In dubious battle

[Kez]

What are your opinions on this book, ive only just started it, but the author seems to make the reds seem like caniving opportunists who have no ethics.

maybe this is superficial understanding from the first few chapters

[canikickit]

Who wrote it and what's it about?

[redstar2000]

John Steinbeck wrote it back in the late 1930s and it's about communist organizing of migrant workers.

There was a vogue or fashion of sorts in America then called the "proletarian novel"...not actually written by proletarians, of course, but by radical middle-class intellectuals.

How "good" they were is a matter of opinion, of course...at the moment, they are definitely "out of fashion". When there is a major upsurge of radical sentiment again, they will be "re-discovered"...just as radical feminists re-discovered the feminist novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Dubious Battle is definitely one of the better ones. Another one I remember liking was called Union Square.

And there's even a play from that era--Waiting for Lefty. Look for it; you'll like it.

:redstar2000:

The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas