Zizek's Lenin

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Mon May 1 22:07:06 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:
>
>
>--
>Lew

*Sigh*

You should then go read _Wage-Labour and Capital_:

"Let us some up: The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract.

"In addition, the working class gains recruits from the higher strata of society also; a mass of petty industrialists and small rentiers are hurled down into its ranks and have nothing better to do than urgently stretch out their arms alongside those of the workers. Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner."

Or you should go read the inaugural address to the First International:

"Everywhere the great mass of the working classes were sinking down to a lower depth, at the same rate at least, that those above them were rising in the social scale. In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those, whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool's paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms. Death of starvation rose almost to the rank of an institution, during this [1848-64] intoxicating epoch of economical progress, in the metropolis of the British Empire."



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