> 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"...
Brad, we differ on the first one. You seem look at averages, which often do show an improvement. While the majority may not be impoverished in the process, great numbers are. However, Marx was not clear as to whether he meant absolute impoverished meant or just relative.
>
>
> --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...
Not only with this entail more interesting work, Marx insisted that modern technology would require a fuller human development if society were to be able to reap the full fruits of its potential.
>
>
> Which of these has been rehabilitated, exactly?
>
The term rehabilitated suggests that Marx's ideas fell into this favor and then were later accepted. A broad acceptance does not seem to have occurred, not even here on LBO.
An objective observer, such as myself -- of course, would have to conclude that Marx was largely correct.
>
> 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...
--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901