Caricatures and easy dismissals of labor cost theories are belied by their complex histories and by the argument they actually beget. The misunderstanding held by many contemporary readers of the individualist anarchists inheres in the suggestion that they actually controverted the subjective, marginal utility argument about economic value; they of course did not. In his novel, The Anarchists, the German anarchist John Henry Mackay illustrates the broader individualist anarchist acceptance of subjectivity: But what, according to your opinion, is to determine the value of labor? Its utility in free competition, which will determine its value of itself. All fixing of value by authority is unjust and nonsensical.10 Elsewhere, Mackay writes similarly, “In itself nothing has value.” The individualists understood marginal utility and what Murray Rothbard much later tagged a “double inequality of values” quite well, appreciating its truth and conceptual value as far as it goes. Even Josiah Warren acknowledged the real importance of subjective valuation in all exchange. But the individualist anarchists challenged those economists who engaged marginal utility as a pretext for all manner of economic injustice, to explain away the deprivation of the laboring masses using the language of voluntary exchange.- David S. DAmato, On Libertarian Socialism
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 20:55:38 +0000
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