Thank you John Steinbeck
If you want the opposite, read The Jungle by Sinclair. Basically the final third of the book is socialist tirades.
Pretty good.
IIRC the very last sentence of the book is “Socialism shall rule the world!”
I remember being taught in school that this book was about the horrible health standards of food production at the time but recently I was told that interpretation is superficial. Is this true?
It wasn’t about that, but the horrors of what Sinclair describes in the book forced the federal government to implement regulations. Sinclair describes men working in tank rooms with steaming, open vats at floor level. He writes that when workers fell in, they would sometimes be overlooked for days, and “all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”.
He describes work floors soaked in blood (both animal and human), mucus, piss, and shit, dead rats, and rat poison, all be swept into the vats and food processing machines.
It turned peoples stomachs. The outcry was so intense it forced President Theodore Roosevelt to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
But that was not the goal of the book. Sinclair hoped to awaken people to the idea that Socialism was the only answer for the conditions described in the book.
Yeah its essentially about wage slavery, classism, and the injustices of capitalism, but its immediate impact on society was creating higher cleanliness standards in the meat-packing industry
Sinclair himself is said to have noted “I aimed for the heart of the American public, missed and hit them in the stomach instead.”
I have decided from now on to skip the preface/introduction unless it was written by the author until I have read the book. Too many old theory books feature an introduction by some no name western academic going on a anti-stalin rant or something along the lines of “While this book has lost its relevancy because history has now ended with the fall of the USSR (Yes this intro was written in 2005, how can you tell?). Its still a quaint little thing.” And they are always like 50 pages long too. I’ve found myself spending a week trying to get through the 50 page intro because I keep putting it down after 2 pages only to then finish the rest of the book in the same amount of time it took me to figure out what the fuck Satre was saying at the start of Wretched of the Earth (Its actually a really great intro, but its one of those intros that is written with the assumtion that you’ve already read the book, so it may as well be at the end)
spending a week trying to get through the 50 page intro because I keep putting it down after 2 pages
I hate this. It took me way too long to realise the intro usually just doesn’t fucking matter and I can just hit da bricks to the actual book.
The first Communist Manifesto I got was like this, going on about “the dustbin of history”. It probably makes publishers less scared to print it.
I cut it out with scissors.
I was reading the Fables comic a while ago and Bigby Wolf randomly, for no reason, goes off on a tangent about how great Israel is.
When you watch some youtube video about like Soviet cities or some space shit or whatever and BAM! you get hit with some black and white footage and a “history lesson” about Stalins baby eating doctrine to “balance out” the cool stuff they did that the video is really about and the reason you clocked it.
It’s so disappointing to me that Steinbeck became more right-wing with time. This is the quote I use to sum up most of the elements of eco-Marxism whenever I make a presentation on it:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
This specific quote is actually partly what made me interested in his works haha
thank you random sci fi author I forget the name of whose work I found in a free library lol
Surprised to hear that tbh, Steinbeck was an incredible writer and seemingly the furthest thing from Anticommunist
I was mistaken it was actually chapter 13 of East of Eden
Maybe I'm misinterpreting his words but here's the text:
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uni-form. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to elimi-nate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or govern-ment which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
there are a lot of different readings on the narrator in east of eden. the narrator is a character in the book (though it is also supposed to be steinbeck since the steinbeck family is related to the arc in some way that i cant remember). some of what the narrator says is supposed to be satirical or ironic. i think there is some sense of irony in this quote. at least that is how i always interpreted it since its so obviously a “rugged individualism” jerk off which does not really reflect Steinbeck’s own philosophy. 100% steinbeck was critical of the USSR at this point and even worked with the CIA around this time but he was still engaged with the american “left” which even at its lamest was going to have some small degree of collective spirit. the american dream is an obvious theme in east of eden and one that steinbeck has complicated thoughts on. he takes it pretty literally in that it is a dream and not a reality but the fact that it is still a widespread dream makes it have a huge impact on the lives of americans and i think he finds that admirable. east of eden is an incredible piece of literature and like any good piece of literature, i think it contains a lot of different layers but of course understanding steinbeck’s own opinions around this time is important for interpreting it.
by the end of his life his views definitely got worse and worse though. awful opinions on the vietnam war, for example. grapes of wrath is still one of the best pieces of proleterian literature out there however.
Omg I did forget the narrator was a character I just finished chapter 15 and he started talking about his mother and that threw me for a loop for a second. Thanks for the additional context too!
Edit: just to add I am also really loving the book so far. I love jumping from perspective to perspective in stories and the characters are so interesting.
Edit 2: and also I’m looking forward to reading the grapes of wrath at some point but I have a whole backlog of books at the moment so idk when I’ll get around to it yet.
East of Eden is my favorite book, ever. And I think a large thing about it is how whenever a character makes a speech or statement where they’re absolutely certain, they will be proved wrong for their hubris, almost like an ironic punishment by God. Only one character stays curious and humble, and is portrayed as the wisest, best among all characters.
It is a very biblical book, in the sense that Life, or God, will dole out judgement to people getting too big for their breeches, and to me it is largely about individual and collective sin and redemption. Not that there isn’t a political read of it, but it doesn’t seem to make politics one of its central themes, like in his other works.
nice, glad you’re enjoying it! i think east of eden is his “best” book but grapes of wrath is so endlessly quotable it’s insane. you will definitely like it if you already fuck with his writing style
No youre right this some internalized hitlerism, anti-worker sentiment and pure navel gazing.
Basically the end point for all writers who don’t study Marxism at some point.
@valium_aggelein@hexbear.net was pointing out that the narrator in the book is also a character in the narrative so this isn’t necessarily Steinbeck speaking directly here and could also be interpreted as a satire of rugged individualism.
Oh okay then this is actually great lol.
Crypto-communist John Steinbeck actually loved the stalking horror of communism don’tcha know
Is it his book about traveling in the Soviet Union?
