What I like is that you can download classic books really cheap or free. It is very different to read them now, compared to doing it for a high school book report 60 years ago. I started with Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” published in 1906. The book follows the journey of Jurgis Rudkus after he emigrated to the US looking for the American dream. He stumbled into a job at a Chicago meatpacking house and was physically and mentally wrecked by the experience. He lost his family, his house, and his dignity in the processes, but discovered and was transformed by Socialism when the book ends. We all know the story of plant workers who fell into rendering vats and left the plant as sausage, lard, or fertilizer, and the shoveling of diseased, infected livestock, live rats, sawdust, and fecal matter into the meat products that were distributed nationwide. His writings created a regulatory revolution, and led to laws now in place that purport to inspect and protect us from the food we eat.
Now, 104 years later, conditions in this country are beginning to look similar to what Jurgis and his fellow workers dealt with. I want to quote some phrases that brought me up short in their description because they are still valid, topical, and true today.
“The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”
“…the Stygian midnight of American evangelicalism…”
“The purpose of government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern fraud.”
“Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at the source.”
“Here is a man (Jesus) who was the world’s first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for—for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth; who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town; who again and again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth and the holding of wealth…”
“Who drove out the businessmen and brokers from the temple with a whip!”
“This class-conscious working-man! This union carpenter! This agitator, law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist!”
“There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited.”
Chew on some of those thoughts, Kossacks.