Hidden Kinship Between Marx and Rand: A Gap in Scholarship – Destabilizing Three Major Pillars

This essay identifies a neglected kinship between Karl Marx and Ayn Rand: both reject the supernatural, thereby minimizing fundamental human tendencies and constraining individual autonomy in one of humanity’s oldest domains. While their ideological opposition has been extensively documented, scholarship has overlooked how their shared secular absolutism aligns them in limiting freedom. By situating this denial of transcendence and lived experience as a common thread, the essay destabilizes—and ultimately collapses—three major pillars of modern thought: Marxism, Objectivism, and materialist secularism. November 2025