If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership

The history of the Industrial Revolution—how feudalism’s serfs became capitalism’s propertyless proletarians—does not make for pleasant reading. It was not, however, the unrelieved tragedy of Marxist propaganda. On the contrary. This Labor Day, I reproduce the 21^st chapter of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (2022), which, with the help of Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek, highlights that story’s pro-life dimension. (“Mr. Ferrara” refers to Christopher Ferrara, the Catholic Distributist author of my book’s foil, The Church and the Libertarian.)

That chapter’s title came to me out of the blue when I wrote its ancestor post for my now-defunct blog, anarcho-capitalist.com, perhaps in 2011. Remembering as a kid enjoying Trini Lopez’s hit in 1963, I thought it an ironically fitting title: serfs did lose the economic utility of their hammers and other tools, and were left with only their labor to sell using machines they no more owned than they owned the commodities that issued from them. But, I argue, they gained so much more.

“I still call myself a communist,” Pete Seeger (1919-2014) proclaimed as late as 1995.

The opportunities now open to them, not the least of which was seeing more of their children grow up to give them grandkids, mean nothing to Communists, excuse me, Progressives who sang “If I Had a Hammer” around the campfire, at rallies, and on the concert stage. Like “Imagine,” John Lennon’s ode to godless communism, “If I Had a Hammer” was an innocent-sounding, mesmerizing, aspirational hymn to their collectivist designs, starting with its Red composer, Pete Seeger in 1949, and continuing with Peter, Paul and Mary in 1962. With Lopez, the ballad reached No. 3—and my ears. For the rest of the tune’s discography, see the Wikipedia entry.

If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership

Now, about the “propertyless paupers” of Mr. Ferrara’s solicitude, Hayek wrote in his own contribution to the previously cited volume:

Discussions of the effects of the rise of modern industry on the working classes refer almost always to the conditions in England in the first half of the nineteenth century; yet the great change to which they refer had commenced much earlier and by then had quite a long history and had spread far beyond England. The freedom of economic activity which in England had provide so favorable to the rapid growth of wealth was probably in the first instance an almost accidental by-product of the limitations which the revolution of the seventeenth century had placed on the powers of government; and only after its beneficial effects had come to be widely noticed did the economists later undertake to explain the connection and to argue for the removal of the remaining barriers to commercial freedom.[1]

Self-interested lords may have intended only to assert their own interests against the monarch, but they unleashed a wave of “beneficial effects” that many beyond them enjoyed. The prescient among them, including some economists, thought it would be good to “roll out” the idea of limited government even further. But Mr. Ferrara’s emphasis on tool-ownership—“the few . . . in possession of the means of production”—is a Distributist “tell” that merits a comment.

We know there are environmentalists who prefer fewer human beings enduring a subsistence-level (but environmentally “sustainable”) standard of living to more people enjoying better and longer lives at the “expense” of nature. Can it be that Distributists prefer numerically fewer serfs who at least owned their own tools, to many factory workers, if they had to choose between these two scenarios? But what about those tools? Hayek again:

The actual history of the connection between capitalism and the rise of the proletariat is almost the opposite of that which these theories of the expropriation of the masses suggest. The truth is that, for the greater part of history, for most men the possession of the tools for their work was an essential condition for survival or at least for being able to rear a family. The number of those who could maintain themselves by working for others, although they did not themselves possess the necessary equipment, was limited to a small proportion of the population. The amount of arable land and of tools handed down from one generation to the next limited the total number who could survive. To be left without them meant in most instances death by starvation or at least the impossibility of procreation.

In short, there is an intimate connection between human economic productivity and human biological “reproductivity,” if you will: one is a function of another. Hayek continues:

There was little incentive and little possibility for one generation to accumulate the additional tools which would have made possible the survival of a large number of the next, so long as the advantage of employing additional hands was limited mainly to the instances where the division of the tasks increased the efficiency of the work of the owner of the tools. It was only when the larger gains from the employment of machinery provided both the means and the opportunity for their investment that what in the past had been a recurring surplus of population doomed to early death was in an increasing measure given the possibility of survival.

It is hard not to hear in Hayek’s reference to “a recurring surplus of population” an implicit answer to Scrooge’s unwanted Christmas Eve visitor who informed the miser that many poor men “would rather die” than avail themselves of whatever assistance could be gotten from the “prisons” and the “workshops.” Dickens’s protagonist coldly rebuffs him with “If they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Ironically, what members of Scrooge’s class had been doing for the previous century, whether they intended to or not, whether their moral character mirrored or diverged from Scrooge’s, was effectively ensuring that great numbers of human beings, once deemed “surplus,” would no longer be “doomed to an early death.” Hayek elaborates upon the pro-life import of this development:

Numbers which had been practically stationary for many centuries began to increase rapidly. The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have “created” was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided. An historical movement that enhanced human fruitfulness, enabling a heretofore doomed “surplus” of human beings to “grow up,” may be called “Satanic” only in propaganda that trades on the ignorance of its target audience.

In so far as it is true that the growth of capital made the appearance of the proletariat possible, it was in the sense that it raised the productivity of labor so that a much larger number of those who had not been equipped by their parents with tools were enabled to maintain themselves by their labor alone; but the capital had to be supplied first before those were enabled to survive who afterward claimed as a right a share in its ownership.

Although it was certainly not from charitable motives, it still was the first time in history that one group of people found it in their interest to use their earnings on a large scale to provide new instruments of production to be operated by those who, without them could not have produced their own sustenance.[2]

But everyone knows that capitalism is nothing but the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few to the detriment of the many . . . or so goes the Marxist-Distributist fractured fairytale. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Today, Labor Day, September 1, 2025, I’ve added this postscript.

Far from being a tragedy for the poor, the Industrial Revolution was a period of unprecedented opportunity and population growth that only the new market system made possible. Marxist communists and Catholic Distributists to the contrary notwithstanding, industrial factories did not exploit the suddenly “hammerless” rural poor but rather offered a means of survival to those whom the land-based economy of the feudal, pre-industrial past could no longer sustain.

By our standards, life for “proletarians” was difficult—but don’t blame capitalism! The factory system, harsh by today’s standards, provided a means of escape from the hopelessness of serfdom. The pre-industrial era was a stagnant one; the poor who flocked to the towns were already miserable. The industrial system freed those without capital or land to sell their labor for wages (and maybe acquire both capital and land). What’s wrong with that? The new system fulfilled the material conditions of a population boom that would have been impossible under the stasis of the agrarian system. Something for pro-life Distributists to consider, as I, following Hayek, argued in my chapter.

Private property is freedom’s sine qua non, for everyone, not just property owners. In a society sustained by independent property owners, there is no centralized authority exercising total control. And that bothers some people, Catholic sacralists and pagan totalitarians alike.

The “prole” of Distributist-Communist romance was under his landlord’s thumb; under a system of more or less free markets—the more the merrier, of course, and the less hampered those markets, the better—he benefits from having more than one economic prospect in life.

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek contrasted serfdom’s limited freedoms to an unhampered market economy’s greater libertarian potential for the individual. The central economic planning of communist fantasy would require a return to a new kind of serfdom with a single, monopolistic employer—the State—one that wields totalitarian power. That on this score Hayek was a prophet with honor, the history of the late, unlamented 20^th century attests.