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Quote by John Steinbeck

“It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates himself.”

Quote by John Steinbeck

Book:In Dubious Battle
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In Dubious Battle

In Dubious Battle is a novel by John Steinbeck, set in the 1930s in California's apple country. The story follows two labor organizers, Jim Nolan and Mac, as they attempt to unionize migrant workers and lead a strike against oppressive growers. The narrative explores themes of social justice, the ethics of collective action, and the personal costs of political commitment. The title itself alludes to John Milton's Paradise Lost, suggesting a struggle that is both earthly and cosmic in its implications. The book is known for its gritty realism and its unflinching portrayal of the harsh conditions faced by itinerant laborers during the Depression era. more

Author

John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was an American author renowned for his profound depiction of American society and the lives of farmers. His works often explore themes of poverty, social injustice, and human nature. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 for his significant contribution to American literature. more

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“Netrukus saulė, raudona kaip žarija, pasislėpė už dantytos kalno viršūnės, ir visa gyvybė bei šviesa geso. Tuojau slėnį apgaubė grėsminga tamsa. Stačios pilkų kalnų uolos vakaruose atrodė lyg pabaisos dantys, tykantys pagriebti auką ir nutempti ją į juodas gilaus slėnio žiotis, kur raudojo girios. - Padre! Tai panašu į pragarą. – Ne, mano sūnau, tik į žmogaus sielą. – Į sielas tų, kurie klaidžioja tamsybėje ir mirties šešėly? – Į sielas tų, kurie kasdien praeina pro tave gatvėje.”

Mankind Nature
Book:خرمگس
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“And it seemed as though for a moment, the world encapsulated them in a giant sigh. As if the world was exhausted by humanity—by the bellows of war and bullets, of hateful cries and grieving tears. Of all the pain, the endless pain humanity had brought into its peaceful existence. A great heaving sigh to wash it all away. But like the sea, when washed away, war only crashed harder, a surging line of arched backs and brackish tears.”

WorldLifeWarPainSufferingHumanityCrueltyHuman ConditionMankind Nature
Author:Kelseyleigh Reber
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“I don't see an enormous difference between a society in which you sell yourself to someone and a society in which you rent yourself to someone. I mean, they seem to me approximately equally inhuman. Well, we agree now, though we didn't 100 years ago, on the first - that slavery is wrong. But there's another thing, which in the old days used to be called wage slavery, which means that you rent yourself to somebody else in order to survive. It means that control over resources, and production, and investment is in the hands of a particular, and rather small group of people, and everyone else has the choice of either dying or renting themselves to them, more or less on their terms. And that seems to me a totally intolerable form of human life, you know. I mean, there's no reason to accept that any more than there was a reason to accept slavery, or feudalism, or whatever. How do you change that? Well, you try to change it through existing institutions. You probably fail. In which case you change the institutions, which are not graven in stone, you know. History hasn't come to an end.”

Wage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.”

EnlightenmentCapitalismSlaveryAnarchismWage SlaveryClassical Liberalism
Author:Noam Chomsky
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