Workers in traditionally low-paying jobs are beginning to organize and fight for better pay and working conditions. One political party, including the current governor of Illinois, seems hell-bent on smashing the power unions have amassed since Sinclair's day.
On the economic front, workers and their unions are still the site of political conflict. Bernie Sanders of Vermont seeks the Democratic nomination for president. "Socialist" is still a dirty word to conservatives, even as Sen. "The Jungle" also should be read to remind us that Americans keep fighting the same political, economic and cultural battles over and over again, and while our factories might be cleaner and our food more pure, things haven't really changed structurally.
Contemporary cultural theorists interested in thinking about representations of the body in literature would do well to read "The Jungle." Sinclair makes his readers look at that beef-boner's hands. He wanted to expose the physical realities and moral evils behind industrial capitalism to inspire his readers to reform the system through political action. Sinclair's purpose was avowedly political: He wasn't trying to write a novel of subtle psychological sophistication. Industrial Chicago was a man-made capitalist version of Dante's Inferno. The novel, even when it leaves Packingtown behind, is unrelentingly grim. Jurgis' wife, Ona, dies in childbirth, and then his son Antanas drowns in a puddle in the street. The immigrants die one after another, from work injuries or worse: one boy passes out in a remote corner of a factory and is eaten by rats. Illegal and unsanitary conditions in the packing plants are detailed, and disaster after disaster ensues. Socialist activist Sinclair used all the skills he had honed in writing popular pot-boiler novels to make Jurgis and his friends and family represent all the bad things that could happen to anyone in the factories, streets and saloons of Chicago. Things go rapidly downhill, as they are brutalized by the work and exploited by the corrupt economic system.
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