Responding to Hayek from the Left: Beyond Market Socialism on the Path to a Radical Economic Democracy

Abstract

The left and the cause of radical economic democracy have never properly recovered from Hayek’s critique of the relationship between planning, collective ownership, and economic decision making. His withering attack at the end of the Second World War was a rear guard action against what he saw as the creeping inevitability of socialism and central planning, which had become the common sense of the time (Hayek 1944). Subsequently, his ideas have become the bedrock for neoliberalism and its dominance of the global economic policy agenda.¹ Whatever the inconsistencies in the arguments of Hayek and others from the Mont Pelegrin Society, or as Mirowski aptly names them, the Neoclassical Thought Collective (Mirowski 2013), they have become the common sense of our times.