However, this notion of free individuals meeting freely in markets is not only factually incorrect, it misunderstands the market relation. There is a dense and somewhat obscure passage in Marx’s Grundrisse (1973 ed.: 243–245) criticizing the supposed elevation of competitive selfishness into a higher order of the common interest (Smith’s “invisible hand”). Marx thinks instead that the common interest “proceeds as it were behind the back of these self-reflected particular interests, behind the back of one individual’s interest in opposition to that of another.” More than this, the “common interest” decided in this selfish way becomes an alienated social force, controlling individuals rather than being controlled by them, so that they are compelled by ruthless competition to do things they know to be socially and environmentally destructive. Spend money on environmentally safe technologies, and you will be driven from the market by producers who do not do so! The idea that markets “harmonize” social relations, as with relations between employers and employees, is contradicted by centuries of struggle and strikes—this is not a history of harmony, it is a record of violence. (Only a member of the elite, like von Hayek—who never worked in a factory or office and was never subject to the arbitrary whim of a boss to deprive the livelihood of the worker and his or her family—could say that employers have less power than the lowest civil servant.) Perhaps the strongest claim made by neoliberal theory is that the price system synchronizes individual knowledge into a higher competitive economic order, producing development, in effect. But prices act as signals only for a limited part of the content of commodities, labor content, and capital investment. Prices do not represent these very well because markets hide more than they reveal. And prices do not represent social and environmental costs and long-term consequences at all. Market systems are environmentally destructive and socially irresponsible as a result. As to prices as signals, the democratic state can signal a higher order of rationality by deliberately increasing prices by adding sales taxes—for example, cigarettes are highly taxed (and should be taxed more) to signal through the price–tax mechanism that smoking kills people. And people smoke because their “innate rationality” is deluded by advertising. The economic calculation problem may have some relevance in state systems like the former Soviet Union, but social democracies use combinations of markets and planning, with planning employed to achieve socially agreed-upon goals—in this sense planning is democratic, while markets are irrational and dictatorial.