Competition and open market would promote sellers who quote lower because of abundance and consumers as well as sellers would benefit from the abundance.
Sellers who try to restrict the supply ultimately would loose in the long run because in a competitive market the seller would always choose cheap prices.
roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price
This would be valid if no one wan’t to be sellers and a all the sellers in a market cooperate together to do this or are required by law to do this.
I know we like to blame capitalism for a lot of things but this here is a different situation i think.
It would in a properly free market. But late stage capitalism’s goal is monopolization, because it maximises profit. Or to quote Marx: “Monopoly is the inevitable end of competition, which engenders it by a continual negation of itself.”
And this is exactly what Steinbeck is describing here: “you buy food from us, at our prices, or nothing at all. We’d rather destroy our product than to sell lower.” And they can do this because no one has access to the products, or the means of production (e. g. the land to grow produce).
And this is where we are today with Amazon, Nestle, Walmart and so on. They don’t have any real competition anymore.
Isn’t capitalism the opposite ?
Competition and open market would promote sellers who quote lower because of abundance and consumers as well as sellers would benefit from the abundance.
Sellers who try to restrict the supply ultimately would loose in the long run because in a competitive market the seller would always choose cheap prices.
I know we like to blame capitalism for a lot of things but this here is a different situation i think.
It would in a properly free market. But late stage capitalism’s goal is monopolization, because it maximises profit. Or to quote Marx: “Monopoly is the inevitable end of competition, which engenders it by a continual negation of itself.”
And this is exactly what Steinbeck is describing here: “you buy food from us, at our prices, or nothing at all. We’d rather destroy our product than to sell lower.” And they can do this because no one has access to the products, or the means of production (e. g. the land to grow produce).
And this is where we are today with Amazon, Nestle, Walmart and so on. They don’t have any real competition anymore.