7. At Home with Marx and Rand: Returning Man in Pre-history

This chapter reads ‘pre-history’ in Marx and Rand, drawing on the strange connections between these seemingly opposed thinkers, and thinking about some of the ways this connection can and has been theorised. It also builds on the fact that Spiderman’s creator, Steve Ditko, was a Randian, and that the comics are also concerned with constructions of pre-history. The chapter plays with Rand’s claims about the ‘proper’ form of political protest in her anti-Marxist writing: ‘sit-ins’ are never acceptable, ‘letters-to-editors’ are. What follows takes the form of such a letter, a seemingly ‘proper’ form that allows a further twist to the working through of problems of pre-history: what is the place prior to the letter’s receipt, and what difficulties attend any claim to knowledge of such a place?