Sinclair's Musings

This month we take a bit of a foray into the world of fiction commenting on wage-slavery in the "land of the free" from over a hundred years ago.

It's a handy parable how capitalism swindles profits from wage slaves while wages go up, and we wonder if anything much has changed in a hundred and eleven years since it was written. We hardly think so! Seems nothing is new under the sun when it comes to capitalists duping workers to produce faster while they lose – slaves running to stand still.

"All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centred upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy." The Jungle, 1906. Upton Sinclair.

For socialism,
 Steve, Mehmet and John