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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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old joke about pro-capitalist people being "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

For what it's worth, this may be a common misquote of John Steinbeck who was originally saying that the American Communists that he knew were temporarily embarrassed capitalists, not that the people who wouldn't support communism saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.

I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

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