Steinbeck and Orwell: Approaching an understanding of Capitalism

Orwell offers a solution to a major problem identified in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

The Joad family travel throughout the southern United States in a bid to find employment and a new home after the destruction of their farm. Steinbeck counterpoints the personal issues of the family with the general plight of the citizens of the country. The ordinary labour workers are becoming victims to the increasingly powerful leaders of industry that have emerged in the economy. These capitalists have gained so much power that it makes more economical sense to let crops die than to pay people to harvest them. Steinbeck indicates that this capital will fall into the hands of fewer and fewer people as this process continues.

But any solution he offers is undermined by a general impotence on the part of the labour movement. Instead, we have to look to other writers to find potential alleviations to this struggle. In Nineteen-Eighty Four we find a society that is constantly in war. The constant need to supply products for the war effort has created stable employment for millions and more importantly, has prevented a revolution by the working class. War can bring capital from outside a country back into it and this process can allow wealth to trickle down through the main capitalists to the individual workers.

Of course, this is a very bleak and distressing conclusion but the solidity of it cannot be denied. Even Marx can be adopted to this theory when his strategy of working within systems rather than revolutionising them is taken into account. However, this system will inevitably lead to strife and pain as increasing levels of violence (or at least destruction of products) would be necessary to sustain it. Is there no way of improving the system?

Can we no longer control the capitalist leviathan that we have created?

-The English Student