From Ayn Rand on the right to Karl Marx on the left, politicians should steer clear of gurus who loathe compromise
One morning in 1926, a young Russian was leaving a movie studio in Hollywood. She was downcast, having been told by its publicity department that there was no work for her. Then, at the gate, she stopped to let a car go by and fell into conversation with its driver.
This was how Ayn Rand, as Alyssa Rosenbaum called herself on emigrating to America, met the film director Cecil B. DeMille. And the jobs he gave her were her first steps on the road to an extraordinary career as novelist, screenwriter and political guru.
It emerged last week that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, twice a year reads aloud the courtroom speech of Howard Roark, hero of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.
The same week saw the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. Perhaps, like me, you celebrated quietly at home, but the shadow chancellor John McDonnell made more of a fuss, telling a conference about Marx’s influence on Labour’s future while standing in front of a banner of the great man.
In many ways, Marx and Rand are complete opposites. Rand came to the US largely to escape Bolshevism and, through her books, promoted a vision of free people fighting against socialism. Yet, for all that, I think Rand and Marx made a common error. Understanding it can help us make sense of politics.
It is hard to see why anyone would regard Marx’s birthday as an occasion to bake a cake and light candles. For all his intelligence, his analysis of capitalism led him to a series of predictions (for example that workers would only be able to earn subsistence wages or that independent producers would be forced into the proletariat) that have all proved wrong.
Every time a country has attempted to follow Marx, it has ended in disaster. His defenders argue that this is not his fault, but it most certainly is. Marx asserted that we can’t be free or human until we eradicate private property and the trade of goods. Doing this, however, results in massive state power and incredible economic inefficiency.
Some argue that this criticism is unfair because European social democracy owes a lot to Marx. In 1948, for instance, the Labour Party published a centenary edition of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, the introduction to which acknowledged the party’s debt. Yet in each case, as Western European parties contemplated moving from some intervention and planning (an idea that preceded Marx) to a proper Marxist view (the abolition of capitalism), they realised that fiasco would follow, and disowned him.
Another defence of Marx is that he didn’t prescribe a particular system, so can’t be held accountable for the ways his ideas were put into practice. But this is hardly a defence. Indeed, quite the contrary. What it accepts is that Marx wanted (strictly speaking it is what he predicted, but he predicted it because he wanted it) to smash the current system without a clue about what would replace it. To suggest that this absolves him of responsibility for the subsequent disasters is ridiculous.
To the question of what comes after capitalism, Marx provided an airy hand wave. The problem of how to organise society will disappear. Our behaviour is the result of our economic relationships, and so when we stop trading under capitalism we will have complete abundance, no problems distributing goods and the interests of the individual will be the same for everyone.
It is the study of economics and psychology replaced by one of Ali Bongo’s magic tricks. It is hard to understand why it has won the allegiance of so many apparently intelligent people.
Set against this, Ayn Rand’s novels at least present a concrete idea of the sort of society she is after, even if it is flawed. She supports laissez-faire capitalism.
Rand’s books celebrate reason and creativity. Her philosophy, objectivism, argues that the basis for everything is fact, not superstition or emotion. Our duty is to express our own beliefs and wishes as selfishly (which she argues is a good word) as possible. We may regard looking after others as a good but this makes caring a selfish act. Beyond that we should never have to sacrifice ourselves.
The passion of her belief in reason and knowledge makes her novels occasionally inspiring. I must admit I find them quite strange and contrived, but in one poll of literary influence, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged came second only to the Bible. It isn’t hard to see what Javid gets from reading Roark’s speech. It is a hymn to inventiveness and to sticking to one’s principles.
Yet here’s the problem. Rand suggests that from each individual pursuing their own interests without compromise comes the greater good. Individual interest and the public interest will harmonise (completely; this is well beyond Adam Smith’s observations). Rand says this can happen with capitalism, Marx believes this will happen only after capitalism. This is the same error. A rudimentary understanding of human nature tells you there will always be conflict.
Let me give you an example. Javid amusingly said he reads Roark’s speech to himself having read it once to his wife who told him not to do it again. Now Rand would argue that if you wanted to read the book out loud to someone you must do so, to fulfil your vision and to be true to your essence. But what if your partner’s vision is that she didn’t want to listen to it again? She has to be true to that. Rand’s answer would be that in that case you shouldn’t be together. Which is ludicrous: nobody would be with anybody based on that logic.
This is what eventually happened to Rand. She felt that if someone preferred Strauss to Rachmaninov they couldn’t be in her circle. She had an affair with her ‘intellectual heir’, both of them telling their spouses that it made objective sense for the two greatest brains to be together. Then when her lover had an affair with someone else she expelled him and his wife for behaviour ‘grossly contradictory to objectivist morality’.
The common error of Rand and Marx was to fail to understand that individual interests, ideas and values clash and always will. It is the job of politics, sometimes acting through the state, to come up with compromises that allow us to live together in some degree of peace and harmony.
The moderates and placaters, the negotiators and split-the-difference people, may not be amongst Rand’s heroes or Marx’s irresistible forces, but we do at least grasp human nature.