Poor Little Rich White Boys.

A potent cliché amongst historians is that the study of the past will prevent history repeating itself. It is with this ideal and hope with which Friedrich von Hayek writes The Road to Serfdom, his bestselling discussion of the economic and political climate of 1944. The root of his argument is that socialism is the root cause of both fascism and communism. That communal power leads to universally shared and expressed ideas. This in turn leads to a need to spread the simple but effective ideologies of the community and eventually to enforce these ideologies through violence. In it's place he argues that in order to protect the "individual" ( I will come back to this loaded term) it is necessary to have a free market, with lots of competition and private property controlling the wealth. Put simply, Hayek argues that if the state takes away the power from the private property owners it will lead them on a road to serfdom.

His argument at its heart is for freedom of the individual. He posits that socialism is set up to destroy individualism and that a free market aids individualism. In so doing he highlights his own utter ignorance for the core roots of socialism. To look at this we need to go back to Friedrich Engels seminal socialist text, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Writing in the 1840s Engels is discussing a period in which Hayek's ideals of private ownership and free markets are in full swing. England is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, individual freedom must therefore of course be at its most high, the "working man" at his most comfortable and secure:

"Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together. To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found."

In such environments it becomes difficult to begin to imagine the individual freedoms of the men and women who were living in these environments, unable to afford basics liberties such as privacy. "We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves, receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple." It becomes difficult to contemplate that they could pick and choose the work, or life they led.

Poverty is rarely touched upon by Hayek. His ideals require the working man to be free and he believes the freedom of all men in England to be somehow self-evident: "By the beginning of the 20th Century, the working man had reached the degree of comfort, security and personal independence which 100 years before had hardly seemed possible." Hayek carefully compares the working man with Engels' working man, but offers no evidence for this new found security and independence of the working classes. George Orwell in the 20s and 30s wrote extensively about the problems which continued to face the poor throughout Britain. His books the Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, are the accounts of his experiences of the working class experience. Socialism is not an attempt to create uniformity as Hayek suggests (by lumping together socialism, Marxism and communism into one very small rowing boat) but was originally founded upon the realisation that capitalism was destroying the independence and individuality of the poor.

Hayek writes: "Our generation has forgotten that a system of private property is a most important guarantee of freedom. It is only becuase of the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves." The "we" of this statement refers to those like Hayek, the rich, the white, the male, and the powerful. The Road to Serfdom is adored by people like Hayek; Churchill used up precious stocks of rationed paper printing thousands of copies of it, Glenn Beck, stark raving mad republican broadcaster loves it, and George W. Bush sr. gave Hayek a medal of freedom for writing it. The individual freedoms which Hayek wishes to protect are their freedoms. But it says nothing for the freedom of the poor to have enough money to put a roof over their heads, to have enough food to eat, to have job satisfaction or even the simple choice of being able to leave their job and find better employment.

Interestingly, Hayek paints two pictures of the working man, the first is the comfortable, secure ideal I have already discussed. The second is those who will seize power if socialism is allowed to slide into communism or fascism. "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail." Once a political extreme prevails, it will be the less individualistic people who will take control. Thus on the one hand Hayek suggests that the poor have independence and individualism and on the other purports that their like of individualism will lead them to become powerful in a communal state. The hearty warm working man is transformed into a uniform, dangerous bureaucrat.

Hayek's Road to Serfdom closes with the following rhetoric: The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: a policy of freedom for the individual is the only progressive policy." In reality what Hayek proposes is a regression away from giving the working class an opportunity to develop individuality and independence. Instead he is self-serving in his attempts to preserve the wealth and independence of the rich. Indeed his ideas were played out during the 80s by Thatcher's government. Once again Britain was engaged in the biggest boom of the 20th Century, and yet unemployment was at its highest since the war. Hayek gives the right a cosy little bedtime story that socialism is about crushing the individual which makes it easy for them to privatise, to destroy small businesses, to find loopholes in tax and ultimately to be as greedy as they like. But socialism is not about creating a community which controls everything, it's about closing the gap between rich and poor, about giving everyone the opportunity to be free. To misquote Marx; if Hayek's description of socialism is correct, then I am not a socialist.