The Grapes of Wrath and Marxism

The hungry have one goal, to eat, but there are people in their way of their goal, making them angry. .
             In the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck plays on Marx's theories of society and creates a fictitious story about the three classes: upper, middle, and lower, being separated. The upper class, the bourgeoisie, are the rich landowners and the banks. In the beginning of the novel, the reader reads about Tom Joad, who is fresh out of the State Penitentiary for murder. He soon finds out that his family has been evicted from their farm. Steinbeck sets up the tensions between the rich and the poor in the beginning of the novel. The tenants to the farmers end up having to give them an ultimatum, either get out or be squashed by a tractor. Of course, the tenants feel bad about this, however when it comes to losing money, there's suddenly no issue with threatening another man's life. Many of the poor landowners are forced to live out on the streets in horrible living conditions while their homes and farms were flattened by the tractors.
             Steinbeck openly advocates Marxist proletarian revolt in response to unjust economic conditions, which, he goes on to explain, are directly caused by capitalism: "The tractors which throw men out of work, the belt lines which carry loads, the machines which produce, all were increased; and more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads." When Tom finds his family, he finds them in the midst of a decision: California. When the Joad family arrives in California, they aren't greeted by their dreams in reach, instead, their nightmares become their home. They stay in a work camp called Hooverville, a place with its own rules that's filled with pitched up tents that housed homeless families desperate for any sort of work.
             Tom quickly begins to realize the corruption and the mistreatment that was going on in Hooverville and in California.