Released in 1936, 'We The Living' by Ayn Rand is a story about Andrei Taganov, who fought on the side of the Red Army during the Russian Revolution. After the Revolution, he witnessed the rise of the USSR from inside the Party with a growing sense of unease. With the expulsion of Trotsky and his ideals of Communism, what is left behind in the newly branded USSR is merely a totalitarian regime, not unlike the previous regime under the Czar.
When he meets this beautiful and smart girl, Kira, at the university which he frequents, he falls in love and begins to dream of a future beyond the failure of the Communist Dream. She gets him to do things for her and give her all his money which she says is needed for her family. With each new request from her side, Andrei further risks his standing within the Party.
Ultimately, it is revealed that Kira was just using him and never loved him, nor cared about escaping the USSR together by using his plan of a reassignment of Andrei as G.P.U. (secret service) member to a foreign post. During all the time he has known her, she was living with this other man, Leo. When Andrei realises that the G.P.U. will soon be coming for him in the worst way possible because of all the favours he did for Kira, he takes the only option that's still open to him.
After burning all of Kira's clothing and other items which were still left at his place to protect her in a last act of kindness, he takes his gun and ends everything with a single shot. When his suicide is discovered, he is buried with full honours as befitting a Soviet Hero.
What I just wrote is not actually the main story in the novel, but to me it's the most poignant and interesting one. The girl Kira is supposed to be the main character for whom one is supposed to be rooting, to make her last, futile escape attempt in the closing chapter a swansong that proclaims the value of freedom and to make a last, final fist to the crushing boot of totalitarianism.
Yet Kira is the one who begins a secret relationship with this guy Leo who she randomly meets on the streets. Kira is the one who grew up spoiled in a rich aristocrat family, who had dreams of constructing skyscrapers out of glass and aluminium. Yet who gave up all of that because of this sickly... devotion to Leo. Instead of a loving relationship, Leo is abusive, self-destructive, ends up cheating on her and yet she keeps up trying to protect him.
After Taganov's suicide, Kira stands at his gravestone, uncomprehending, as if she cannot grasp that she is the force which is driving good men to early graves. Even as she proclaims the evils of the totalitarian Soviet regime, she fails to look inside and see that the seeds for the very same tyranny can be found inside her own chest.
In light of Kira's behaviour as a foolish, love-smitten girl, the grandstanding proclamations on the back of the book (Signet edition), as well as in Ms Rand's accompanying foreword from 1958 seem rather over the top. Let alone the vilification of 'socialism'. Ironically, the distinction is highlighted right in Ms Rand's novel, with Andrei's disillusionment with the system that is being implemented, and Trotsky's expulsion from the 'Soviet project'. As greed and all of the other worst aspects of human nature led Russia's people into yet another totalitarian world where human lives outside of the wealthy are essentially disposable.
During the decades since Ms Rand's death in 1982 and the collapse of the Soviet Union only eight years later, it has become clear that her favoured 'free market capitalism' and the strongly associated Neo-Liberalism is in many ways reminiscent of the proclaimed evils of Stalinism - as the Soviet totalitarian dictatorship became known after the death of Lenin. Without the ills of the USSR acting as a mirror which kept Western governments in check, Neo-Liberalism has gone down the same path of restricting individual freedoms, of constant monitoring and reduction of the individual into just a grain of sand to be trampled into the economical foundation which holds up the lavish lifestyles of the over-privileged.
When the goal of Ms Rand was to preserve individualism, and provide the room for an individual to grow and live their life to their fullest, then what one needs is a political and economical system which preserves those freedoms. That system is Socialism. In the political sense, Socialism is a system which guarantees that every person born has access to the same education, same healthcare and same employment opportunities as anyone else. No person is better than another merely based on the accident of their birth.
Within a society there has to be something which holds the social fabric together. Due to the integral role of money in the economies which underlie societies, it's clear that money is more important than even food or shelter. As Ms Rand's novel illustrates, having to fight within a society to obtain money just so that one can buy the food and shelter one needs to live is dystopian and inhumane. Contrast that with Neo-Liberalist societies where tenants who fail to pay rent or home owners who fail to pay taxes on their presumed possessions can be tossed out onto the streets without recourse. Here one finds little difference.
More and more Western societies are now experimenting with concepts like a Universal Base Income (UBI), where everyone, no matter who, receives a fixed monthly amount of money. Enough to pay rent and buy food, meaning that they're essentially freed from the stresses of basic survival. Freeing the individual from those worries means that they are free to focus on growing in a way which they desire, instead of one dictated by the harsh rules of survival.
Perhaps the real social revolution does not look like the Russian Revolution, with violence and grand proclamations and people with oversized egos abusing statements like 'for the greater good', 'for the cause' while promising that soon the famine and plagues that are decimating the population will come to an end.
Perhaps giving every individual the guarantee that they are able to live somewhere and eat every day and not worry about tomorrow is the only society in which an individual can be truly free and thus truly become a part of society out of their volition. All of this depends on the successful integration of Individualism into Socialism, counter-intuitive as that may seem.
Maya
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