>> “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Steinbec

>> “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Steinbeck never said or wrote that, as far as I can tell. He did write a passage that maybe was paraphrased that way, but let's be clear here, he was talking about Communism, and revolutionary Communism, not socialism: "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 picnickers 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." Steinbeck was a communist in the 1930s, he belonged to a communist organization and wrote for a communist publication. He wrote the above passage in the 1960s looking back on that period. To me it seems like he is trying to minimize his participation in revolutionary communism, as one would naturally do in the 1960s. Maybe I'm overly skeptical and he just grew up. He did not write or say what you quoted him as saying. Looks like the definition of "proletarian" is a member of "the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live". I did that for some time, retired now. Don't know what about that category of person means they are expected to support communism. I don't.