Zizek's Lenin

[Brad De Long]

>
>The "cut off heads" remark was something of a joke, though I know 
>that Lenin is very very serious business, almost as serious as the 
>Blessed Virgin Mary. But the point of the joke is that something 
>must be done to get beyond this seemingly permanent horizon of 
>liberal/multicultural/Third Way capitalism. While Marx has been 
>partly rehabilitated in intellectual circles, meaning his critique 
>of capitalism, we don't have any idea of or hope for revolution. 
>Reimagining a Lenin for the year 2000 is a big political task, and 
>I'm not sure that evoking the Lenin of 1917 is the best way to go 
>about it.
>
>Doug

Marx has three critiques of capitalism:

--that capitalism impoverishes and immiserizes the overwhelming 
majority of humanity: "the forest of upraised arms looking for work 
gets thicker and thicker, while the arms get thinner and thinner"...

--that anarchic capitalism is extraordinarily inefficient as a social 
calculating mechanism for planning production and allocating 
consumption relative to conscious democratic planning...

--that capitalism forces most people into jobs that they find 
extraordinarily laborious, boring, and dehumanizing; and that it 
would be easy and straightforward to rearrange work so that it would 
be interesting and stimulating: hunt in the morning, fish in the 
afternoon, criticize after dinner without ever becoming hunter, 
fisherman, or critical critic...

Which of these has been rehabilitated, exactly?

Brad DeLong, at the moment alienated from his species-being not by 
his work but by the massive amounts of antihistamines he needs to 
take to keep his immune system from freaking out at the sudden 
arrival ofhigh spring...