Literary Ramblings: A Capitalist Anthem (a review of Ayn Rand’s Anthem)
In the introduction to Ayn Rand’s Anthem, it is noted that the Macmillan publishing company turned down the manuscript claiming that the author did “not understand socialism”, and upon reading the novella it seems that Rand, whilst also borrowing heavily from other authors to create contradictory characters and claims concerning communism, does indeed fail to understand socialism, as well as the history which supports capitalism, and in turn undermines the suffering of the working class and women and the value of her novella.
Understanding the context of Rand’s life offers some insight to her position on socialism. She was herself the daughter of a middle-class family in Russia before the revolution, and saw her family lose what comforts they had in the name of the working class, eventually abandoning Soviet Russia to move to capitalist America. Guessing how Rand came to develop her opposition against socialism is only about as hard as guessing how she developed the concept for Anthem once one has read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Throughout the novel Rand works hard to shout down socialism whilst rehashing concepts that had already been explored, and to little if any effect since she offers nothing new to either.
Like Zamyatin’s novel, characters are given numbers as names and refer to themselves in the plural “we”, and also like Zamyatin’s novel, Rand’s novella focuses on a protagonist who discovers his own individuality. This self-realization is also the focus of Huxley’s novel, as is the concept of having children raised by the state and enter their occupation at the bequest of the state, while offering satirical interpretations of Freudian and Fordian ideals. Neither Huxely’s, nor Zamyatin’s novels though seem like one-sided, incomplete, reasonless rants against socialism, but rather they offer thoughtful criticism on Taylorism, Fordisms, industrialization and the political ideals of Russia’s post revolution government. Rand’s novel only serves to recycle the set-up and general plot of the wroks by Huxley and Zamyatin, while neglecting the impact of industrial minds and attacking socialism, communism and collectivism on a whole, rather than the Russian interpretation of such political ideals.
The problems with Rand’s novella aren’t that the material is so blatantly lifted from Huxley and Zamyatin, as George Orwell also borrowed from both novels to create his masterpiece, and one of the best novels of the 20th century: 1984. The problem lays more within the novella’s structure and its characters. In his novella Animal Farm for example, Orwell attacks the Russian interpretation of communism specifically, illustrating how it was corrupted and transformed until it resembled the political structure that existed in Tsarist Russia. Rand though doesn’t only attack Russia’s interpretation of communism, but rather Rand argues against socialism altogether, presenting misleading representations of socialist ideals, displaying inherent contradictions in her own suggestions whilst also painting a disparaging portrayal of women.
The only woman who appears in the novel is the love interest of the novella’s protagonist. The name given to hear by the state is Liberty 5-3000, a name which the protagonist, Equality 7-2521, replaces with “The Golden One”. While it might seem to suggest that women in this society are equally likely to be independent enough to seek self-awareness, the novel only presents one woman who does so, whilst it suggests there are several men at least who are like Equality 7-2521, and after the two lovers escape in the forbidden area, Rand presents a Miltonic portrayal of the male/female relationship. In Milton’s Paradise Lost the angel Michael puts Eve to sleep before speaking to Adam, leaving him to rely God’s message to Eve with a wording which she might understand. Orwell adopts this archetype in 1984 and his protagonist, Winston, shares a book with his love interest, but has to “read it aloud… and explain it” as well. Rand creates a similar structure for relationships between men and women as Equality 7-2521 read many books and then claims to have “called the Golden One… told her what I had read and what I had learned”. The female is subservient to the male and is incapable of learning on her own and therefore needs the male figure to explain things to her. Earlier in the novella, when the Golden One joins Equality 7-2521 in the forbidden forest, she does not insist on her own independence, but rather she tells Equality 7-2521 to do as he pleases with her and responds with “your will be done” when Equality 7-2521 makes a suggestion, further illustrating the female as a subservient being.
This relationship between the Golden One and Equality 7-2521 contains within it the inherent contradiction of Rand’s work. Rand suggests that people should work to serve themselves, but her novella’s heroine lives to serve another, and when Equality 7-2521 find self-realization the first thing he wants to do is bring that gift of self-realization to his comrades, illustrating that living to serve oneself is not fulfilling and that only when you can share with others can one feel fulfilled. The creation of her novella is indeed part of the contradiction. The work does not come alive until it is read, meaning that Rand’s work is empty until others read it, suggesting the purpose of the work it to reach others, to share her own ideas with others, not just herself. If such self-serving views were sincerely held by Rand, she wouldn’t have published a word of her writing. Rand may have been writing her own views, but she was sharing them in the process of writing and therefore creating for her fellow humans, not only for herself.
One of the other contradictions lays within Rand’s evaluation of human nature. Rand seems to suggest that in serving others, human nature will become so corrupt that a socialist state’s government will seek to impose its will on the people in tyrannical fashion. Instead Rand suggests individualism, people who serve themselves, claiming that a socialist order will eventually lead serfdom or plebeian life. The irony is that it was the system she is condoning that birthed slavery, and serfdom. If Rand believes society will become so corrupted by human nature that it will rob every soul of self-awareness, I’m not sure how she could possibly believe that individualism would serve society better on a whole, especially considering the fact that the laissez-faire approach which she condones is historically linked with the serfdom and slavery which she denounces in the novella. And despite the fact that capitalism is the system that is linked with slavery and serfdom, Rand suggests socialism will turn free persons into plebs. It seems one must do a great deal of compartmentalising to hold these opposing beliefs and facts at once, a task any reader with even the slightest ability to reason will not be able to do.
Rand’s misrepresentation of socialism seems to be a heavy weight on the novella as well. In Anthem Rand portrays socialist society as one that discourages education, which is fundamentally opposed to one of the core concepts of socialism. In socialism and communism alike, education is supposed to be brought to all. Even in Soviet Russia, where communist ideals were eventually corrupted so much that the government became communist in name only and fascists in all practicality, education was a key component. Literacy rates went soaring in Russia once the communist regime came into power. Likewise communist Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world (even higher the America). Indeed, socialist countries have offered equal education to all, even through university. The system which Rand encourages is actually the one which discourages education. In a capitalist society those who are born rich, most often stay rich, and their children are the ones who have the time and money to invest in their own education whilst the children of the working-class have neither the time, nor the money to pay for an education.
The flaws in Rand’s work are too plentiful to enjoy the novella. It is not a necessarily poorly written novel, but neither is it particularly well written. Its employment of the term “we” to describe the individual is an interesting tact, but one that was already used by Zamyatin, while the core ideas of the book seem to read as sketches of several other, more complete works. Rand’s personal biases and beliefs weigh heavily on this work, and though it is fair to expect an author to put themselves into their work, when their reasoning is flawed, their understanding of history incomplete and the perceptions regarding certain political ideals are flawed, it exposes the author’s ignorance and takes away from the work, and these are the flaws of Rand’s work that cause it to suffer. After reading this work, it is clear why Rand has such a loyal following among conservative capitalists, but it is no surprise that I have not seen her works so widely syllabized in the more liberally mind academic world.