Capitalist System Quotes
There are some who question the authenticity of this Steinbeck quotation on the grounds that all the references to it seem to be secondary sources. However, we lean toward its authenticity.
Ataturk was not receptive toward Communism as some other world leaders were at the time. He saw its weakness far earlier than many others.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. Ironically, during the McCarthy period and the Red Scare of the 1950s, some of the right wingers charged that Mark Twain’s writing was “Communist Propaganda”. Most of the accusers had never read most of Train’s work. At the time, the Communists had condemned the racial segregation that was then legal in America and most of the staunch Southern segregationists accused anyone who attacked segregation as a communist. Twain was one of the leading voices against American racism. As for communism, the accusers of Train had probably never read this particular quotation. Twain was an early severe critic of communism and used his favorite weapon—humor—to attack it.
The major problem at the time was not the capitalist in the industrial revolutionary sense of the word as there was little industry. China as an agrarian society but the vast majority of the land was owned by relatively few wealthy families. It was close to a feudal system and that was the target for the Communists and their revolution. There was a very small proletariat. Their methods were brutal, but they executed the landlords and the class warfare ended quickly. Sun Yat-sen was not able to solve the land problem, nor was Chiang Kai-shek as most of his major supporters were landowners of warlords who controlled the landowners.
