Marxist Ideals in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

“The Grapes of Wrath” is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. This book is set during the great depression that occurred in the United States, focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other “Okies” seeking jobs, land, dignity and a future.

In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Steinbeck uses Marxist ideals to plot the long struggle experienced by the Joad family. This novel also shows us how capitalism, an economic system dependent upon consumerism, fails owners and tenants alike. When tenants can't meet the demands of the consumers, crops in this case, they are unable to pay the owners. The owners, in turn, are unable to pay the banks. The Joads’ experiences prove that the Bourgeoisie abuse their power in order to control the Proletariats, alienating and exploiting their class to prevent revolution by forcing them to work for barely enough money. Families who had lived and worked on their land their whole lives became workless as the bank repossessed homes to sustain profit. The bank had become a ‘monster’ led by the Bourgeoisie to exploit the families for their houses and jobs, leaving them with almost nothing.

The banks and business owners are the bourgeoisie. They control the wealth and own the land. Steinbeck describes the banks as ‘machines and masters all at the same time.’ The men who represent these banks are ‘proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.’ They come to the farmers, who have worked the land their entire life, and tell them ‘the bank, the monster, owns it. You’ll have to go.’ The land has become dry and not arable. The bank is not making money from the farmers. They have to go. The farmers have nowhere else to go. They leave the land; they have no work, no crops, no money, no place to live. But the bank doesn’t care. It wants only money, and if ‘they don’t get it, they die the way you (the farmers) die without air.’ The men who want to work, who need to work in order to provide sustenance for their family, are having this ability taken away from them by the banks and he men who run them. This is just the beginning of the Marxist class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The economic system of the Great Depression in the United States gained much of attention including Steinbeck to write the novel. The family of Joads in the story has faced the capitalistic influence on their farm; they could not work producing crops to the severe droughts of that region. They also were unable to pay the debts neither to the bank nor the landowners. Moreover, as they had a house lease, there were no longer able to pay for it as well. The Joads are just one example among other families who, if facing natural disasters, could not make for a living in such dramatic circumstances. From the regular working class people, they automatically changed their status to the poor ones. The driving force of the novel is the conflict between the people and their ideas which considerably differ from the one the government has. The primary conflict in Steinbeck’s book is that working class faces a challenge of leaving their homes and refusing work they did to find a better life. Through the period of the Great Depression farmers were striving to find success and hope for the future by migrating to the west.

According to Marx, the core of the society are not ideas but material forces of production and the relations within the process of production. The nature of these two aspects lies in the division of labor and the type of ownership. Consequently, as described in the novel ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ society is a system of production factors along with the changes which are then change the division of labor and modify the former models of ownership.

In conclusion, the themes from the Marxist theory are tightly connected to the plot of the novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ The author John Steinbeck was determined to show the reality of the economic system during the Great Depression and how it affected people’s lives during that time. He also managed to present who a considerable separation between rich and poor representatives of the society, where the latter suffered the most.