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is completely metaphysical and unreal in nature from which they can derive a manner in which they should act and behave.

Unlike the religious and metaphysical of yesteryear, the marginalists have found a new series of tricks to hide the fact that they’r

essentially priests who are imparting to people the “correct” way of thinking and acting. They have done this because, in part tha

to Nietzsche, the mist of blind religious devotion no longer weighs so heavily on contemporary society and so the marginalists h

turned that more modern subject of objectivity and devotion: mathematics. The marginalists have derived some of these mathem

from engineering (for example, the Lagrange multiplier), some from contemporary game theory and some they have simply inv

themselves. However, the goal is always the same; namely, to trick the student into thinking they are learning something objectiv

when really they are being taught how to organise their minds in a very particular way.

I shall not here get into too many concrete examples having provided them elsewhere before, but take the standard marginalis

exercise in “showing” that a perfectly competitive firm in a perfectly competitive market will always equate marginal revenue wmarginal cost. The student is taught to work through this problem mathematically (using the engineering math discussed earlier)

order to “prove” the truth of the proposition. Of course, the proposition itself is false because no firms operate like this in the rea

world, as numerous empirical studies have hinted at, but which good theory and careful observation should tell us anyway.

So, what is the point of the exercise? Simple, it gives the student a moral story which doubles as a call to action. On the one hand

tells the student the morally purifying tale that they should make optimal use of scarce resources – this is based on the fantasy of

“utility” which we shall deal with below (and which ties this to Robin’s concerns and the Austrians). On the other hand, it hints

the fact that the world actually works this way and so begins to structure their reality. That is, it avoids the fact that the way in w

firms actually operate in a capitalist economy involves distributive issues that are inherently political and open-ended (widening

income disparities anyone?). The marginal cost-marginal revenue theory (i.e. the marginalist theory) puts income distribution

and pricing down to some perfectly optimal allocation of scarce resources that is objectively determined by The Market. The re

is quite different. Income distribution and pricing, as any non-economist will know, are inherently political and institutional issu

It is then strongly hinted at that this is how capitalist economies actually function – which is a complete lie. And they are then gi

them the invitation to join this imaginary world – as one more cog in the Great Machine of Efficient and Fair Allocation. These

the people that then give us our moral guidance in the contemporary world. They are the ones that call for free-trade, balanced 

government budgets and privatisation. They are the ones that advised countries like Russia and Argentina in 1990s and collapsed

them. All of this undertaken is a sort of purple haze of mathematics and nonsense. The metaphysics bleeds into reality through th

halls of power but, as can be seen again and again, reality rejects the metaphysics and the economy crashes.

The Marginalist Theory of Objectively Measurable Value

Back to the Austrians; the villains in Robin’s story (although the reader should realise by now that he has his gun pointed firmly

the wrong direction). The Austrians avoid the fog of scientism and instead, as Robin correctly notes, build a straightforward 

metaphysical framework which devotes quite literally kneel before. In doing so they lay out marginalism in its most nakedly

metaphysical form. This brings us back to the roots of marginalism and how it relates to Nietzsche. By looking at this we cut rig

the heart of the mathematical marginalist theories outlined above and, at the very time, of the Austrian metaphysical system – fothey are one and the same.

Marginalism purports to be a subjectivist theory of value. It appears, at face value, to hold that people have the freedom to choo

But it does not. This is all a well-disguised lie. In fact marginalism is a strongly objectivist system and it is for this reason that

scoundrels and fools can build metaphysical systems out of it – whether clouded by mathematics or blind ideological devotion. A

have highlighted before on this site , marginalism conceives of people as fixed bundles of preferences. That means “fixed bundle

in peoples’ preferences are assumed to be fixed. The neoclassical economist Paul Samuelson expresses this quite clearly in wha

 probably the most famous and widely read textbook on economics ever written:

What is assumed [in marginalist consumer theory] is that consumers are fairly consistent in their tastes and actions – that they do

flail around in unpredictable ways, making themselves miserable by persistent errors of judgement or arithmetic.

Marginalist analysis cannot exist outside of this static universe. The moment we conceive that human desire is somehow in a sta

flux and change the entire marginalist doctrine breaks down completely and we enter a world that slips through the fingers of theneoclassicals and the Austrians. It is this stasis of human desire that gives the marginalist doctrine it’s strongly objectivist flavou

is this that allows marginalists, Austrian or otherwise, to compare a basket of goods and give these weights – whether relative or

numerical – which they then assume consumers will follow in an act of a sort of consumption-calculus.

Life, desire, action and everything else is reduced to a calculation that flashes through the person’s mind in line with their 

supposedly static preferences. Hello “rational agent” and all that garbage! The moment the marginalists have to face the fact that

 people may not attribute value to goods and services in such a straightforward and static manner is the same moment that the wh

edifice collapses in upon itself. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern neoclassical and Austrian economics collapses and it becom

the meaningless verbiage I have no doubt it will be seen to be by future historians of thought.

At a deeper level the marginalist analysis assumes this stasis of fixity of preferences because it seeks, like the morality masking

 pseudo-science that it is, to view people as objects. It does not truly recognise subjectivity at all. Subjectivity is complex and 

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ephemeral. The reasons why people make the choices the make – whether in love, in life or between Coke and Pepsi – is infinite

complex and very likely unanswerable. Marginalism cannot deal with this because, being a metaphysical doctrine that seeks to h

down structures of behaviour and belief to its followers, this means they can no longer exercise control over people. Because do

doubt it: any doctrine that treats people like objects is designed to control them and any doctrine that tries to objectively determi

“laws” of human behaviour contains within it the worst seeds of tyranny; despite outward protestations to the contrary.

 Nietzsche’s subjectivist theories of values and morals are completely different. Indeed, they are quite the opposite. Nietzsche’s

theories, as those philosophers that developed them recognised well, were all about flux and change – the movement of people, th

wills and their desires through time. These theories were about the mysterious forces that lay inside each individual, forces whic

they themselves do not properly understand, that push them to and fro, dictating their whims and desires. These forces, for 

 Nietzsche, were above and beyond anything that could be objectively conceived in any rationalistic manner. Because these very

forces determined our very ability to reason and hence our very impulse to try to determine things objectively, they could not be

conceived of through the frame of objective knowledge. Such would be like an eye trying to look in upon itself.

In equating Nietzsche’s truly subjectivist thoughts on human values and morals with fashionable marginalist claptrap Robin has

only done the great philosopher a disservice, he has also unknowingly provided cover for the marginalists. In touting their silly

metaphysics as being subjectivist he has given them just the cover they need to carry out their designs which seek to view people

objects and control them.

With that I leave the reader with an extended quote from the great economist Joan Robinson from her recently reissued 

 book  Economic Philosophy. I encourage any philosopher who wants to begin to engage with marginalist economics – Austrian

neoclassical – to read; for this is the metaphysics of our day; this is the language of power as it operates in the world today. To

understand it is, quite literally, to understand the Zeitgeist.

Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to

them, and the fact that individuals want to buy them shows that they have utility… The whole point of utility was to justify lais

 faire. Everyone must be free to spend his income as he likes, and he will gain the greatest benefit when he equalizes the margin

utility of a shilling spent on each kind of good. The pursuit of profit, under conditions of perfect competition, leads producers to

equate marginal costs to prices, and the maximum possible satisfaction is drawn from available resources… This is an ideology

end ideologies, for it has abolished the moral problem. It is only necessary for each individual to act egoistically for the good of

to be attained.

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