Zizek's Lenin

[Brad De Long]

>
>It should be added that the "immiseration thesis" is really a legacy of the
>Cold War. It was a distortion of Marx used by the Communist parties to
>"prove" that workers in the West generally would suffer dire poverty if they
>did not emulate the state capitalist dictatorships. While the latter have
>been consigned to the dustbin of history, I think Marx's legacy deserves a
>more honest re-consideration.
>

I remember reading a passage by Lev Davidovitch Bronstein--the 
introduction to _The Living Thought of Karl Marx_ if I recall 
correctly--in which he wrote that Marx's theory was one of relative 
immiserization during booms and absolute immiserization during 
depressions, all adding up to absolute immiserization in the long 
run. Bronstein was not around during the Cold War, due to a certain 
incident with a pickaxe.

The "immiserization thesis" predates the Cold War by a hundred years. 
Why do you falsely claim that it is a legacy of the Cold War?


>  > >  > While the absolute immiseration thesis has turned out largely wrong -
>>  >
>>  >I'm not aware of Marx putting forward an "immiseration" thesis
>
>>  *Sigh*
>>
>>  You should then go read _Wage-Labour and Capital_:
>
>It is true that in WL&C and the Communist Manifesto Marx said that wages
>tended to the level of bare physical minimum...
>
>--Lew

Ah. So you were aware that Marx put forward an "immiserization" 
thesis. Why did you falsely say that you were not?

That's two strikes...

Brad DeLong