Trying to watch TPM videos on my Firefox browser, for some reason unbeknownst to me, became impossible in the last few days, so I downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser, installed it, and launched it. It opened with a bunch of tabs I'd been browsing in months ago, when I was trying out Opera. One of those tabs was a web site I'd forgotten about. It was Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.  

Of the many people who blog, and who I'd always read faithfully, was this woman, someone I began to appreciate after I'd read Nickle & Dimed (to death). She is not Molly Ivins, but like Molly, she writes with a kind of furious, funny outrage about the world in which we live. She reminds one of, in her own daring way, of what we've put up with, become, despaired of changing. In a blog about the 160th birthday of the Communist Manifesto (you forgot, did you? To put this on your calendar?) she writes:

"All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

"Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom."

Immiseration is not going to become part of anyone's every day vocabulary, but it is good to be reminded that there is a word that encompasses a lot of what is wrong in this nation today, where getting sick is not just an uncomfortable bodily state of affairs but also a gateway to poverty and that homeless hell we have all been taught to fear more than life itself (every think about how the homeless do it? Get up and put one foot in front of another every single day instead of simply jumping off a local bridge and letting their bodies float home to mother ocean?).

Barbara thinks about those things, and I'm happy to know she is still out there and still finding amusing and interesting ways to write about them.