In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his moving tale of the “Okie exodus” to the fields of California, John Steinbeck evoked Thomas Paine when speaking of the social revolution to come. After beautifully suggesting how working-class mutualism might lead to socialism, Steinbeck wrote, “If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’”