4 ideas
After the bank's tractor levels their tenant house in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, twelve Joads load a converted Hudson and drive Route 66 to California, following handbills that promise work picking fruit. The book ends with Rose of Sharon, after her baby is stillborn, breastfeeding a starving stranger in a flooded barn.
When the tenants try to find someone to blame for their eviction, the agent says he answers to the bank, the bank answers to the East, and the tractor driver is paid three dollars a day to feed his own family. Each person in the chain is only following the logic of the one above, so no single person can be held to account. The corporation acts like a creature that 'breathes profits' and must grow or die. Decisions that no individual would defend get made, and the harm has no author anyone can shoot or argue with.
The book argues that the owners' real danger is the moment two dispossessed families squat together and share their grief, turning 'I lost my land' into 'We lost our land.' Suffering that is shared across people becomes political consciousness, and that becomes collective action. By creating a mass of propertyless people and throwing them together on the road and in the camps, the system that dispossessed them produces the solidarity that threatens it.
Read the migrant crisis as a designed market and not a natural disaster. Growers advertise for far more workers than they need, so desperate men will underbid each other, and then they deputize police and label organizers 'reds' to stop the workers from pricing their labor together. From this view, hunger among the pickers is what the arrangement produces, not a side effect: crops are destroyed to keep prices up while the people who could eat them starve.