The curious revival of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it. And now after years of rumours, it’s finally become a movie. That’s odd because it’s longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most critics despise it — as Jason Steger told the ABC First Tuesday Book Club: "The writing is unbelievably repetitive, tedious, banal. The ideas in it are crass".

Somehow, the global financial crisis triggered a resurgence in sales of the novel. Nobody knows how many people are actually reading the book, but fans clearly think it’s relevant to the problems of today.

What’s weird about this is that Rand’s philosophy is a kind of inverted Marxism. Without an understanding of Marx, it’s impossible to understand what Rand is on about. In a world where even China’s communist party has converted to free market economics, it’s odd to read a book by a free market evangelist who takes Marx so seriously.

Marx argued that labour was the source of all value. "Capital is dead labour," he insisted. Dead labour "that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." It is labour that creates the capitalist’s machines and once created, the machines drain work of its creativity, skill and purpose.

But for Rand, it is workers who feed off capital. Productivity increases when scientists, inventors and engineers develop new technologies. As her fictional her John Galt puts it: "The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time." Without the benefit of this technology, ordinary labourers would either starve or be forced to live like medieval peasants. As Galt says: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains."

Atlas Shrugged is about what happens when the creative minority go on strike.

Atlas Shrugged is usually filed under science fiction. And the odd thing about this is that Rand is fixated on diesel locomotives. Railroads are an essential feature of the novel. Despite the role technological progress has in her philosophy, she understood very little about what was happening with science and technology in late 1950s America. Her high-tech future is the kind of future a young person might have imagined while growing up in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

Space ships, supersonic planes and atomic power. This is the kind of technology you expect to find in a science fiction novel from the 1950s. But for Rand, trains, blast furnaces and radio are high technology. The year before Atlas Shrugged was published President Eisenhower signed legislation authorising the construction of America’s interstate highway system, ending an era where railroads were engines of growth. But her characters live in a world that has fallen into decline before it could be transformed by interstate highways and cheap air travel.

So how did the film makers deal with Rand’s anachronistic technology? ÆtherCzar asked screen writer Brian O’Toole about the challenges of the film in a world where interstate highways and jet aircraft have overshadowed rail. He replied:

It makes sense that in the universe Ayn Rand created fuel prices would be so high that airlines, ship freighters and even buses and cars would become too expensive to operate and the first to collapse. People would naturally rely on railroads again.

But Rand never imagined trains as a regression to the past. When her heroine looks at a powerful new motor that runs pollution-free on almost no fuel she doesn’t see a solution to the problem of climate change or a technological answer to the threat of peak oil, she looks at the motor and sees a train that runs at two hundred miles an hour. But in today’ America, it’s big government progressives who are in love with high speed rail. Maybe rail-loving progressives will go to the movie to see the trains and emerge as libertarians … or maybe not.