Factory farming today isn’t the only way in which our current climate resembles the world Sinclair portrays in The Jungle. Today’s monopoly capitalism, dominated by transnational corporations, makes wage-slaves out of a vast population of workers, worldwide. This is complicated by the prevailing rhetoric that continues to convince the majority of Americans of the mythology of the American Dream. Moreover, rhetorics of tolerance and equality—regarding such issues as religion, gender, and race—complicate the discourse so that the actual conditions of labor are obscured.
In The Jungle, Sinclair uses Jurgis and Ona and their extended family as a kind of synecdoche for an entire population of wage-slaves—at the time, the majority of them were immigrants. The entire family, and particularly Jurgis, are necessarily drawn in a sympathetic light in order to elicit public sympathy for their plight. Their faults, then, are perceived as inevitable response to their lives. Jurgis's drinking and violence, for example, can be interpreted as an escapist reaction to Ona's rape by Phil Connor, and especially to Antanas death. Marija's prostitution is perhaps even more forgivable, being as her value as a laborer in the factory couldn't possibly support the family with Jurgis absent. Her drug addiction is a critique of management and its control over labor. Moreover, it symbolizes the bound-ness of Marija's labor as a wage-slave.
Packingtown symbolizes the horrific working conditions; the idea of the jungle represents the sort of social Darwinism inherent in any capitalist system where “the mass of the people were always in a life-and-death struggle with poverty. That was ‘competition,’ so far as it concerned the wage earner, the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top, the exploiters, it appeared very differently, of course—there were few of them, and they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable” (357). The fact that Jurgis is sent to jail for his violence against Phil Connor, and also the system of "mortaging" slumhouses, are both symptomatic of a larger corruption that Sinclair sees in the capitalist economy.
Through the rhetoric of socialism, however, Sinclair means to make it clear that if workers were to combine that they, too, could dominate. As Ostrinski explains the socialist movement to Jurgis, Sinclair distributes socialist propaganda to the reader. This objective provides the exigence for drawing Jurgis and his family is such a pathetic yet sympathetic light. Sinclair's rhetoric suggests that the control of the means of production is undermined when there is no labor to accomplish that production. Were this rhetoric to be successful in communicating to the masses, then they may realize the implicit necessity for a vast underclass to serve as labor in the capitalist system in order to generate the surplus value that enables profit. Were this rhetoric successful, the majority of American wage-slaves who read The Jungle might, as Jurgis does, recognize the value in labor coalition.
However, it seems that the opposite has occurred, as demonstrated by Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 expose Nickel and Dimed, an undercover journalistic exploration of the lives of the American working poor, arguing the idea that it is virtually impossible to survive in America by working for a minimum wage. Socialist rhetoric has been denigrated in the eyes of the typical American citizen—many of whom still live as laborers bound by the shackles of wage-slavery. Labor unions have been systematically stripped of negotiating power while popular opinion has turned against the notion of coalition. And the typical American citizen still lacks “class consciousness”.
Works Cited:
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan, 2001. Print.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Cambridge, Mass.: R. Bentley, 1971. Print.
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