I’m reading The Winter of Our Discontent by Communist author John Steinbeck. He was a Nobel Prize winner and majorly popular in the USSR. You can see bits of Marxist theory quoted inside his novels.
But here’s the funny thing that goes exactly to what I said in my previous post. The main character of the novel, Ethan Hawley, comes from a family that came to America in the times of the Mayflower. They lost all the money they made since then, though, and Ethan has to work behind the counter at a neighborhood grocery store. He works very leisurely hours but makes enough to support himself, a stay-at-home wife, and two children. He owns his house, has five suits, eats flounder for dinner, and has the equivalent of $50,000 in savings at the bank. A hired wage worker at a neighborhood store. Welcome to America of 60 years ago.
Once again, the author was a Communist who despised capitalism. And this is how he described the harsh, demanding reality of 1961 capitalism in the US.
We all know there’s been nothing but progress since 1961 but if somebody told us Ethan’s story as happening today, we’d laugh. How come, though? Where’s the progress?
The novel isn’t supposed to be funny but I’m heaving with laughter because the poor Marxist Steinbeck couldn’t have possibly anticipated that his story of a grocery store wage worker would sound like dispatches from the life of upper-middle classes a few decades later.
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