The Communist Manifesto and the Jungle

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair uses a true to life story to demonstrate the working man’s life during industrialization. Marx depicts in the Communist Manifesto an explanation of why the proletariat is worked so hard for the benefit of the bourgeois, and how they will inevitably rise up from it and move to a life of communism. When The Jungle and the Communist Manifesto were written, the proletariat, or working class, was a commodity of commerce. Like their brothers, they subjected to competition and all of the quick and sudden changes of the market.

Before the industrialization movement began, there was more of a blend between the classes, and now there is a distinct separation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Because of the industrialization of the countries, the replacement of manual labor with the use of machinery and the division of labor, the work of the proletarian has become homogeneous. It does not contain the individuality or charm of the laborer as handmade goods do. The worker instead becomes part of the machine and is reduced to performing menial, repetitive tasks. Thus, the workman's pay rate reflects his work, and is reduced to minimum amount needed to barely sustain them. Therefore, as the skill needed to perform the job reduced, so does the amount of the wages. Also, as industrialization increases, so does drudge and toil. The worker become, in the eyes of the bourgeois in control, a part of the machine and as expendable and as easily replaced as any part of the machine. This is in the forms of prolonged work hours, amount of work done in a certain time, or by the increase of the speed of the machinery, which wears down and drains the workers.

Modern industry has replaced the privately owned workshop with the corporate factory. Laborers file into factories like soldiers. Throughout the day they are under the strict supervision of a hierarchy of seemingly militant command. Not only are their actions controlled by the government, they are controlled by the machines they are operating or working with, the bourgeois supervisors, and the bourgeois manufacturer. The more open the bourgeois are in professing gain as their ultimate goal, the more it condemns the proletariat.

In other words, the more industry becomes industrialized or developed, or the less physical or mental skills a laborer needs to complete their task, the easier it is for women and to move up into equal or higher positions than that of men. The children are also worked just the same as any man. There is now no social distinction between sexes and ages in the society of the proletariat. Each individual is part of the labor force, only differentiated by pay rate.

Even after the laborer is free from exploitation in the workplace, and is given their pay, the other portion of the bourgeois takes its place. The landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, and others of the like, all of them try to take advantage of the workers by raising the price of the basic necessities. Jurgis and his family are an example of victims of this corruption; when they buy their house, they get sick, loose the house, Ona and her boss. In The Jungle everyone with any power over another man is sure to take full advantage of that for his own benefit. But over time, the lower middle class; the trades people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen, the crafters and farmers, all slowly dissolve into the proletariat, because they are not making enough money from their trade to survive on their own, and others because the need for