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Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

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In Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, he accounts the vile methods of food preparation and the hazardous working conditions for immigrant workers. Sinclair argues how the growth of industrialized food production, in Chicago’s Packingtown, results in competition for jobs. Survival now solely depends on physical strength. Sinclair offers socialistic solutions to these problems such as advocating workers’ rights and benefits. This refuted the Capitalists anything goes for money and no public obligation for workers’ ideas. Sinclair reveals that industrialism’s influence on society is highly contradictory because industrialism simultaneously emphasizes and weakens the difference between humans and animals. It would seem maybe that it would be …show more content…

Ona becomes pregnant and is still forced to work and given an extremely short time off to have the baby. After Ona returns to work, Jargis finds out she is being forced to have sex with one of her bosses. Jargis becomes furious and beats the man and when the other workers “tore him away he was dripping with blood, and little ribbons of skin were hanging from his mouth” (Sinclair 110). Jargis is then thrown in jail and the family drops even further into debt. After Jargis is released from jail his wife, Ona, dies in childbirth. Jargis, unable to cope with this, starts drinking. Teta Elzbieta, Ona’s stepmother, has to ration his money so the family can live. Jargis loses a number of jobs and runs into another misfortune when he comes home from his job at the steel mill to find that his youngest son drowned in a flooded street in …show more content…

Also, the politicians would have had to been on board with these things instead of everyone trying to make themselves rich. When society works together as a whole, everyone benefits. It is easy to see why people would want to run to the Socialist Party after living and working in the conditions that they did. They would provide citizens with significant social benefits, including guaranteed employment or unemployment insurance and free or heavily subsidized health care, child care, and education. However, it would make people dependent on the state for things that could easily be obtained for themselves and people would be regulated to what kinds of goods and services are produced, how much they cost, the wages or salaries paid to people in different professions, and how much wealth a single individual may accumulate. This sounds like a great idea but the end result would be worse. There would be a mass amount of people dependent on the state when they are perfectly capable of doing all of these things for themselves. The state would have total control over every aspect of people’s lives, an extremely scary

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