>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?
While the absolute immiseration thesis has turned out largely wrong - though the course of Africa over the last 20 years is an important and disgraceful exception - relative immiseration, a/k/a polarization - certainly hasn't: the gap between rich and poor globally and within individual countries (including our own glorious land) has never been so wide. Nor has the gap between possibility and actuality ever been so wide: there's no reason anyone, anywhere should go hungry or die of diarrhea or go blind from vitamin A deficiency, but it happens in vast numbers every day.
And as for work, there's plenty of godawful jobs in the world. Even "successful" people are often massively bored, stressed, and/or alienated. Maybe not professors of economics at prestigious universities, but try working as a chicken puller or in a municipal recycling facility.
Doug