ABSTRACT
This book analyses the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek, the two foremost theoreticians and social philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I believe that examining their differences and similarities, successes and failures, political ideals and predictions can help us understand their systems of thought and that this can help us meet and overcome the most important challenges to ever face humanity. These are the connected issues of global warming and the capacity of our planet to meet the growing demands we put upon it – issues that will dominate the politics, philosophy and morality of this century and require changes in our economies and the way we live, think and act. Marx and Hayek both believed material abundance to be necessary
for the achievement of their aims. Marx, because he saw it as a condition for overcoming what he called the ‘alienation’ of the majority of people from their full potential, believing that both these aims could be achieved together by building a society of cooperating members based on common property. He acknowledged that capitalism, increasingly reliant upon science and its technological application, had proved its ability to rapidly develop production. But he believed that capitalism would falter due to its own inherent tendencies such as the booms and busts of the business cycle and the development of monopolies and their authoritarian, exploitative relationship with the workers. These workers, the proletarians, would then take over from the capitalists, complete the task on the basis of cooperation, in the course of which government, as a coercive instrument, would ‘die out’1 or wither away. Hayek, however, believed that abundance had to be endlessly pur-
sued because better satisfaction of their material needs was the sole objective on which people could possibly agree and live peacefully together, with each then aiming at their own further individual ends. He sought an end to government, corporation, union or any other
form of intervention in the free buying and selling of goods, services and labour on the basis of private ownership, and devised a new constitutional system to that end. Specifically, the government apparatus would include an upper house constitutionally charged with preventing any such intervention. Its role would be to ensure in perpetuity free use of privately owned property and all its proceeds, with perhaps minor adjustments or tinkering. The twentieth-century socialist regimes that were based, at least
initially, on Marx’s analysis, did not show superiority in the creation of abundance, failing on this account and in other ways. The first avowedly socialist state, the Soviet Union, collapsed near the end of last century, while the regimes in China and Vietnam turned to market forms and the freer buying and selling of goods, thereby rapidly expanding their economies though giving no clear indication of how they intend to achieve socialist ideals. At the end of the Cold War, the perpetuation of capitalism and the
markets in which buying and selling took place, seemed assured, and the United States under the leadership of an extremist group known as neo-conservatives, set out to impose everywhere what they called the ‘single sustainable model for national success’, beginning in the Middle East.2 Stuck in a quagmire there, they, and that ‘single sustainable model’, were confronted with a threat that had been present since the 1950s, but largely ignored. Ignored, that is until Sir Nicholas Stern, an economist appointed by the British government, reported in October 2006 that a change in the earth’s climate, manifested in global warming, constituted ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’.3 He concluded that this threatened economic losses equal to those inflicted by the Great Depression of 1929-32 plus the two world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45. This market failure, Stern added, ‘interacts with other market imperfections’ – a prophecy which proved only too accurate as the US sub-prime housing market financial crisis broke shortly after and spread globally, creating a credit crisis. This, among other effects, lowered the value of the US dollar, putting up the price of oil and emphasising the limitation of the earth to provide all we want.
