Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

The Jungle is a naturalistic fiction book written by the famous muckraker Upton Sinclair. The book follows a poor Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis and was made to expose the horrors of the meat packing industry in Chicago, and the life of an immigrant. Upton Sinclair believed that capitalism has undermined the American value of liberty, but capitalism has created many more detriments to the U.S. and the world as a whole. I believe socialism would have produced a superior version of America compared to the capitalism seen in the Gilded Age because America would have been more efficient, less exploitive of other countries(post-Gilded Age), and would have seen results similar to that of other far leftist countries. Socialism promotes efficiency more

Global South countries are still poor not because of what they do, but what the Global North does to them. The first way the Global North exploits the South is through unequal exchange. The global North and South are defined in the quote “the Global North implies the developed economies, the Global South implies the underdeveloped economies”. It is considerably simple why these countries had a bad start, due to colonialism. For example, Haiti had to pay France $30B(today's money) just to have independence. The reason why these countries stay poor is because of the previously mentioned concept of unequal exchange. The basic definition is when Global South countries export resources(including land and labor) to Global North countries at incredibly low prices. The Global North sells items made from the aforementioned resources at a far higher price. According to science direct “Rich countries and monopolistic corporations leverage their geopolitical and commercial dominance in the world economy to depress or cheapen the prices of resources and labour in the Global South, both at the level of whole national economies as well as within global commodity chains (section 5.2). As a result, for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade.”(Hickel et al.). In the short

One major reason why these nations like Cuba and Chile have not done the best or survived for long was because of Western intervention. For example, Cuba has had to endure a terrible embargo, and Chile was couped. This brutal embargo can be summarized by the quote “It banned all trade and financial transactions with the island unless licensed by the Treasury Department subject to detailed regulations contained today in the 56-page Cuban Assets Control Regulations” (“Understanding the Failure of the U.S. Embargo on Cuba”). The coup of Chile was in 1973 where Salvadore Allende was killed due to his leftist politics and the U.S.’s fear of it spreading. The dictator Augusto Pinochet was put in charge of Chile after the coup. Someone who lived under Pinochet said, “That day we buried not only the poet, we buried Allende, Jara, and hundreds of other victims, we buried our democracy, and we buried freedom” (Allende). Despite the embargo, Cuba has created many medical innovations and has one of the most efficient healthcare systems as can be seen in the quote “Many high-income countries could learn a lot from Cuba’s model. Dr Keck explains that the country’s healthcare system is universally accessible and fully integrated.” (Medicc), and the quote “That's what makes the medical prominence of Cuba all the more surprising to those who view a free market as an essential driver of scientific discovery. Cuba is very poor, and yet the country has