The US election and the "Grapes of Wrath"
“It’s a free country. Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.”
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
I observe these days the climax of the confrontation in the presidential elections of November 5th in the USA, between the candidates of the Republicans Donald Trump and the Democrats Kamala. Harris, which garnishes Elon Musk and Gates handing out millions; Beyoncé, DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and others. A "confrontation" that is based on existing differences, but at the same time hides an essential identification in the basics and strategies.
I watched a flushed Trump call immigrants "monsters," "cold-blooded killers" and "beasts," demand the death penalty for "any illegal immigrant who kills an American citizen."
But I also heard Kamala Harris assure her constituents that there will be "consequences" for immigrants and that "the laws" - including many made by the previous Trump administration - "must be respected and enforced."
So I was thinking of John Steinbeck and his masterpiece novel The Grapes of Wrath, which today, we would benefit from having a second part, focused - but from a different direction - on the same protagonists: immigrants.
At the time the book was written, in 1939, the protagonists were the uprooted, homeless, wandering laborers of the land, the people tortured by the violent landlords. Those who experienced incredible injustices and barbaric exploitation, in a society of inequality between rich and poor. Their only "property" was humanity, care and class solidarity.
In the same region, 85 years later, in the schizophrenic derailed political climate of America in 2024, amid the same and worse inhuman consequences of unchecked capitalism, where profits trump individual well-being, immigrants are once again persecuted, against the broken backdrop of the electoral "American dream" of democracy, equality and equal opportunities.
How necessary, indeed, would be the voice of the American prose writer, screenwriter and dramatist, at this time when capitalism is in crisis, when a - still - modern "witch hunt" is unleashed, by someone who declares that the American military must to be used to defeat the "internal enemy" and promises that if he is elected he will immediately hire 10,000 border guards, in addition to the 20,000 that exist today.
"The Grapes of Wrath" and banks - monsters
In his epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940, Steinbeck denounced the inhumane oppression of workers by the powerful landowners of the American South, revealing in time the myth and illusion of the much-vaunted "dream", in period of the Great Depression.
John Steinbeck, the son of a cashier and a schoolteacher, who worked as a reporter, builder, plasterer, carrier, painter, carpenter, oil painter and laborer, accepting the Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy, said:
"The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement."
"Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love."
The truth is that his close contact with the proletarians helped him to uniquely render the Golgotha of an entire people, who were looking for a way out of the mud and to find the Promised Land. Through the story of a poor family of farmers from Oklahoma, uprooted from their place (having lost their land and with their property seized by the banks), and who migrated with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots to the fertile plains of California, a message emerges as urgent today as it was when the book was written.
The message for social awakening and the need of the collective. For the immense importance of human connection and community, as a means of survival and resistance to the oppression of the powerful.
In 1932, a third of the population of America is unemployed and somewhere there begins the odyssey of half a million ruined farmers, who take the road to the West, hoping for a "Garden of Eden", unsuspecting of the exploitation they would know there too.
“It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."
Steinbeck believed:
"The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we".
But this "we", when it happens, it becomes the miracle. It's everything.
The temporarily unlucky millionaires
For an immigrant to fight for his dignity in the barbaric conditions of a corrupt system, to denounce economic inequality and to demand justice, remains - throughout the centuries - a struggle that will never be recognized by any bourgeois class. For this class will always diligently gloss over her own responsibilities. They will always hide that no one leaves their homes because they are thirsty for adventure, but because the policy of unemployment, poverty, hunger and destitution forces him to remain locked in.
The one that breeds immigration, bringing great profits to capital. The only thing that can be a support for the immigrant is the organization of the struggle in the workplaces, the support of the action of the class unions and the gathering in committees of struggle, against the compromised unions. It is important that everyone realizes that migration is not prevented by walls or barbed wire and is not stopped by threats and terrorism.
Steinbeck said that
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
But he also said something else:
"If you have a problem or are hurt or in need, go to the poor. They are the only ones who will help you - the only ones!'
Translated and republished from Rizospastis