doing it. I work so that I can do whatever I like during the weekend. Depressing though this is, it is a fact and it is the rule to which the supermen are the exception.
I have already described how profit can be made with the image of a product with no actual product. Much the same kind of thing happens at the next stage of the process. The people who profit are seldom the people whose efforts have gone into bringing a product into the world. They are shareholders, and after making their initial investment they do nothing but submit themselves to the whims of the market. And why is the market so whimsical when the introduction of new products is sluggish by comparison? Because the share prices of a company have little to do with its product line but, yet again, simply on its image.
This brings us to what Rand calls the 'aristocracy of pull'. This is the idea that if the economy is controlled by groups of politicians then profit derives from influence over the minds of the politicians by means of 'hospitality' rather than influence over the natural world by means of technology. The latter would certainly seem preferable to the former. But does capitalism actually produce the latter ? No, it merely transplants these tactics to the dynamic between seller and buyer, between 'image consultant' and 'demographic group'. I suppose one might argue that all this is not properly a part of 'capitalism' but should be categorised under 'commercialism' or 'consumerism'. This seems nit-picking to me unless someone can actually describe a socio-economic system where the one exists without the other. Any takers ?
Where Rand is strongest is in her critique of Marxist notions of the workers being the value-producers and obtaining equality by seizing the means of production. The workers do not produce value any more than the secretary who types out the words of an author produces literature. They maintain value, and this is certainly not an unimportant job, and they can be trusted to keep the means of production running as long as nothing unpredictable happens. Since they are going through the motions of somebody else's thoughts they are scuppered when they actually have to think of something new.
On the subject of apathy, I think this is due to the superficial nature of freedom of choice. One is faced with choices which claim to be different but are so only in appearance. Why do so many people not bother to vote ? Because they think there is no real difference between the candidates. Again, image is everything, but due perhaps to the sporadic nature of these images we are not so easily fooled. How much more entrenched in our consciousness are images of nation, religion masculinity ? Structurally they are all similar and they all boil down to the same thing; somebody is trying to sell you something.
Dave Botting