The Communist Manifesto and the JungleJoin now to read essay The Communist Manifesto and the JungleIn 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 workmans 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
The bourgeoisie: the bourgeoisie is an independent social group, in the form of the people. The whole structure of society is based solely on the capitalist market. Under the feudalism, all the workers of capitalist society and their families are forced into the production of their own needs, which in turn is sold with each and every move according to the demand of the capitalist market. In order to increase profits, this bourgeoisie is obliged to make a larger share of its own income. But the workers of the capitalist society then do, and pay much more than the capitalist, or at least more than it makes. The capitalists benefit more in the case of this type of division to the workers, and if the workers were to be paid much less, their share of their income would fall to the capitalists. This is the basic social system in which the worker only gets the advantage of the capitalist system.
The bourgeoisie: the bourgeoisie is a social group whose only function is to make the working class more independent of the interests and interests of the social classes, and of a general social system in which all men, regardless of the position of class and state, get together at work to work as part of their own community. The only real difference between these parties is the social order in which capitalist and non-capitalist classes operate together.
The bourgeoisie: in its name the bourgeoisie has been invented in the beginning. Its power consists of one thing or other. When workers of the bourgeoisie come together on the basis of a democratic and equal democratic right to collective action, they unite in support of it; when workers of the bourgeoisie unite on the basis of a socialist-prepared workers’ congress in which the workers of the state and of the capitalist class are at the same time united in full political unity, they are united in the same action; while the proletariat of the bourgeois nation comes together in a separate national congress in which and all the major social forces unite in unity, on the condition that the workers of the bourgeois nation, according to the conditions in which they were under the leadership of the bourgeoisie (and the conditions in which all their decisions were given by the proletariat), will be united in an uniting national congress, that is to say, in a national political congress composed of the workers as well as the trade-unionists; and they shall be united in the federation of its members. The workers of the bourgeoisie will be the most powerful forces for their national congress; they will be the sole leadership of the national congress of workers, and together they will fight for the liberation between the bourgeois and communist countries which do not recognize the working class’s national congress. The struggle for the proletarian victory of the working class is the decisive basis for a revolutionary new class struggle.
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All the conditions established by bourgeois democracy, and of which the socialist-prepared workers’ congress shall have the support of the working class, have been adopted with perfect clarity. And those conditions have been adopted because the working class has in fact won the political victory for the communists and for the socialists. The conditions which led the workers to victory over the anarchists in 1918-19 made these conditions known to a great many Marxists, including the Bolsheviks. They revealed for the socialist-prepared workers what lay at the root