I have been writing about the experience of a particular group of people: those of us in our thirties who grew up in professional, middle-class households in the UK. This is one route in to the ground I want to explore with this blog - and it's sparked some thoughtful, personal responses - but it does risk becoming parochial. So let's zoom out.

The revolution that didn't happen

In the first volume of Capital, Marx sets out his "immiseration thesis". Within the capitalist system, he argues, improvements in productivity are put into practice at the cost of the individual worker. As a result:

they mutilate the worker into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process… they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. (Vol.1 Ch.25)

Marx was convinced that the progressive degradation of the proletariat was built into the very nature of capitalism. (Read the accounts of the new horrors of England's industrial cities from which he quotes and you can see why.) This deepening misery would put ever greater strain on the relations between workers and the system, until things reached a revolutionary breaking point.

Only that wasn't quite how things worked out.

One of the difficulties for 20th century Marxism was the failure of capitalism to make people as miserable as it should have done. Instead - under pressure from trades unions and, subsequently, the state - it turned out to be capable of providing workers with shorter hours, longer holidays and better pay.

Add to this increasing access to consumer goods and home ownership, and we found ourselves in a world where politicians from John Major to John Prescott could claim that, in the words of McCarthy (the band, not the senator), "we are all bourgeois now."

Except that something funny happened on the way to the suburbs…

The endlessness of history

Just when Thatcher, Reagan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of globalisation and New Labour appeared to mark the triumph of consumer capitalism, the fabric of middle class existence began to unravel.

The causes of this unravelling, I want to leave for another day. For now, let's stick to the effects - and to the question of whether they add up to something we might (with a certain sense of humour) call the "immiseration of the bourgeoisie"?

Recent posts have focused on property, because that's one place where I see this coming home to people I know. But the inflation (sorry, growth!) of house prices is just one of a series of factors, each with its own stories, coming together in different combinations according to your age or the country in which you live. My argument - the basic argument of this blog, really - is that these effects, taken together, form a pattern which we cannot, as societies, continue to ignore for much longer.

Here is a back-of-an-envelope list of the factors I have in mind:

• the failure of real incomes to keep pace with the costs of living; 
• a rise in the ratio of average house price to average income; 
• rises in the price of health care (US) and higher education (US, UK and elsewhere);  

• an increase in average working hours and in the out-of-hours commitment expected by employers; 
• an increase in the amount of "emotional labour" demanded by employers; 
• a decrease in job security; 
• the erosion of professional autonomy (and morale) as new managerial cultures transform the professions; 

• a pensions crisis affecting both state and private provision;
• record levels of personal debt.

I'm interested in whether we can get to a better list than this - are there factors that don't belong there? Or that I've missed out?

Certainly, such a list does no justice to the complexity of each item, the particular relationships between them or the cultural forces driving them. Taken together, though, I think they amount to something not unlike immiseration - a general worsening of the conditions of middle class life.

This degradation has come on gradually, been accelerated for many by the current economic crisis, and will come sharply into focus over the next few years if the global economy does not return to business as usual.

Getting real

One more point for now. In describing the ways in which life has been getting harder for the middle classes, I am not making an appeal for sympathy.

My friend and co-conspirator Vinay Gupta puts this pretty firmly in his latest post:

The inability to buy our way to the lifestyles we have always thought we would have one day is one of the critical features of our time. But we should not be confused about the position we are in – as some of the most protected and privileged people in the world, the hardships we can rationally expect to face in upcoming years as our economies shrink and some of our nations run into severe political problems are as nothing compared to the living conditions which people all over the world call “normal”.

So why talk about the "immiseration of the bourgeoisie", when other people's normal makes a mockery of our supposed hardships?

My answer is, because we seem to be pretending it isn't happening - and because I want to understand what happens if we stop pretending. How could we start dealing practically with its implications? And what possibilities might we discover, which remain hidden for as long as we continue trying to make things work the way they used to?