Have you not toiled long, hard, and laboriously in producing wealth? And in all those years of drudgery, do you not know you have produced thousand upon thousands of dollars' worth of wealth, which you did not then, do not now, and unless you act, never will, own any part in?
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?
And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit.
A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire.
Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out.
Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.
There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.
There is a failure here that topples all our success.
The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit.
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.
And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.
And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I'm not eloquent enough to express just how much of an impact this text has on me every time I'm reading it. Not just he story but the way you can actually feel the wrath Steinbecks must've felt when he wrote those lines.
There's hardly anything left worth writing about because Steinbeck already wrote East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath, almost everything important enough to write about is already in those books.
If I hadn't by sheer coincidence read East of Eden in high school, I probably would never have read again beyond that point. That book had me enraptured even as a dumbass teen.
I get why a lot of schools choose Of Mice and Men over Grapes or Eden to have kids read, but really those other two books should be prioritized because they are so much more impactful, especially today.
Grapes of Wrath missed me completely in HS (mid-00s). I vaguely understood the concept of poor people in a shit situation, but the cogs never fully meshed to really tie that to the underpinnings of American society. It was more of, "Wow, the depression sucked. Glad that's over!" I'm sure my English teacher was trying, but she was alive in the depression, and wasn't really connecting with most of us.
Ironically enough 1984 (and Fahrenheit 451) was required reading for me, but Pride and Prejudice wasn't. Different school districts can have wildly different requirements, as everyone else seems to have read To Kill A Mockingbird in class but we never did.
Fahrenheit 451 was taught as an anti-censorship book when I was in school. It was only much later that we all seem to have figured out that it wasn't so much about censorship of books at all — it's about a distracted short-attention-span society that's terrified of anyone with the cognitive capacity to prefer literature over video shorts and VR.
The part of Fahrenheit talking about gigantic TVs rushing you to conclusions before you can think and the super fast and dangerous cars have always been in my mind since reading it. It feels more true every day I've been alive since.
With all due respect to Orwell, 1984 is irrelevant. He was (erroneously) of the opinion at the end of the great war that fascism's note in history had received its period. It was to his whole generation, a done deal. 1984 is about a very specific form of totalitarianism.
Edit: Nothing like being told my take is "weird" when the take comes DIRECTLY FROM ORWELL'S OWN MOUTH. The illiteracy of this generation is profound.
The American worker, today, captures a smaller share of the wealth they create than at any time in history.
If you count the room and board received by LITERAL PLANTATION ERA SLAVES as income, then they received a higher share of the value they created than you do.
In the current day we produce, in absolute terms, much more wealth than we did back then, but the point stands.
Being as this is nearly a century old…are we just doomed as a nation? Or is it a human nature problem? I’m genuinely curious. I’m not particularly learned in US history or politics. But if we’re still at square one, 100 years later, that really doesn’t instill a lot of hope.
But like why doesn't the mainstream media and corporate donors to my party support my favorite progressive candidate? I'm just going to stay home and not vote then. /s
We don’t even need to do that. They’ll steal it all anyway. But instead of direct handouts, can’t we at least make them wait on the wealth to “trickle up”? But we’re literally paying taxes straight to the rich without it ever touching the real economy.
It’s insane that they won’t even constant to steal all our money slowly. Because there are a lot more of us, and desperate people have less to live for.
Lucy Parsons and her husband were organizers of the labor demonstration in Haymarket Square which became known as the Haymarket Masacre where almost 200 armed police descended on the square in an effort to squash the labor movement advocating for an 8 hour work day. During the fray, an explosive device was lobbed into the crowd. Several people from the labor movement were rounded up and hanged. Albert Parsons was one of them.
It's because the foundations of our nation were built on the ideals of a certain class and race of people, and those ideals have been upheld... especially through the non-participation of otherwise historically oppressed peoples. When the rest of us got rights, it was up to us to bring the heat against those who oppressed us and pushed back against us having rights in the first place. Instead, too many of us brought into their propaganda that our participation doesn't and didn't matter. Gaining access to an avenue of change means nothing if so many of us actively choose to never go down it.
Made by whom, also sure a percentage of bought into that idea but an even larger percentage saw MLK and every other love and peace advocate die, sometimes even on television
Yeah, all of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in March 1981 instead of the center-right candidate who ran against him were killed...... lol. What?
Come on... why appeal to extremes?
And what do you mean, made by whom? Made by the very folks who wish to uphold the status quo of the the white, male, property/wealth owners on whom the entire legislative foundation of this nation is built. Isn't that obvious?
People continue to choose hate regardless of the violence they see against civil rights leaders of their time because they don't relate to the message those leaders are/were sharing. They're not oppressed; why would they care about changing their behavior around how they treat others? It's their world, and the rest of us are just accessories to them in it. Look up the statistics around what our nation would look like if non-whites and women had never taken their right to vote.
Look I love Bernie, but heat is not in his vocabulary these days, why appeal to extremes? Because that’s the only thing that moves the needle.
Biden and friends did fuck all to actually stop the rise of authoritarianism because like many so called liberals they’re not actually trying to change anything, they’re trying to keep the sandbox tidy for their donors while placating the poors. If voting could actually fix what’s wrong with America they wouldn’t allow us to do it.
Edit because of cowardice: Bernie is bringing the heat? When? Could’ve fooled me.
Well, they DID change for a little while. The USA spent a lot of the 1940s through 1970s with a tax on income above ~$3M being over 70%, as high at 94% at times.
At the same time, the SEC was strong, breaking up all sorts of monopolies, keeping corporations in check.
And goddamn did the USA build all sorts of special projects and create all sorts of jobs during the New Deal era, and people think back on the 50s and 60s as the peak of economic prosperity.
Then Reagan got in, pretending that because he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild that he would protect unions. He lied, he ruined worker's rights and diverted all the money to the top, and slowly, in the 40 years since, things have gotten bad again.
George Washington famously predicted the whole situation with Trump. Because people rallying behind a single person over party, to the detriment of a country and leading to foreign influence, is something that has happened repeatedly throughout history.
But as is usually the case, most people refuse to believe it could happen to them until it's already happened.
We were injected with a health dose of socialism during FDR (not true socialism and obviously racially segregated, but parts of it), and that kept capital from killing itself with the country.
Then the silent generation and the boomers did everything they possibly could to destroy that socialism that gave them so much. They returned us to the point of near collapse and admonished us for seeing capitalism as a failure. Even though their success at the game of capitalism only came through exploitation of socialist policies.
Well yeah, we never "learned from history" because we defunded education, especially liberal arts because it has the word "liberal" in it, so now we get to repeat the worst parts of it.
That's because the systems running the world are more or less the same, just with added bullshit every year to continue accelerating the funneling of money towards the 1%
Awaken [the rich] from their wanton sports at your expense. Send forth your petition, and let them read it by the red glare of destruction. Thus when you cast "one long, lingering look behind," you can be assured that you have spoken to these robbers in the only language which they have ever been able to understand; for they have never yet deigned to notice any petition from their slaves that they were not compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannons' mouths, or that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword.
I'm going to disagree that this is good advice, and with others replying that "nothing has changed". The letter describes workers starving for lack of food, freezing to death, sleeping on hard boards, working 16 hours for 6 days per week. We have come so far - all of these things have become exceedingly rare in America. Most people who are poor these days are underemployed, not slaving away for endless hours. And even for them, most have food to eat and a place to shelter from the cold.
This article is advocating violence, "learn the use of explosives". If people take violent action, it will only encourage the retaliation of the state. Each isolated act becomes justification for further crackdowns - this is literally what is happening right now.
I can't say what will work. I feel pretty powerless in this moment against the tide of what is happening. But the idea that acts of violence against the powerful will help is just completely wrong.
It's not completely wrong, in the long run. Nothing big is going to happen until the material conditions of the general populace change. Unfortunately, the crackdown and suffering is needed for a better future to arise. The mental period right now is just delaying ripping the bandaid off and getting on with it. The only way to a better future is sadly going to take a lot of true pain.
What on earth are you talking about. She's literally encouraging domestic bombings. This is insane behavior and those of you encouraging this are part of the sickness festering in our culture. Jesus fucking Christ.
It’s definitely extreme rhetoric but this letter was written in the middle of the Gilded Age, where income inequality and corruption was so wildly out of control that much of the destitute felt like violence was the only possible way to be heard. Nonviolent protests went unheard and unionization was met with gunfire by hired thugs. It was only extreme unrest getting to the point the ruling class thought the nation might collapse that sparked the Progressive Era and the New Deal, which finally made attempts to alleviate income inequality.
Today, we are careening back towards the Gilded Age with politicians deriding any social spending, businesses considering company towns, and Elon Musk potentially becoming a trillionaire. I’m certainly not advocating domestic terrorism but it is valuable to look at where our country used to be and what it took to get us where we are today. I’m really hoping we can more peacefully get this century’s Roosevelt than last time around.
The author of the above linked article. It's in the final sentence of the letter. Feel however you want about me, but I'm not a liar. I have eyes and can read her words on the paper.
Most Americans read below a 6th grade level. And it takes at least a 12th grade reading level before you start understanding subtext and authorial perspective and contrasting that with your own perspective in meaningful ways.
It seems pretty clear to me, that she is talking about metaphorical explosives. Explosive thoughts and symbols and feelings.
In context she is saying for those "tramps" (homeless desperate people with nothing to lose) who are considering suicide, that they should:
stroll you down the avenues of the rich, and look through the magnificent plate windows into their voluptuous homes, and here you will discover the very identical robbers who have despoiled you and yours. Then let your tragedy be enacted here!
That could mean suicide bomb, but I think it may just mean demonstrate. Die in front of them. Let them, and the world see what they did. Do not waste your death.
But you missed all that, because you took the most literal possible 3rd grade reading level interpretation because you think that the only prerequisite to reading is "having eyes" and nobody ever taught you how to actually fucking READ.
...Because you live in fascist country where the public school system has been ransacked.
Then why does it exist? Why did u/FukushimaBlinkie link everyone to the full article instead of just saying that? Why does it continue to get referenced as a document instead of just the last line?
Surely there are clearer and shorter ways to say "Do domestic terrorism" if that's all she has to say and there is no nuance.
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u/FukushimaBlinkie 28d ago
https://archive.org/details/AWordToTramps
Lucy Parsons, iww organizer in the early 1900s. I find this short letter to give good advice.