You should look up the origin of that quote. Not only is it paraphrasing part of a story and not an actual quote, but it's referring to people that voted to enact communist policies and ended up poor, instead of creating a society where everyone had everything they could want. They didn't want to admit that they'd been fooled by the government, so they were the "temporarily embarrassed millionares".
Here's the original John Steinbeck quote it's paraphrased from, if anyone's interested:
>"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 picknickers 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."
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