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I would like to recommend Atlas Shrugged to anyone who has not read it. It is long, and it is indeed preachy, but she nails so much about the human condition.

by arkis22 10y ago

I would like to recommend Atlas Shrugged to anyone who has not read it. It is long, and it is indeed preachy, but she nails so much about the human condition. I do think that most people that complain about her don't really understand her work. In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other. The heroes of the story all have their companies named after themselves, while the "bad companies" are bland things like associated steel. Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes. At the end of the day companies aren't companies, they're people. To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs. If that's your policy you are completely ignoring people's individuality. Are they lazy? smart? work hard? People are not interchangable, and by respecting that the US outspent the USSR. This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today.

ue_ 10y ago
>This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today. As a Socialist myself, I have wondered: how does capitalism become personal? Is it possible to achieve this? Let's assume for a moment that Marx was wrong about exploitation; how does wage labour, unexploitative, take the form of personal relation? From my point of view, I was thinking that the division of labour will create an impersonal relationship, so much so that the worker will not see his own labour in the final product. How does personal capitalism fare with division of labour and automation? I want to keep an open mind rather than to steer this ideologically, so I hope you are not put off by my differing viewpoint.
- Danihan 10y ago
  How is capitalism, or any financial system, ever not personal? At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary. Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else. Of course there are negative externalities to worry about, contractual enforcement, etc. But those don't change the core philosophies.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > How is capitalism ever not personal? A review of the works criticizing the dominant system of the mid-19th Century industrialized West by cobtemporaries who coined the name "capitalism" to describe that system would answer that question. > At it's core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. No, at its core capitalism is the arrangement of government, property rights, and legal system to preferentially serve the interests of the holders of capital over others. Hence the name.
    - Danihan 10y ago
      Are you saying capitalism cannot exist without government?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        "Government" is simply whatever actor or set of actors possesses, between them, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; you can't have human society without government and you can't have capitalism without society, so, sure, you trivially can't have capitalism without government. More deeply, capitalism is not only incidentally tied to government through the necessity for society, but more deeply through the dependency on a specific model of property rights being enforced by government.
  - mattmcknight 10y ago
    That's redistributive taxation, not socialism. Socialism is ownership of all property and business by the government. Per Marx/Engels: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State," "Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. "
- Artistry121 10y ago
  Have you ever worked for someone you liked? Or have you ever been offered a job or promotion because of a good personal relationship? Most things sold in the business world are sold by personal relationships and conversation or personality.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  I think the issue Marx points out isn't an "original" quality of capitalism, but rather an "eventual" (steady-state) quality of it. AFAIK, capitalism is the idea of investment of capital. Marx's issue is that the capital pools in such a way that most people don't have it, or don't get to spend what they do have in a way that gets returns. In an ideal situation, I am able to "spend" my "excess capital" - my excess time, skills, drives, etc - to improve my own situation. This is personal. However, in practice, many people can't or don't do this. Maybe they're missing that drive towards self-investment. Maybe they're minimum wage and literally don't have any excess. Marx's issue of "praxis" - that you do not own (literally or emotionally) the product of your work is an emergent, rather than inherent, quality of capitalism. So it seems reasonable that a society could exist with other factors the confound that emergent quality, so that you can have you cake (the core bits of capitalism) and everyone gets to eat it (everyone can actually take advantage of those core bits)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jressey 10y ago
This is a satirical analysis of Atlas Shrugged, right? When I read it, my impression was that the message is 'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' The 'heroes' as you call them abandoned civilization to create a utopia where the free-market is the only law. Check out Bioshock to see what might happen.
- Danihan 10y ago
  'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' I believe it's more, "All acts are moral when transactions are conducted fairly and consensually between the involved parties."
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    Which works fine as long as there's an ultimate authority to enforce fairness (defined how...?) and consent.
- arkis22 10y ago
  'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' Is obviously wrong. The villains of the book think that charity takes precedence over everything, or that they are intrinsically entitled to something just because they exist. In other words, if we're both starving, it's my moral obligation to feed you first. Abandoned civilization? By the end of the book the main characters had their wealth confiscated and civilization had fallen apart. And it's not just the heroes. There's countless references to regular workers "abandoning civiliation," giving up work and roaming the countryside stealing food. I would love for you to point out a passage where Rand says that the only law should be the free market.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  She had PTSD or something similar. Her "literature" was therapy. Born in the upper-middle class in tsarist Russia, her dad a business owner. Got thrown out in the street by the muzhiks, along with the whole family. Had to wander through the country, nearly starving on occasion. Fled the place at the first opportunity. It's all in the books. The glorious, near superhuman entrepreneurs are echoes of Daddy. The welfare state is the masses who robbed her family of their wealth. She has a visceral hate of them because, well, they were the cause of her family's destitution in real life. And she is actively trying to construct an ideology which is in every way, every single detail, opposite to the ideology of the revolution that sent her life on a different course - opposite even when it makes no sense. Like someone who got raped and then is preaching how sex is bad for you. It's quite transparent.
nyolfen 10y ago
> In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other. I don't think 'helping' is the best word choice here
- cknight 10y ago
  Nice one. For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged: amongst the group of protagonists in the book, the granting of favours or donations is clearly outlined as immoral, as per Rand's philosophy. All goods and services are to be traded for fair value.
- arkis22 10y ago
  I meant helping in the sense that when the two parties engage in a transaction, it's mutually beneficial. So the two parties obviously aren't harming each other (they're helping).
ch4s3 10y ago
If as you say "Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes." Then she totally misses that humans are inherently social and will trade for social capital whenever possible, and form cartels naturally. She seems to have had a poor understanding of actors who engage in realpolitik.
notahacker 10y ago
> capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other. Rand was so averse to the idea of "individuals helping each other" that she includes a scene where a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car[1]. It's the villains who show their villainy by talking about doing each other favours and the heroes who talk about driving a hard bargain even when they're about to consummate the business relationship by having an affair. [1]which is absurd both for the assumption that it's better that way and for the assumption that a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market.
- IsaacL 10y ago
  She also includes scenes where the heroes help one another, or even help strangers. (Example: Dagny inviting the tramp to join her for dinner). The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car" is symbolic. The characters in the valley wanted to uphold the ethos that everyone there lived by the product of his or her own effort. Ayn Rand didn't include that scene for people like you who want to nitpick everything. She is writing for the kind of readers who think "hmm, having to pay for everything sounds annoying -- but on the other hand, it means you're not constantly dealing with requests for free favours. What kind of people would live in a place where everything had to be paid for? Would I want to live with those people?"
  - notahacker 10y ago
    It's hardly a "nitpick" to point out that throughout the book the heroes make a point of congratulating themselves and each other on only acting in their self-interest every time they conclude an agreement, whilst every time they dare to practice the Randian vice of altruism either the ungrateful recipients or the book's narrative throws it back in their face. The real purpose for Dagny's dinner with the tramp after all isn't for Rand to illustrate the virtues of helping tramps, but for the tramp to lecture on how the Twentieth Century Motor Company failed because the company based its ethos around helping those claiming to be in need, and explain that the book's hero has resolved to "stop the motor of the world* rather than continue to work for others. And yeah, the symbolic nature of having to pay for everything rather than do favours is the heroes believe [in maintaining the illusion that] those deserving of their support are evaluated not as individuals but based on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens of past effort....
htaunay 10y ago
I like to compare Rand's work with Marx's. When I read the "Communist Manifesto" and - part of - "The Capital", I was impressed by Marx's critique of capitalism. Most of his hypotheses (back from the 19th century) were eventually proved true, while seeming absolutely unthinkable at the time (e.g. the issue of over-production). However, his proposed solution - Communism - seemed naive and overly-optimistic, probably due to the outcomes we already are already aware of from such social experiment today. His critique was excellent, but his proposed solution weak, and dare I say almost a fairy-tale. When reading Rand, her solution - Objectivism - seems also impracticable and overly-optimistic. I personally believe that he who disassociates his well being from the well being of his neighbor, has little understanding of how society behaves in the long term. However, her critique of Socialist policies is spot on, and almost eerie. I live in Brazil, and there are many moments of our current political catastrophe that seem to have come out of Atlas Shrugged, and therefore I cannot through away the authors entire work because of a broken solution, which is only part of both novels. The anticipation of such self-destructing forms of government with more than half a century in advance is a merit of Rand's. Needless to say, it is always easier to criticize then to come up with a solution. In Ayn Rand's case, her critique is pertinent and time has in fact proved it to be well founded. Just please ignore her solution.
- RestlessMind 10y ago
  So TL;DR : "Marx correctly diagnosed the problem with Capitalism, but his prescription was wrong; Rand correctly diagnosed the problem with Socialism but her prescription was wrong"? I say its much easier to find faults in a system than coming up with a well-designed system.
  - arkis22 10y ago
    I think it's a misnomer to think of capitalism and socialism, or objectivism, as solutions. They are structures or perhaps models. They all fail because of people not doing what they're supposed to be doing. The only true solution would be a process that forces people to do what they're supposed to do. And I don't see that happening... ever? Until the AI rules us at least.
  - 10y ago
dragonwriter 10y ago
> To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs. Capitalism does that, too (it's a central element of the Marxist critique); that's actually a big part of why many non-Communist socialists and even non-Leninist Marxists, from very early on, described the system in the USSR as State capitalism (where the State was a vehicle for the Leninist vanguard, rather than the population/proletariat, to control capital and oppress the proletariat in much the same manner as a traditional capitalist elite.)

by arkis22 10y ago

ue_ 10y ago

>This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today. As a Socialist myself, I have wondered: how does capitalism become personal? Is it possible to achieve this? Let's assume for a moment that Marx was wrong about exploitation; how does wage labour, unexploitative, take the form of personal relation? From my point of view, I was thinking that the division of labour will create an impersonal relationship, so much so that the worker will not see his own labour in the final product. How does personal capitalism fare with division of labour and automation? I want to keep an open mind rather than to steer this ideologically, so I hope you are not put off by my differing viewpoint.

Danihan 10y ago
How is capitalism, or any financial system, ever not personal? At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary. Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else. Of course there are negative externalities to worry about, contractual enforcement, etc. But those don't change the core philosophies.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > How is capitalism ever not personal? A review of the works criticizing the dominant system of the mid-19th Century industrialized West by cobtemporaries who coined the name "capitalism" to describe that system would answer that question. > At it's core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. No, at its core capitalism is the arrangement of government, property rights, and legal system to preferentially serve the interests of the holders of capital over others. Hence the name.
  - Danihan 10y ago
    Are you saying capitalism cannot exist without government?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      "Government" is simply whatever actor or set of actors possesses, between them, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; you can't have human society without government and you can't have capitalism without society, so, sure, you trivially can't have capitalism without government. More deeply, capitalism is not only incidentally tied to government through the necessity for society, but more deeply through the dependency on a specific model of property rights being enforced by government.
- mattmcknight 10y ago
  That's redistributive taxation, not socialism. Socialism is ownership of all property and business by the government. Per Marx/Engels: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State," "Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. "
Artistry121 10y ago
Have you ever worked for someone you liked? Or have you ever been offered a job or promotion because of a good personal relationship? Most things sold in the business world are sold by personal relationships and conversation or personality.
RangerScience 10y ago
I think the issue Marx points out isn't an "original" quality of capitalism, but rather an "eventual" (steady-state) quality of it. AFAIK, capitalism is the idea of investment of capital. Marx's issue is that the capital pools in such a way that most people don't have it, or don't get to spend what they do have in a way that gets returns. In an ideal situation, I am able to "spend" my "excess capital" - my excess time, skills, drives, etc - to improve my own situation. This is personal. However, in practice, many people can't or don't do this. Maybe they're missing that drive towards self-investment. Maybe they're minimum wage and literally don't have any excess. Marx's issue of "praxis" - that you do not own (literally or emotionally) the product of your work is an emergent, rather than inherent, quality of capitalism. So it seems reasonable that a society could exist with other factors the confound that emergent quality, so that you can have you cake (the core bits of capitalism) and everyone gets to eat it (everyone can actually take advantage of those core bits)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jressey 10y ago

This is a satirical analysis of Atlas Shrugged, right? When I read it, my impression was that the message is 'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' The 'heroes' as you call them abandoned civilization to create a utopia where the free-market is the only law. Check out Bioshock to see what might happen.

Danihan 10y ago
'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' I believe it's more, "All acts are moral when transactions are conducted fairly and consensually between the involved parties."
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Which works fine as long as there's an ultimate authority to enforce fairness (defined how...?) and consent.
arkis22 10y ago
'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' Is obviously wrong. The villains of the book think that charity takes precedence over everything, or that they are intrinsically entitled to something just because they exist. In other words, if we're both starving, it's my moral obligation to feed you first. Abandoned civilization? By the end of the book the main characters had their wealth confiscated and civilization had fallen apart. And it's not just the heroes. There's countless references to regular workers "abandoning civiliation," giving up work and roaming the countryside stealing food. I would love for you to point out a passage where Rand says that the only law should be the free market.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
She had PTSD or something similar. Her "literature" was therapy. Born in the upper-middle class in tsarist Russia, her dad a business owner. Got thrown out in the street by the muzhiks, along with the whole family. Had to wander through the country, nearly starving on occasion. Fled the place at the first opportunity. It's all in the books. The glorious, near superhuman entrepreneurs are echoes of Daddy. The welfare state is the masses who robbed her family of their wealth. She has a visceral hate of them because, well, they were the cause of her family's destitution in real life. And she is actively trying to construct an ideology which is in every way, every single detail, opposite to the ideology of the revolution that sent her life on a different course - opposite even when it makes no sense. Like someone who got raped and then is preaching how sex is bad for you. It's quite transparent.

nyolfen 10y ago

> In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other. I don't think 'helping' is the best word choice here

cknight 10y ago
Nice one. For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged: amongst the group of protagonists in the book, the granting of favours or donations is clearly outlined as immoral, as per Rand's philosophy. All goods and services are to be traded for fair value.
arkis22 10y ago
I meant helping in the sense that when the two parties engage in a transaction, it's mutually beneficial. So the two parties obviously aren't harming each other (they're helping).

ch4s3 10y ago

If as you say "Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes." Then she totally misses that humans are inherently social and will trade for social capital whenever possible, and form cartels naturally. She seems to have had a poor understanding of actors who engage in realpolitik.

notahacker 10y ago

> capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other. Rand was so averse to the idea of "individuals helping each other" that she includes a scene where a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car[1]. It's the villains who show their villainy by talking about doing each other favours and the heroes who talk about driving a hard bargain even when they're about to consummate the business relationship by having an affair. [1]which is absurd both for the assumption that it's better that way and for the assumption that a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market.

IsaacL 10y ago
She also includes scenes where the heroes help one another, or even help strangers. (Example: Dagny inviting the tramp to join her for dinner). The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car" is symbolic. The characters in the valley wanted to uphold the ethos that everyone there lived by the product of his or her own effort. Ayn Rand didn't include that scene for people like you who want to nitpick everything. She is writing for the kind of readers who think "hmm, having to pay for everything sounds annoying -- but on the other hand, it means you're not constantly dealing with requests for free favours. What kind of people would live in a place where everything had to be paid for? Would I want to live with those people?"
- notahacker 10y ago
  It's hardly a "nitpick" to point out that throughout the book the heroes make a point of congratulating themselves and each other on only acting in their self-interest every time they conclude an agreement, whilst every time they dare to practice the Randian vice of altruism either the ungrateful recipients or the book's narrative throws it back in their face. The real purpose for Dagny's dinner with the tramp after all isn't for Rand to illustrate the virtues of helping tramps, but for the tramp to lecture on how the Twentieth Century Motor Company failed because the company based its ethos around helping those claiming to be in need, and explain that the book's hero has resolved to "stop the motor of the world* rather than continue to work for others. And yeah, the symbolic nature of having to pay for everything rather than do favours is the heroes believe [in maintaining the illusion that] those deserving of their support are evaluated not as individuals but based on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens of past effort....

htaunay 10y ago

I like to compare Rand's work with Marx's. When I read the "Communist Manifesto" and - part of - "The Capital", I was impressed by Marx's critique of capitalism. Most of his hypotheses (back from the 19th century) were eventually proved true, while seeming absolutely unthinkable at the time (e.g. the issue of over-production). However, his proposed solution - Communism - seemed naive and overly-optimistic, probably due to the outcomes we already are already aware of from such social experiment today. His critique was excellent, but his proposed solution weak, and dare I say almost a fairy-tale. When reading Rand, her solution - Objectivism - seems also impracticable and overly-optimistic. I personally believe that he who disassociates his well being from the well being of his neighbor, has little understanding of how society behaves in the long term. However, her critique of Socialist policies is spot on, and almost eerie. I live in Brazil, and there are many moments of our current political catastrophe that seem to have come out of Atlas Shrugged, and therefore I cannot through away the authors entire work because of a broken solution, which is only part of both novels. The anticipation of such self-destructing forms of government with more than half a century in advance is a merit of Rand's. Needless to say, it is always easier to criticize then to come up with a solution. In Ayn Rand's case, her critique is pertinent and time has in fact proved it to be well founded. Just please ignore her solution.

RestlessMind 10y ago
So TL;DR : "Marx correctly diagnosed the problem with Capitalism, but his prescription was wrong; Rand correctly diagnosed the problem with Socialism but her prescription was wrong"? I say its much easier to find faults in a system than coming up with a well-designed system.
- arkis22 10y ago
  I think it's a misnomer to think of capitalism and socialism, or objectivism, as solutions. They are structures or perhaps models. They all fail because of people not doing what they're supposed to be doing. The only true solution would be a process that forces people to do what they're supposed to do. And I don't see that happening... ever? Until the AI rules us at least.
- 10y ago

dragonwriter 10y ago

> To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs. Capitalism does that, too (it's a central element of the Marxist critique); that's actually a big part of why many non-Communist socialists and even non-Leninist Marxists, from very early on, described the system in the USSR as State capitalism (where the State was a vehicle for the Leninist vanguard, rather than the population/proletariat, to control capital and oppress the proletariat in much the same manner as a traditional capitalist elite.)