Started reading today. Penguin are selling copies for 80p as part of their little black classics series. Penguin did sell a similar range of books with rather fancier covers, but they cost £5 a pop, which was quite costly for such thin books for which the material is out of copyright.
The first chapter was remarkable. It reminded me slightly of the secret book that Winston Smith received from O'Brien in 1984. For the first ten pages, if you just swapped neo-liberal for bourgoisie, it all still seemed remarkably applicable to the present day, e.g. venture capitalism always looking for the next disruptive technology, globalization, ever-increasing productivity, erosion of national and regional identities, MacDonalds on every high street.
The second half of that chapter seemed a little out of date. Partly this was because the trade unions have been busted in this country. Up to the 1970s they were very powerful, but Margaret Thatcher gutted them. But also, I don't think the living conditions for present day British proles are anywhere as bad as they were back in the C19th. When I read of the conditions of the working classes in books by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing and Robert Tressell, they seem very much worse than that section of society today has to face. Few people have to pawn their clothes or go without food. I expect partly that is because of globalization. Not so much of that de-skilled, production line work still exists here; it was mostly undercut by industries in foreign countries, such as China. I expect it's the workers in those countries that are more comparable to the proletariat described by Marx and Engels.