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

Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Mutability of the Past

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

Winston is confronted by this Party doctrine which articulates the government's control over all elements of history. By removing all physical evidence of past events and by editing others, The Party dictates the entire history of London. This control forces us to wonder whether the past can truly be altered at will.

On the face of things, this apparent "mutability of the past" is entirely possible. Our newspapers, history books and countless other physical media contain evidence the past, but these media are all corruptible. Even personal memory is fallible and can be manipulated. So, the question emerges: does the past actually exist anywhere or can it be fabricated?

I have a natural inclination to say that the past does indeed exist. Of course, any human would. The idea that nothing we experience or do has any lasting effect whatsoever is simply abhorrent. Perhaps the answer lies in this instinctual rejection of "the mutability of the past". The past may not have an objective existence, but it is hard to deny the impact that everyday occurrences have on our present and future. Whether measurable or not, our instincts and inclinations are formed by past experience.

No account may exist, but the past is latent in everything we do and everything we are. That past, is not mutable.

-The English Student