I’ve noticed his name dropped in some threads around here, usually the “libertarian / anarchist reading list” ones. Block gave a pretty critical review here, which seemed pretty spot on based on the bits of his book that I read.
Anyway, if anyone else here has read his Mutualist Political Economics, do you have any coherent ideas on his subjective labor theory of value? I understand the LTV and the STV but I have no clue what Carson is proposing with this SLTV.
For Better Hallway Vision: it’s Kevin Carson.
Note: Cleaned up OP’s spelling mistake to prevent redundant tangent popping up.
Carson has an appeal for ascribing to what he (I forget where & when he more or less said this, will look for a quote later…) describes as the original anachism, mutualism, & he is noteworthy for taking the criticisms of the old Marxian STV via the Marginalists & Austrian School, & updating the STV accordingly, as well as taking a different property stance (which some are debating as to whether or not it is superior to the usual libertarian / market-anarchist / anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist private property stances).
You can find better explanations starting from the following links:
1.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
yikes, thanks for fixing my gross naming error.
No worries, just wanted to avoid a possible modding nightmare of Bel Air posts. It’s the small things in life.
“Mutualism is based on a labor theory of value which holds that when labor or its product is sold, in exchange, it ought to receive goods or services embodying the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility”.
So if I feel a banana is of greater utility than an orange, and my neighbor feels it is the orange that has greater utility, do we have to find a third person who deems them of “equal utility” in order to trade them? Who will punish us if we just go ahead and trade them, doing something we “ought” not to?
“Integral to the scheme was the establishment of a mutual-credit bank which would lend to producers at a minimal interest rate only high enough to cover the costs of administration”
i.e. a non-profit organization encouraging malinvestment. People are free to throw their money away now, why wait for “mutualism” to take root?
“Mutualists oppose the idea of individuals receiving an income through loans, investments, and rent, as they believe these individuals are not laboring”
Yeah, an entrepeneur who invests in new manufacturing equipment isn’t laboring. What a passive and lazy individual. He ought to starve.
No offense, but let’s try living in reality, not dream-land.
No offense, but this thread isn’t about refuting Carson, it’s about what his appeal may be. Please start a new thread if you wish to refute him and/or mutualism, or continue posting on-topic here.
Kevin Carson essentially argues that capitalism as it actually functions is a manifestation of statism. His beliefs can best be summed up as free market anti-capitalism.
He argues that in a genuine stateless society the means of production would be owned by labour, either individually or communally. He maintains with a great deal of evidence that the means of production has essentially been expropriated by the capitalists through historical theft and privilege carried out by the state.
Since the capitalist class owns the means of production they can use their monopolistic bargaining position to essentially extract tribute from Labour, which requires access to the means of production to actually engage in production. So Kevin Carson upholds the idea that the workers are indeed exploited by capitalists and wage slavery is very real.
He also argues that the modern corporation is grotesquely inefficient, not to mention oppressive and alienating for the labouring wage-slaves and could only exist due to the subsidy of history and the continuing system of state privileges afforded to it.
For example in the discussion of the Oil spillage effecting the Gulf of Mexico, he will point to the fact that BP’s liability is capped to approx £75 million, whereas in a free market the corporation would be bankrupted by all the torts from all the parties economically affected by the spillage.
Unlike most other market anarchists and political economists, he doesn’t rely one bit on sex appeal.
I haven’t seen a single picture of the guy.
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/carson-kevin-2005
I think this is him.
I think Carson appeals to what I know think of as “social justice” libertarians/anarchists. Folks who are less interested in economics and more interested in class struggles.