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I'll argue that textual evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Look at when Rearden finally decides to bail of society. He takes his top / mangers / engin

I'll argue that textual evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Look at when Rearden finally decides to bail of society. He takes his top / mangers / engineers with him. What about all those other workers in Rearden Metal? The most of them are shown as hard working. But that's not enough. They (along with the d'Anconia's employees, etc, in a more explicitly cruel fashion) get left in a society that is purposefully being put into apocalypse mode in order to prove why certain people should get what they want. They get left there because they have to be. The Randian-moochers, would probably never humble themselves to ever invite the exceptional back. It's only going to be the impoverished workers who are going to have to throw off the yoke of the moochers and acknowledge how the world should be. So without the honest hard workers of the novel in such a position, the central conceit doesn't work. People like Galt start as mere workers but only so their exceptionality can be established by their ascendancy. The common worker is cannon fodder. In the world of Ayn Rand, the worker only exists to acknowledge the superiority of the exceptional.

roenxi 7y ago
Some of these points are convincing, so I shall slightly modify my argument. If Galt's Gulch had taken in the hardworking labourers as well as the management Ayn would have basically been writing a parable of the US vs the USSR. She might have been happy to do that too, but with Atlas Shrugged she clearly wasn't satisfied saying "Capitalism is better". She wanted to say "Communism doesn't work, and the driving idea here is really bad and should be rejected". So although horrible things did happen to the workers in the story of Atlas Shrugged, it wasn't at all because Ayn's message was anti-labour. Her point was that if the power of labour was being directed by people who wanted to redistribute capital based on need/fairness/something-other-than-ability-to-use-capital then the story would not go to a good place. Her philosophy had nothing bad to say about people who worked hard and earned money. It had a lot of unkind things to say about people who worked hard to support involuntary redistribution, and stood idly by without understanding that power was shifting away from the capable people. > In the world of Ayn Rand, the worker only exists to acknowledge the superiority of the exceptional. If I look around my room, I can't really name a person who could create any item in it except some of the technical writings. If I could, it would be the very small fraction of my acquaintances who are not clerks, office workers, administrative types or in the health or service sector. I rely pretty heavily on exceptional people of superior creativity to myself. I suspect most of the people on this forum do too.

roenxi 7y ago

Some of these points are convincing, so I shall slightly modify my argument. If Galt's Gulch had taken in the hardworking labourers as well as the management Ayn would have basically been writing a parable of the US vs the USSR. She might have been happy to do that too, but with Atlas Shrugged she clearly wasn't satisfied saying "Capitalism is better". She wanted to say "Communism doesn't work, and the driving idea here is really bad and should be rejected". So although horrible things did happen to the workers in the story of Atlas Shrugged, it wasn't at all because Ayn's message was anti-labour. Her point was that if the power of labour was being directed by people who wanted to redistribute capital based on need/fairness/something-other-than-ability-to-use-capital then the story would not go to a good place. Her philosophy had nothing bad to say about people who worked hard and earned money. It had a lot of unkind things to say about people who worked hard to support involuntary redistribution, and stood idly by without understanding that power was shifting away from the capable people. > In the world of Ayn Rand, the worker only exists to acknowledge the superiority of the exceptional. If I look around my room, I can't really name a person who could create any item in it except some of the technical writings. If I could, it would be the very small fraction of my acquaintances who are not clerks, office workers, administrative types or in the health or service sector. I rely pretty heavily on exceptional people of superior creativity to myself. I suspect most of the people on this forum do too.