Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
Page 37
Whereas Rand would have proudly affirmed property as “the right of selfishness,” it is obvious that Marx spoke disparagingly of this phenomenon. In this regard, Rand was actually closer to Hegel than to Marx. In Rand’s philosophy, individualism has ontological, ethical, political, and psychological components. The concept of rights does not depend on the reified, atomistic individual of bourgeois economy. Rand’s individualism does not view any person as a means to any end, rather, it views each person as an end in him-or herself. It holds that each of us should value nothing higher than our own autonomous thinking and judgment. The rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are the social expression of the individual’s quest for self-realization.27 Since property is the material means of sustaining life, it is crucial to the actualization of the human potential.
It should be emphasized that Rand defined property broadly; it does not necessarily entail land ownership. Property is the product of a person’s labors. It refers to all of the material assets he or she has created, earned, exchanged, and legitimately appropriated for survival as a rational being. Much like Hegel, who saw property in an ontological relation to the person, Rand viewed the right to property as a sanction of human ability to appropriate nature for the purposes of self-development. As Den Uyl and Rasmussen suggest, this conjunction of property and personhood is so intimate that one cannot separate the creator from the creation without obliterating the integrated view of human existence that Rand projected.28 In Rand’s conception, people have the potential to engage in empowering social activities. They can pursue their goals unarbitrarily, with reason, creativity, purpose, and pride. And while an individual’s rights may be threatened by others, the Randian vision points toward a social order based on voluntary, mutually beneficial interaction. Rand’s philosophy aims for a free association of persons united by their own choice.
Rand’s concept of rights has many other specific implications that are outside the scope of this book. But it is valuable to mention some of these briefly. Rand did not believe that rights were applicable to fetuses or to nonhumans; she fervently advocated the right to abortion and opposed the animal-rights movement.29 She supported the extension of rights into the realm of intellectual property. She defended the right of inheritance, voluntary association, incorporation, free trade, and immigration.30 She believed that apart from some tangential public property linked to narrowly defined governmental functions, all property should be privately owned. For Rand, the notion of “public property” undermined individual responsibility, since everyone and no one was held liable for their actions. In Rand’s view, privatization should be extended to the forests, the oceans, and the airwaves as a means of introducing accountability into law.31
Rand’s doctrine of individual rights was also in stark opposition to modern welfarism. Rand believed that the entitlement mentality had manufactured all sorts of illegitimate “rights,” such as the “right” to food, clothing, shelter, employment, and medical care. No one could have a right to goods or services abstracted from the process that makes them possible. Rand asks, “At whose expense” are such goods to be provided? To postulate that some people are rightfully entitled to goods which they have not earned, is to force those who have achieved legitimate values into supporting others by unchosen obligation.32 This was not a resistance to voluntary charity, but it was a moral condemnation of the coercive redistribution that characterizes the welfare state.
ANARCHY AND GOVERNMENT
John Robbins (1974, 123, 125) argues that Rand’s undiluted concept of individual rights logically entails an endorsement of anarchy. Despite her dissociation from anarchism, Rand, like Marx, incorporated some basic anarchistic elements into her political theory. Murray Rothbard, the contemporary libertarian, credited Rand with having convinced him of the theory of natural rights.33 But he too believed that Rand’s injunction against force must necessarily translate into a moral opposition to the state as such. In Rothbard’s view, the state is force incarnate.34
While Rand would have vehemently disagreed with Robbins and Rothbard on this issue, her understanding of the nature of government does in fact sublate and preserve elements of anarchist theory. Just as Marx seems to have endorsed an anarchistic utopia in the final stages of communism, so Rand assimilated anarchistic elements in her vision of the ideal government. The reasons for this provocative parallel between Marx and Rand are strategic and methodological.
First, within their respective political movements, both thinkers had to deal with dissenting factions. Marx dealt strategically with the followers of Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakunin; Rand, with the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists. The anarcho-capitalists were forging a new, vibrant ideology in their synthesis of Austrian-school economics, natural rights, New Left historical revisionism, and an indigenous brand of American individualist anarchism in the tradition of Tucker, Spooner, and Nock. Against such opposition, Marx and Rand developed remarkably similar theoretical responses to anarchism.
This is not to say that the Marxian and Randian critiques of anarchism are instances of mere political strategy. Their opposition to anarchism was primarily the expression of their distinctive dialectical methods. Marx had opposed the anarchists because they advocated a dualistic worldview in which the state was distinguished from civil society. They emphasized the voluntarist principles of the latter to the detriment of the former. But this anarchist approach was ahistorical. The history of capitalism, according to Marx (Grundrisse, 885), was replete with “state influences.” Indeed, the state was endemic to the genesis and development of capitalism, the source of primitive accumulation, and the financial fulcrum of the business cycle. Marx maintained that capitalism had never existed in its purest form and that it would take a historical movement to dispense with both the market and the state.
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 “c
apitalism,” 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.