Networks

Authur Jensen’s vision wasn’t of course invented by Chayefsky, but is rather an only slightly hyperbolic rendering of the discourse of Neoliberalism. This doctrine wasn’t especially new, but the postwar years had seemed to answer so finally the problems of Capitalism, especially in America, which saw a long period of uninterrupted growth, and the newly recovering social democratic countries of Europe, that an alternative to the evils of a Keynesian mixed economy and welfare state were relegated to the fringes. When the postwar compromise seemed to come unstuck in the Seventies with recession setting in and seemingly impossible phenomena like stagflation occurring, the Neoliberals took their chance to press home their alternate vision of the good society and the stable economy: small government, low taxes, free markets, flexible labour, and of course, restored growth.

This ideology had in reality been expounded for years by a group of thinkers broadly known as Austrian School. Part of the Austrians’ philosophy is a reverence for the entrepreneur as a heroic individualist and world-spirit, and much of the anti-communist and anti-socialist rhetoric rests on this vision of the businessman being, rather than a miserable, self-interested exploiter of labour, a beneficent Ubermensch, without whom humanity would still be dragging its knuckles through the primordial slime. Jensen’s vision may be democratic and egalitarian sounding, but there is no doubt that it promotes a vision of the businessman as a minor deity, hence Beale’s whispered “I have seen the face of God.”

Should there be much doubt about the contempt in which the Austrian School holds the common man, or indeed about its faith in the transcendent power of the businessman, we only have to refer to two letters written by a founding father and disciple of the Austrian school, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard respectively, to the author Ayn Rand, on the publication of her novel Atlas Shrugged

“Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also – or may I say: first of all- a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the “moral cannibals,” the “gigolos of science” and of the “academic prattle” of the makers of the “anti-industrial revolution.” You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you

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If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State.”

Rothbard’s position on Rand is more conflicted, and later he would be at the forefront of Libertarian attacks against her “cult”. The early letter, worth reading in full, contains a bizarre, barely concealed admission of his trembling schoolboy love for Ice Queen Objectivist Rand, and concludes with a reference to Nietzsche:

“If Zarathustra should return to earth and ask me-as a representative of the human race-that unforgettable question “ what have ye done to surpass man”, I shall point to Atlas Shrugged.”

Rothbard is a fascinating figure, the founder of Anarcho-capitalism, heavily opposed to Friedman and later a vicious critic of Rand herself. But still, the question of the Superman haunts the formulations of Libertarianism and Neoliberalism, as much as it does those of the Communists. Productivity is the key to economic success, to outperforming other systems, and is ideologically legitimating: when Khrushchev mockingly tells a visibly uneasy Richard Nixon that in seven years they will be waving the USA goodbye, he is boasting about the U.S.S.R.’s superior productivity, its ideological grip on its workers which can push them to unprecedented levels of raw physical strength and endurance, the figure of the Communist Superman Stakhanov, against whom the Americans have no equivalent. Despite all the technological and other productivity gains of the late 60s and early 70s on some levels, productivity is still figured in terms of manpower (we will explore this more fully in considering the Terminator movies). The Superman must be found (and of course he returns in the Seventies, stripped of kitsch and ready to literally turn back time), and along with this a new generation of more modern, clued-up capitalists.

What’s certain in American films of the early Seventies is that the Old Order is dying. In Being There, Five Easy Pieces, Stay Hungry, Chinatown, Winter Kills, an older generation is passing over, looking for an heir to continue business-as-usual. Mises descends from an aristocratic lineage and arguably seeks to recast the notion of the better man, the high born, genetically superior aristocratic, creating a new Aristocracy (literally, rule by the best) in a more demotic, democratic form. The pressing need in rebuilding the American dream is for the dream warrior; the Superman needs to be born, limits need to be surpassed, the new modern, pop-culture Capitalist, suited to the liberated post-hippy age and media-savvy, must be nurtured and sought out. These things will come to pass, but for the time being, for Rand, Mises, Rothbard and their various adherents, associates and disciples, the hated Welfare state and Big Government prevail.

When the Superman does appear in the auspicious Seventies - unsurprisingly perhaps - he will be Austrian too.