Marxist Reading Of John Steinbeck Essay

Furthermore, Steinbeck describes the bank as "something more than men... It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it," (Steinbeck 37) and there was no man who can punish them for taking advantage of them. Steinbeck also writes that "they [the banks] breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat" (Steinbeck 37). In this quote, Steinbeck is trying to tell the reader that the bank is evil and unstoppable. Steinbeck also relates the bank to a monster in order to give the reader a clear understanding of something they usually associate with evil.
Marxism and the issue of the class divide a prevalent topic that arises several times throughout the novel. Steinbeck writes, “Three dollars a day. I got damn

In this way Tom is the character that most accurately embodies Steinbeck. Tom is in agreement with Marxist principles, but he has come to them from his own reasoning. He wants to do something about class injustice, but he wants to do so on his own terms. When Tom speaks of the government camps he is expressing the same optimism Steinbeck felt when he visited them. Tom says, “I been thinkin' about how it was in that gov'ment camp, how our folks took care a theirselves…I been a-wonderin' why we can't do that all over. Throw out the cops that ain't our people. All work together for our own thing – all farm our own lan” (Steinbeck 536). George suggests in The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck that, “Every lower-case utopia described in The Grapes of Wrath begins with the baseline of work – if necessary work for hire, but eventually culminating in working one's own place” (George 39). In these quotes, we see that Steinbeck his trying to use Tom to get his ‘moral philosophy’ about capitalism through to the