Zizek's Lenin

[Brad De Long]

>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

I'm not saying that people's jobs are bowls of cherries: they are 
not, and (in my view) the research university professoriate is 
incredibly lucky--we've managed to expropriate control over the 
not-for-profit organizations we "work for" and use it to rearrange 
our jobs to suit ourselves.

The weak points I see are "relative to conscious democratic 
planning..." and "easy and straightforward to rearrange work..."