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To answer this question you need look only to the incident with \"the Captain.\" The Captain owns a great many desirable things - a nice house, some land, a frog-pond, some good whisky - and it is all the cause for his misery. His wife has left their home for politics, and he is forced to stay there in absolute isolation to guard their possessions from theft, fire, and flood. The tyranny of things extend even to the guest towels, which he has carefully avoided using all the time his wife has been away; and which the Cannery Row boys desecrate almost immediately. When the boys visit the Captain, the only difference between him and his guests is that they are free from this tyranny of things and he is not. He is a prisoner in his own house.
When they leave him drunk on the floor, they know that he has never before had such a good time. There are two opposing values in this book: the natural and free, and the conventional and institutional. With this polarity in mind, it is easy to see that Steinbeck has some of his characters do unusually things like petty thievery and prostitution to shock and perhaps refresh the more conventional of his readers.
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