In Dubious Battle Mob Quotes

“People have said, mobs are crazy, you cant tell what they do.’ Why don’t people look at mobs as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonable, for a mob.” Says John Steinbeck in his major work, In Dubious Battle. The book has many main characters but a few that stick out are Doc Burton, he serves as a camp health officer, Mac McLeod, he is the party organizer, and London, the leader of the camp. These characters among many others show you the doubtfulness, seriousness, patriotism, capitalism, and vigilante violence of the 1930’s in California. They go through many hard ships during the great depression, especially during the Pixley Cotton Strike. In the book In Dubious Battle the underlying theme that Steinbeck is supporting

The dominant classes in society accumulate wealth off of expropriating the labor of society. One German economist Karl Marx has said, “The ideas of the ruling class are, the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class, which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Karl Marx shows that when you are considered a higher class, which means you produce the resources need by society, you control what happens to society. With that being said when society is in constant need of resources, and you in of control production, you put society at risk for control. Then that leads to class having issues or disagreements on what needs to be

Did you ever think, London? We've got no guns. If anything happens to us, we don't get in the newspapers. But if anything happens to the other side, Jesus, they smear it in ink. We've got no money, and no weapons, so we've got to use our heads, London. See that? It's like a man with a club fighting a squad with machine-guns. The only way he can do it is to sneak up and smack the gunners from behind. Maybe that isn't fair, but hell, London, this isn't any athletic contest. There aren't any rules a hungry man has to follow." John Steinbeck shows him self that when you’re a not considered a capitalist class, you don’t have resources you need, and that you’re almost considered to be non-existent in society. This can cause many issues between classes, when someone feels like they are not acknowledged they will act out just to prove a point. This relates to the story when the workers wage gets cut, they don’t feel acknowledge and many other things, so they decided to