Zizek's Lenin

Lewis Higgins lew at higgins.org.uk
Mon May 1 13:15:31 PDT 2000



> While the absolute immiseration thesis has turned out largely wrong -

I'm not aware of Marx putting forward an "immiseration" thesis (i.e. that working class living standards decline absolutely). Marx did refer to the "misery" of the surplus population within the unemployed:

The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.

(Capital: Volume One, Chapter XXV, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation}

-- Lew



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