Communism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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Communism The establishment of societal structure can be viewed as the pinnacle of human accomplishment. All other advancements have arisen from the distribution and subsequent implementation of ideas that thrive in orderly communities. This inherently leads to the dilemma of selecting how society should be ordered. During the last century, no political theory has had more impact and spread as quickly as that of communism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx, and Engels introduce the concept of forced bourgeois oppression through capitalism by degrading the traditional family and creating wage slaves, which holds its relevance through later texts like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. In the eyes of Marx and Engels, the traditional family has been …show more content…
The worker “… becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of them” (14). The worker is compared to a cog in a machine, which once worn out, it can simply be replaced. This shows the dehumanizing nature of industrialization. Marx and Engles argue that these people, these disposable components in the eyes of the capitalists, are turned into wage slaves so that they can be kept at the brim of survival. They attribute the issue to the low minimum wage which traps the working class and makes them dependent on unsecure employment at the hands of the puppeteering bourgeois. This exploited working class, in turn, creates capital and wealth which does not find its way back to the worker. Marx and Engles propose a question: “…does wage-labour create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation” (22). The systematic repetition of oppression that’s created by capitalism is suggested by both men. They see capital as useless to the working class because, through the low
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