Capitalism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair reveals the vicious and merciless characteristics of the system of Capitalism through Jurgis. At the beginning, he comes to America full of hopes and dreams to improve his life but then he helplessly falters because of the cruelty of Capitalism. The Jungle portrays two oppositional images of America, which is seen by newcomers like Jurgis as a free land of opportunities that would give them fortunes and make their dreams come true, but in reality is a world of slavery under Capitalism.

From 1865 to 1910, the Industrial Age was an interesting time of great economic growth and prosperity for the United States as a whole, however the American citizens who worked to push this positive chain of success paved the way and paid the cost for that very occurrence. In The Jungle, a family from Lithuania travels to the United States in order to gain a better living than what they had in their home country. During their time of adjustment to life within the United States, some members of the Rudkus and Lukoszaite family especially Jurgis Rudkus, experienced extreme hardship while attempting to develop their lives into a better state for the sake of their family’s wellbeing. Upton Sinclair opens a small window into the lives of hopeful and hardworking immigrants to reveal how America’s Industrialization Age hindered many from true freedom. This was due to a lack of care for employees and their wellbeing in the workplace, poor sanitary conditions that led to unhealthy living conditions for workers, and political corruption which was held over certain citizens in order to allow corruption to thrive, making workers remain powerless.

     While the works of Upton Sinclair are not widely read today because of their primacy of social change rather than aesthetic pleasure, works like The Jungle are important to understand in relation to the society that produced them.  Sinclair was considered a part of the muckraking era, an era when social critics observed all that was wrong and corrupt in business and politics and responded against it.  The Jungle was written primarily as a harsh indictment of wage slavery, but its vivid depictions of the deplorable lack of sanitation involved in the meatpacking industry in Chicago resulted in public outrage to the point where Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection

Analysis with textual evidence: Chapters 22-26 of The Jungle unravels the vulnerability of those who have lost everything, as they are easily influenced by the temptations of corruption. Sinclair emphasizes in his novel how even if one has clear morals, it will certainly waver if the individual confronts conditions he/she is not familiar with. This is noticeable through the actions of Jurgis after the death of his child when he transitions from barely surviving to living a life full of crime and wrongdoing all in the city of Chicago. “A month ago Jurgis had all but perished of starvation upon the streets; and now suddenly, as by the gift of a magic key, he had entered into a world where money and all the good things of life came freely” (Sinclair

A muckraker, an investigative journalist that draws attention to problems, is not particularly what I would call myself. However, many people seem to believe in the idea that I, Upton Sinclair, have changed the American food industry for the better by exposing the meatpacking industry. The Jungle, my first successful novel out of many failed ones, used Jurgis Rudkus, an immigrant from Lithuania who got a job in meatpacking, to uncover the unfortunate truth of the industry. It all started when my Socialist contacts told me to go for a journaling job in Chicago to write about meatpacking, out of which I came up with the novel. After being published in 1906 and selling millions of copies worldwide, The Jungle created a public scare that would

Jurgis and his family are thrust into the polluting factories, toiling away for meager wages. Even as all of them work, including the children, it’s barely enough to scrape by to pay for rent and food. “Working harder,” as Jurgis says, only brings them closer to death. As the result of capitalist greed, workers are treated as only a means to an end, making profit while the workers scrounged up cents a day to make ends meet. Immigrants such as Jurgis were a seemingly endless supply, and employers manipulated this to implement cheap wages for long hours. All around Jurgis, his family members waste away; his wife, Ona, dies during childbirth because their family couldn’t afford a doctor inside the attic of a dingy house. One of the children, “wretchedly sick and undersized” [1, Ch. 13, pg. 91] was perpetually sick and dressed in shabby clothes and forced to crawl under heavy machinery. Furthermore, one particular scene describes Ona’s rape; if she didn’t sleep with her boss, Phil Connor, her whole family would be without work. Sinclair portrays capitalism as soulless and lacking any empathy for humanity.  Jurgis keeps “working harder,” [1, Ch. 1, pg. 14] but capitalism forces him to work harder and harder until he cannot work any harder. Jurgis then comes to be educated in socialism, where he is enthralled by the idea. His journey through the jungle has only brought him grief, and in the end he can only rely on himself. The people that have meant most of them have submitted themselves to capitalism or have died at the hands of their work. The economic system has failed him, the judicial system has failed him, and he had nowhere to turn. Socialism was his answer, and so after meeting Hinds, who educated him, his life turned around and gave him a purpose to fight for.

Upton Sinclair was a famous novelist that exposed the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry through his novel, The Jungle. "I aimed at the public's heart," he said in 1906 about The Jungle, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." His involvement with socialism led to a writing assignment about the innocent workers in the meatpacking industry, eventually resulting in the best-selling novel The Jungle. Despite the revolting reality, Sinclair utilized his socialist background and language to express universal truths of the mistreatment of workers and the foul conditions of the meat packing industry.

Christopher Phelps, ed. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 363 pages with related documents.

The main thesis of Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is capitalism. He is attempting to highlight the negative aspects and provide a solution, in this case socialism. He provides a description of the employers up top who take advantage of, and provide poor working conditions for the lower class workers in order to maximize economic gains. Sinclair portrays the ripple effects on the lower class caused by capitalism. He shows how poverty can affect the home life of families, and how it can force people into horrible situations.

Truly understanding the conditions of an immigrant’s life during the Gilded Age is a feat of remarkable magnitude for us who live such amazing lives today, but Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle achieves this astonishing task by describing the tortuous lives of Jurgis and his family as they toil to simply survive the insurmountable debts and problems society has placed upon them. Sinclair enthralls the reader with this story of small joys that are quickly overshadowed by depression, death, and anger. He effectively builds relationships between this small Lithuanian family which seems to be desperately fending off the whole world and the reader who just wants the best for them. The Jungle also details the conflicting opinions between the wealthy and the poor and the growing movement of socialism in America. While I do not agree with his idea of using socialism as a solution for the problems many immigrants have faced, Upton Sinclair has crafted a thrilling tale that successfully expresses the lives of immigrants during the Gilded Age and the amount of dangers they constantly faced.

This was one of the most important quotes from The Jungle, as it explained the capitalist system as a system of oppression. The capitalist system here was describes as a system that not just puts people in bad working conditions and corrupts the government, but a system that puts the working in a form of slavery.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle’s true purpose was to expose the horrible working conditions in the meat-packing industry. He described the diseased, rotten and contaminated meat that had passed inspection due to the negligence of the government inspectors and he described the political corruption that kept this immoral practice in place. Sinclair also picked the title as it is a hint to readers that Capitalism is evil and that it leads to corruption. The place where the story took place served as a jungle where the strong hunts the weak. The book was essentially a socialist book as it had implied many times in the last few chapters that socialism was the only solution possible to protect the working class as Unions at the time, were failing to

Written like fiction, Sinclair's book ostensibly follows the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian who, with several members of his family, come to Chicago on the tail of the American Dream and find themselves working in the nightmare of the Slaughterhouse district. But in effect The Jungle is an epic look at the obscene cost of unfettered capitalism run rampant in the early 20th century. Sinclair's book is a muckraking expose of the institutionalized inequality, corruption, privilege, sickness and slavery needed to

The Novel “The Jungle” represents the capitalism and social Darwinism during the 1900’s. The author tried to persuade the audience that socialism is good, be he didn't achieve that. What actually happened is that it made people question what they were eating from the meal packing plants. The main characters who immigrated to America during the “Gilded Age” and experienced the hardships themselves.

When one thinks of a jungle often there are connotations and denotations of a dense, tropical forest with wet, humid air surrounding the tall trees and wild animals roaming the jungle floor. Tigers prowl through the trees, sloths hang upside down from branches, snakes slither through vines, monkeys swing through the canopy, and parrots and toucans soar over the dense tree tops. Although in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair this isn't the jungle the reader imagines, many of the encounters can be compared to a jungle. By naming his novel The Jungle Sinclair is able to highlight everything he wants to rather than just highlighting socialism, life in packingtown, or capitalist corruption. Also, the characters in the novel each symbolize a different jungle animal in their personalities. Life in packingtown often felt wet, humid, and every resident was on edge as if a tiger was about to pounce upon them. In The Jungle Sinclair unravels the deep mysteries of packingtown as if he is exploring a dense jungle, and shows the things about this unexplainable place of hopeful immigrants.