In many ways, I became an academic in the first place because I love to read. Ironically, now that I have retired, I finally have time to read books for pleasure again. Even more ironically, the book that I am currently reading purely for pleasure (and enjoying enormously) is Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenny and Karl Marx, Love and Capital. I am currently up to the momentous year of 1848 and Gabriel's discussions of the horrors of unfettered capitalism, wealth inequality, and the economic transformations of industrialization are riveting. And enraging. That a society would be OK with people having to live like this!

Mudlarks, for example, were people (often children) who were pushed by poverty into trying to scrape the most meagre living by scouring the mud on the banks of the River Thames in London for whatever they could scavenge that they might be able to sell. There among the garbage, raw sewage, and corpses of dead dogs and cats (and sometimes humans), they might find a few pennies worth of something to sell and eke out another day of existence. 

Mind you, this was happening in sight of the towers and palaces of the rulers of an empire, of Queen Victoria herself. Those rulers had every reason to fear that Marx was right and that these oppressed and starving people would one day rise up in revolution. Justice would have demanded it.

I met a mudlark at our storage unit a couple of days ago. She cleans out houses that have been foreclosed and apartments where people have been evicted. Quite a lot of stuff is usually left behind and she scavenges what she can and stores it in her unit, hoping to be able to sell it somewhere. 

We talked about the recent spate of robberies at the facility. Someone has been cutting through the locking hardware on the individual units with bolt cutters and making off with the stuff inside.

"But who would want all this junk?" I said, looking at our stacks of used math books and boxes of baby pictures.

"Oh," she said, "People will take anything they can get these days."

Alas, in this version of 1848, we seem more likely to end up with fascism than any utopia.

Writing aobut the events of 1848, Marx said that everything in history happens twice -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Perhaps if we are lucky.