The amazing Barbara Ehrenreich makes a connection, just after the crash of 2008, the 160th anniversary of the publication of the pamphlet that ignited the world:
The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. 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.
You can read the whole blog entry here. It’s an older post, but well worth the read . . . as is everything Ehrenreich’s ever written.