the Jungle

[Pravda Soyuz]

In english class we are reading The Jungle. My english teacher is constantly reminding us that it is all propaganda and has turned the whole thing into a right-wing bash-the-commies-fest! He talks about how laissez-faire capitalism is really not that bad, and socialism is a totalitarian doctrine that is almost identical to fascism. I don't like what he is doing at all. Any thoughts from insightful comrades?

[Razzle Dazzle]

You're english teacher is a dumbass. Have him investigate why that book was written and then ask him if he thinks the pure food and drug act or FDA are bad ideas. Ask him if corporations have a good track record of doing whats best for consumers.

[Princess Luna]

point out how accusations the book makes were were almost all confirmed to be true through investigations ordered by Theodore Roosevelt who was a die-hard capitalist.

[Rakhmetov]

In english class we are reading The Jungle. My english teacher is constantly reminding us that it is all propaganda and has turned the whole thing into a right-wing bash-the-commies-fest! He talks about how laissez-faire capitalism is really not that bad, and socialism is a totalitarian doctrine that is almost identical to fascism. I don't like what he is doing at all. Any thoughts from insightful comrades?


Here's what free market capitalism entails:


http://www.workers.org/ww/fruit.html

What would Einstein do?

http://huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm

Excerpt From Dr. Michael Parenti's Democracy for The Few 7th Edition

Hard work seldom makes anyone rich. The secret to wealth is to have others work hard for you. This explains why workers who spend their lives toiling in factories or offices retire with little or no wealth to speak of, while the stockholding owners of these businesses, who do not work in them and usually have never visited them, can amass considerable fortunes.

Workers endure an exploitation of their labor as certainly as do slaves and serfs. The slave or serf obviously toils for the enrichment of the master and receives only a bare subsistence. (James Madison [father of the U.S. constitution and 4th President] told a visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he made $257 a year on every slave he owned and spent only $12 or $13 for the slave's keep.) Sharecroppers who must give a third or half their crop to the landowner are obviously exploited. Under capitalism, however, the portion taken from the worker is not visible. Workers are simply paid substantially less than the value they create. Indeed, the only reason they are hired is to make money from their labor. If wages did represent the total value created by labor (after expenses and improvements), there would be no surplus value, no profits for the owner, no great fortunes for those who do not labor.

The greatest source of individual wealth is inheritance. If you are not rich, it is probably because you lacked the foresight to pick the right parents at birth. Studies show that rags-to-riches is a rare exception. Most people die in the class to which they were born. A large
majority of the self-made Forbes 400 superrich inherited fortunes or received crucial start-up capital from a family member.

While corporations are often called "producers," the truth is they produce nothing. They are organizational devices for the exploitation of labor and accumulation of capital. The real producers are those who apply their brawn, brains, and talents to the creation of goods and services. The primacy of labor was noted 140 years ago by President Lincoln in a message to congress: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could not have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration." Lincoln's words went unheeded. The dominance of the moneyed class over labor remains the essence of the U.S. sconomic system.

Workers' wages represent only a portion of the wealth created by their labor. The unpaid portion is pocketed by the owners. Today, a private-sector employee is likely to work two hours for herself or himself (the value created and paid back in wages) and six or more hours for the boss (the value realized and pocketed by owners after expenses). The latter portion is what Marx described as "surplus value," the source of the owner's wealth. Capitalists themselves have a similar concept: "value added in manufacture." For example, in 1995, management estimated that the average General Motors autoworker added $150,000 to the value of products for which he or she was paid $38,000, or one-fourth of the value created. Workers employed by Intel and Exxon received only about one-ninth of the value they created, and in industries such as tobacco and pharmaceuticals, the worker's share was a mere one-twentieth of the value added. Between 1954 and 1994, the overall average rate of value added (the portion going to the owner) in the United States increased from 162 percent to 425 percent, far above the exploitation rate in other Western industrialized countries.

Dr. Michael Parenti Democracy For The Few 7th Edition

_________________
Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

Laws and governments may be considered in this and indeed in every case, as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods, which would otherwise be soon destroyed by attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence. --- Adam Smith, Lectures in Jurisprudence

Excerpt of D. F. Fleming's book


The Rule of Fear and Hindsight in World Politics


The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1950), pp. 528-537

Of course it is not possible for the people of an unbombed, uninvaded nation really to understand what happened to the Russians. The Nazis and their allies occupied Soviet territory in which 88,000,000 people had lived. They destroyed, completely or partially, fifteen large cities, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages. They burned or demolished 6,000,000 buildings and deprived 25,000,000 people of shelter.

They demolished 31,850 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometers of railway track and 4,100 railway stations; 36,000 postal, telegraph and telephone offices; 56,000 miles of main highway, 90,000 bridges and 10,000 power stations. The Germans ruined 1,135 coal mines and 3,000 oil wells, carrying off to Germany 14,000 steam boilers, 1,400 turbines and 11,300 electric generators.

Any reflection on these figures by American city dwellers will undermine the idea that Russia can have no motive in the world except aggression. Farm people, too, will see another possibility when they think of the meaning of 98,000 collective farms and 2,890 machine and tractor stations sacked and the following numbers of livestock slaughtered by the Germans or carried away by them: 7,000,000 horses, 17,000,000 cattle, 20,000,000 hogs, 27,000,000 sheep and goats, 110,000,000 poultry. What would the American countryside be like if this kind of scourge had passed over it? And what feelings would be left behind?

The Germans and their satellites were no more tender with Soviet cultural institutions. They looted and destroyed 40,000 hospitals and medical centers, 84,000 schools and colleges, and 43,000 public libraries with 110,000,000 volumes. Some 44,000 theaters were destroyed, and 427 museums. Even the churches did not escape, more than 2,800 being wrecked.

In this country these figures do not burn holes in the page, but in Russia what they represent has been burned so deeply into the minds of the people that generations of safe living would be required even partially to eradicate them. There are between Nashville and Atlanta some people who still feel deeply about what General Sherman did on his march to the sea nearly a hundred years ago. What would our feelings be if the United States had been ravaged, as Russia was, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, with 15,000,000 people killed, twice as many made homeless, and 60,000,000 treated to every degrading and brutalizing experience that the fascist mind could invent? Only then could we really know how the Russians feel about their security from future attack through East Europe

[MellowViper]

In english class we are reading The Jungle. My english teacher is constantly reminding us that it is all propaganda and has turned the whole thing into a right-wing bash-the-commies-fest! He talks about how laissez-faire capitalism is really not that bad, and socialism is a totalitarian doctrine that is almost identical to fascism. I don't like what he is doing at all. Any thoughts from insightful comrades?

Your English teacher can go fuck himself with a coppy of Atlas Shrugged, especially when you consider that the harsh working conditions depicted in The Jungle wasn't bullshit. It was really that bad. I suppose he thinks the triangle shirt waste factory fire, the 12 hour work days, the gross underpayment, child labor, food contamination etc reported in history books is all fake propaganda and that life wasn't really all that bad for Lithuanian immigrants. It was all just handle bar mustaches and barber shop quartet music for them.

[Diello]

Your English teacher can go fuck himself with a coppy of Atlas Shrugged

:lol: Very nice.

[The American]

I hope you are reading the uncensored version that Sinclair wanted on the market instead of the watered down thing that was mass produced

[Rocky Rococo]

It had been Sinclair's intention to convey the plight of the slaughterhouse workers to his readers, but the graphic description of the filthy conditions in the stockyards and slaughter houses caught the most attention of his middle-class readers. He was famously quoted as saying, "I aimed for their hearts but hit them in the stomach."