Hayek was scared, and rightly so if his analysis was right. Nazi
Germany and Stalin's Russia were nightmares of states that the rest of
the world would hope to wake up from. That the Russian people and the
Germans eventually woke up does not excuse the excesses of power claimed
by both totalitarian dictators.
Hayek, however, was wrong in his analysis.
First
off, I want to dispatch and then turn away from the easiest and most
superficial criticism of this work. Hayek is a bad writer. The
construction of his English is tortured and awkward. Not every writer
taking on English can write with the verve and elegance of Conrad or
Nabokov. Sadly, even in his field, someone writing centuries before him
has a better grip on lucid prose. Adam Smith, a Scotsman, writes in a
clearer English to the contemporary reader.
Rhetorically, Hayek's
largest problem with his argument is definitional. He dedicated his
work `to the Socialists of all parties.' His tongue-in-cheek dedication
is meant to yoke together both the Nazi program and Stalin's version of
Marxism-Leninism. The work goes through pains to keep this parallel
alive, but only goes to show that both of our antagonists in the work
are effective dictatorships. The key argument of the work is that the
road that both countries took to their respective places were parallel.
Hayek goes through pains to support this thesis, tying together some
ex-socialist in the Nazi movement as proof of the socialist root of
Nazism. He ignores the fact that Nazism developed in the beer-halls of
Bavaria as a nationalistic alternative to the internationalist SDP that
lost its intellectual and moral high ground by supporting Germany's
entry into the capitalist conflagration we know as World War One. The
Nazi party and fascist ideology grew and developed not as a logical
extension of socialistic ideals, but in conflict with both socialist and
communist parties in the late twenties and early thirties.
Hayek's
villain becomes not socialism as understood by any socialist, but
instead the villain is a planned economy. Ignoring the fact that
socialism is an economic, political, and moral system is one thing.
Parts of the socialistic system are open to criticism and discussion and
debate. However, Hayek's move is intellectually dishonest. If the
countries of the Soviet Union and Germany had anything in common it was
that they had centrally directed economies. Both countries had separate
problems and were not heirs to the post-capitalist utopias in any form.
Germany had to rebuild, as did the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had
not just the international war to recover from, but also faced internal
strife. The tsarist country that became the Soviet Union was still
very rural and largely agrarian and thus had to focus a damaging amount
of economic focus on industrialization. Neither country was ready for
the transition that Marx was able to see happening in mid-nineteenth
century England or Germany.
Hayek's thesis is rendered moot by
this false comparison. `Socialism' is not the villain. Dictatorship
and totalitarian systems that repress the people are the enemy of a
well-functioning state. Many different political and economic systems
have led to serfdom. Hayek's market-based savior is no better. He
argues that oppression is inevitable in both a planned economy and a
market based one. The market-based economy, to Hayek, is preferable
because the oppressor is the market itself, and not some entity that has
a face. I fundamentally disagree with him here, as in an open system
you have a chance to petition for redress an individual. If a market
leaves me to starve, I have no one to look at for succor or blame. This
is many times more alienating for me.
The final prescription
Hayek advocates is one I and many other leftist can get behind.
Although Hayek speaks against international planning, he recognizes the
need for international cooperation. For him this is a cooperation of
the markets, where governments hand over economic policy and the
nation-state is weaker as a result. The confounding part here is that
the socialist, Marxist view is internationalist. Nation-states
themselves exist to protect bourgeois capital, and borders are at best
an ethno-linguistic myth. What Hayek in the end argues against is
competing state capitalist countries and advocates for the blurring of
those boundaries.
I recommend this book, despite my rating,
because it is important for people from all sides of the debate to know
every side of the debate. Hayek is important in right-wing libertarian
thought, but you should approach with caution if you have not read some
of the important theorist he is speaking against; his definition of
leftists are at the mercy of his arguments and not necessarily a
reflection of any socialist's words or intents.
(Originally posted 6.2.2010 at http://www.amazon.com/review/R37LEZY6ZO0LFC)
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