Ayn Rand Sounds Like Marx

Or so the following would seem to indicate:

...Cardinal Ratzinger, in his homilies on creation, talked about a "change of paradigm in our understanding of the commission to exercise dominion" delivered to man:

How did the mentality of power and activity, which threatens us all today, ever come to be? One of the first indications of a new way of looking at things appeared about the time of the Renaissance with Galileo, when he said that if nature did not voluntarily answer our questions but hid her secrets from us, then we would submit her to torture and in a wracking inquisition extract the answers from her that she would otherwise not give. The construction of the instruments of the natural sciences was for him as it were a readying of this torture, whereby the human person, despot-like, gets the answer that he wants to have from the accused.--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", p. 49.

At that time, a new kind of knowledge was being sought--not what things are, what constitutes their "nature", or, to put it another way, what their "logos" is, the divine idea that is being expressed in them--but rather what we can make out of them for ourselves. This approach to reality is called "power knowledge."...

In order to establish this kind of "power knowledge", the idea of a Creator had to be set aside. It had to be made possible as a "hypothesis", to dispense with him.  It was a matter of eliminating any "language of creation", and thereby any message from the Creator, so that sheer utility, with no limitations or handicaps, becomes the model that determines everything.  The question regarding a Creator had to be declared meaningless, as did the question of his commission to us in creation.  In its place a different basic commission for man had to be formulated: "This is the source of the change in humanity's fundamental direction vis-a-vis the world; it was at this point that progress became the real truth and matter became the material out of which human beings would create a world that was worth being lived in."(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", pg. 50)

The two ideologies that this "power knowledge", dissociated from the Creator and the creation, brought into a largely dominant position during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Marxism and Darwinism (to be distinguished, once again as an ideological trend, from Darwin's scientific theory). The young Karl Marx drew up the following basic outline:

A being cannot call itself independent until it can stand on its own feet; and it stands on its own feet when it owes its existence to itself.  A man who lives by the grace of someone else regards himself as a dependent being.  And yet I live entirely by someone else's grace if I owe to him not only the sustenance of my life, but if besides that he has created my life; if he is the source of my life--and my life necessarily has such a basis outside itself, if it is not my own creation.  Creation is thus a concept that is difficult to drive out of the consciousness of ordinary people.--Karl Marx, translated from Nationalokonomie und Philosophie.  Fruhschriften [National economy and philosophy: early writings]  (Stuttgart, 1955), p. 246, cited in Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156

Not to owe one's existence to anyone else is certainly the presupposition for empowering oneself to be one's own Creator. It is certainly no accident that Friedrich Engels, after reading Darwin's Origin of Species, wrote enthusiastically to Marx that here they had found the scientific basis for their theory...

The era of ideologies is at an end. However, the paradigm of "power knowledge", the ideology of the domination of nature as mere matter for our scientific/technical/economic will to power to work on--a domination dissociated from belief in creation, and the responsibility for creation that is founded on it--has not yet perished. Now, as in the past, our culture is dominated by a way of thinking that sees the world as a product of chance and necessity rather than as the utterance and the challenge of the Creator. Now, as in the past, the idea of utility is largely dominant within the ethical debates about whether what we can do is permissible...--Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156