"Capitalism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

The success of capitalism is explained by the Britannica as follows:

Productive use of the "social surplus" was the special virtue that enabled capitalism to outstrip all prior economic systems. Instead of building pyramids and cathedrals, those in command of the social surplus chose to invest in ships, warehouses, raw materials, finished goods and other material forms of wealth. The social surplus was thus converted into enlarged productive capacity.

This is said about a time whenEurope 's population subsisted in such poverty that child mortality approached fifty percent, and periodic famines wiped out the "surplus" population which tiie pre-capitalist economies were unable to feed. Yet, making no distinction between tax-expropriated and industrially produced wealth, the Britannica asserts that it was the surplus wealth of that time that the early capitalists "commanded" and "chose to invest" and that this investment was the cause of the stupendous prosperity of the age that followed.

What is a "social surplus"? The article gives no definition or explanation. A "surplus" presupposes a norm; if subsistence on a chronic starvation level is above the implied norm, what is that norm? The article does not answer.

There is, of course, no such thing as a "social surplus." All wealth is produced by somebody and belongs to somebody. And "the special virtue that enabled capitalism to outstrip all prior economic systems" was freedom (a concept eloquently absent from the Britannica's account), which led, not to the expropriation, but to the creation of wealth.

I shall have more to say later about that disgraceful article (disgraceful on many counts, not the least of which is scholarship). At this point, I quoted it only as a succinct example of the tribal premise that underlies today's political economy. That premise is shared by the enemies and the champions of capitalism alike; it provides the former with a certain inner

╗ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1964, VoL IV, pp. 839-845.

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consistency, and disarms the latter by a subtle, yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisy as witness, their attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of "the common good" or "service to the consumer" or "the best allocation of resources." {Whose resources?)

If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that has to be checked and challenged.

Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man not of the loose aggregate known as a "community" that any science of the humanities has to begin.

This issue represents one of the epistemological differences between the humanities and the physical sciences, one of the causes of the former's well-earned inferiority complex in regard to the latter, A physical science would not permit itself (not yet, at least) to ignore or bypass the nature of its subject Such an attempt would mean: a science of astronomy that gazed at the sky, but refused to study individual stars, planets, and satellites or a science of medicine that studied disease, without any knowledge or criterion of health, and took, as its basic subject of study, a hospital as a whole, never focusing on individual patients.

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined. Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists. Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: "Man is that which fits economic equations." Since he obviously does not, this leads to the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science, political economist* are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the concretes of actual existence.

It leads also to a baffling sort of double standard or double perspective in their way of viewing men and events: if they observe a shoemaker, they find no difficulty in concluding that he is working in order to make a living; but as political economists, on the tribal premise, they declare that his purpose (and duty) is to provide society with shoes. If they observe a panhandler on a street corner, they identify him as a bum; in political economy, he becomes "a sovereign consumer." If they hear the communist doctrine that all property should belong to the state, they reject it emphatically and feel, sincerely, that they would fight communism to the death; but in political economy, they speak of the government's duty to effect "a fair redistribution of wealth," and they speak of businessmen as the best, most efficient trustees of die nation's "natural resources."

This is what a basic premise (and philosophical negligence) will do; this is what the tribal premise has done.

To reject that premise and begin at the beginning in one's approach to political economy and to the evaluation of various social systems one must begin by identifying man's nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.

Man's essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man's mind is his basic means of survival his only means of gaining knowledge.

Man cannot survive, as wpimais do, by the guidance of mere percepts. ... He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow bis food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought No percepts and no "instincts" will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave doth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet bis life depends on such knowledge and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it2

A process of thought is an enormously complex process of identification and integration, which only an individual mind can perform. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student. Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of bis rational faculty by every individual scientist Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind's progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.

" Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics," in The Virtue of Selfishness.

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In order to sustain its life, every living species has follow a certain course of action required by its nature. T action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectu everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind a produced by his effort. Production is the application of r< son to the problem of survival.

If some men do not choose to think, they can survive 01 by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered others but those others had to discover it, or none woi have survived. If some men do not choose to think or work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting t goods produced by others but those others had to produ them, or none would have survived. Regardless of wl choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any numb of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil cour they may choose to pursue the fact remains that reason man's means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survi or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are prope ties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his ration faculty or not depends on the individual, man's surviv requires that those who think be free of the interference i those who don't. Since men are neither omniscient nor infal] ble, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate < to pursue their own independent course, each according i his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental r< quirement of man's mind.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it dot not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, dire tives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its vie of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans, < "welfare." Such a mind may be hampered by others, it ma be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cann< be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example an symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)