Objectivist campaigning.

[Axil]

In AS and FH Rand seems to make the arguement that political action is not needed as the nature of political evil is illusory - it exists soley at our consent and is not self sustaining. How did Rand, and the early movement of the 60s see political/cultural action?

Was a system like Marxism defined showing the enemy's nature, his end, and a utopia?

[softwareNerd]

In AS and FH Rand seems to make the argument that political action is not needed as the nature of political evil is illusory - it exists solely at our consent and is not self sustaining.

Even if we assume that evil exists solely by consent of the non-evil, that doesn't imply that political action is not needed. Evil is not self-sustaining, in the sense that it requires the good to sustain it. For instance, a robber is not self-sustaining; he needs someone from whom he can rob.

If the world was clearly divided into robbers and robbed, with the robbed not wanting to have anything to do with the robbers, then political action would not be necessary. Such a situation would require police or military action. On the other hand, if it's all mixed up, with some good people having ideologies which say that it is okay for them to rob now and then, or that it is okay for someone else to rob if they really, really need something, and so on... then political action is necessary to convince those (mostly) good folk. The essence of such political action is to convince people who are part-good to become more so and to get them to stop making excuses for, and stop supporting, evil.

E.g., if you take the terrorist problem, there are some against whom we must take military action. However, such action would be extremely simple if a bulk of people in the U.S. agreed about some basic principles of ethics and politics. However, since they do not, political action is the way to convince them to change. It is the same with a host of other issues.