Review by Andy Jennyotis

My first encounter with Jack London was via the exceptional television series Northern Exposure. That show opened doors to writers such as Whitman, Dickinson, Kafka, and Dostoevsky, but it is London that gets special treatment. In one episode he is played by the show’s star in his formative years, and in another, selected passages from London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang are read out on-air by the local radio station.

Jack London, born in San Francisco in 1873 only eleven years after the end of the Civil War, grew up in a California in which white working men, particularly after the Panic of 1893, attacked and lynched Asian immigrants, who they perceived as taking their jobs. Intellectuals at the best universities taught “race science” or “racialism,” which posited that the white race was superior to all others. Unfortunately, this aspect of his upbringing and environment seeped into his writings, as London always tried to employ what was considered to be the most advanced thought of the time. As such, many can’t see past the racism in his writing, a tragic fact as they are missing out on what London has to offer.

“If Whitman gave me poetry, then Mr London took me to a place inside myself that I didn’t even know existed, but instantly recognised, like I’d been heading there my whole life,” exclaims Chris, the show’s counter-culture radio host.

Jack London was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

A Life-long Socialist

What is missing from many accounts of his life is that he was a life-long socialist. An ‘Autobiography of Jack London,’ which is composed of excerpts of three works: The Road (1907), The Cruise of the Snark (1911), and John Barleycorn (1913), has a one-thousand-word introduction that fails to mention his leftist politics even once.

And yet, Jack London was an unlikely literary hero in the early days of the Soviet Union: on his deathbed, Lenin asked Krupskaya to read London’s most popular short story To Build a Fire to him.

A Radical Life

By his early teens London was ditching school. He soon discovered the Oakland Public Library, and in particular the librarian, Ina Coolbrith (she was later to become the first Poet Laureate of the State of California) who loaned the boy books, and guided his course of reading. Not long after, he signed aboard a sealing schooner bound for the islands in the seal-rich northern Pacific. This experience was to inspire his later fictional masterpiece The Sea Wolf.

He returned home in the midst of a severe economic recession. London tried his hand at a couple of back-breaking jobs, but quickly gave them up and hit the road, beginning his life as a “tramp.” As the expression went, he joined “Kelly’s Army,” an informal association of thousands of unemployed, determined to march on Washington.

Hobo adventures, riding rails, looking for work, begging for food, and ducking the railroad company “bulls,” made up the bulk of his memoir The Road. Returning home, he set himself to get an education, completing his high school work and publishing, at age 17, his first short story, Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan.

In his short writing life – only sixteen years – he wrote twenty-five novels, dozens and dozens of short stories, plays, and essays. Today he is recognised as a forerunner of such literary giants as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac.

An Introduction to Socialism

The Iron Heel is London’s most ‘socialist’ work. What seems to be missing from most mainstream conceptions and popular reviews ought to be apparent to anyone who has been involved in large, healthy socialist organisations–London’s Iron Heel is an “Introduction to Socialism” masquerading as a dystopian novel.

It’s all there. Well, significant parts of it anyway.

The title of the book starts us off. The idea that socialism will gradually come into existence is a utopian idea. Socialism needs to be grounded in a scientific reality, not wishful thinking:

“The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause of secret wonder to the historian and the philosopher. Other great historical events have their place in social evolution. They were inevitable. Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that astronomers to-day predict the outcome of the movements of stars… Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society. But it were ridiculous to assert that the Iron Heel was a necessary stepping-stone.”

We are introduced to the long view of history in the first few pages of the foreword. The plot of the story covers seven centuries and recounts how the final victories of socialism took hundreds of years. It helps the reader resist the urge to tailor one’s politics to what can be achieved in one’s own life-time.

Once the story properly starts, London explains his politics via a series of staged meetings with the main socialist activist protagonist, the heroically named Ernest Everhard, squaring off with a variety of social classes during a succession of dinners.

Materialism versus Idealism

At the first dinner setting, which London wisely gets to in just the first chapter, his hero protagonist debates a number of the clergy who are involved in goodly works with the lower classes. Everhard bides his time, listening to them prattle on and then, when finally pressed to say something in response, returns fire with interest and it is glorious:

“All right, then, let me begin by saying… you know nothing, and worse than nothing, about the working class. Your sociology is as vicious and worthless as is your method of thinking!”

“What is so dreadfully vicious and worthless in our method of thinking, young man?”

“You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong… You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires…”

“Your terms are rather vague… Just precisely what do you mean when you call us metaphysicians?”

“I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically,” Ernest went on. “Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of science. There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove everything and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything. Each of you goes into his own consciousness to explain himself and the universe. As well may you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain consciousness by consciousness.”

“There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians… judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?… They philosophized, if you will pardon my misuse of the word, about the heart as the seat of the emotions, while the scientists were formulating the circulation of the blood. They declaimed about famine and pestilence as being scourges of God, while the scientists were building granaries and draining cities. They builded gods in their own shapes and out of their own desires, while the scientists were building roads and bridges… In short, the metaphysicians have done nothing, absolutely nothing, for mankind. Step by step, before the advance of science, they have been driven back. As fast as the ascertained facts of science have overthrown their subjective explanations of things, they have made new subjective explanations of things, including explanations of the latest ascertained facts…. The difference between you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating god is merely a difference of several thousand years of ascertained facts. That is all.”

“Yet the thought of Aristotle ruled Europe for twelve centuries,” Dr. Ballingford announced pompously. “And Aristotle was a metaphysician.”

“Your illustration is most unfortunate,” Ernest replied. “You refer to a very dark period in human history. In fact, we call that period the Dark Ages. A period wherein science was raped by the metaphysicians, wherein physics became a search for the Philosopher’s Stone, wherein chemistry became alchemy, and astronomy became astrology. Sorry the domination of Aristotle’s thought!”

The gigantic battle between idealism and materialism in the form of an argument at dinner: what’s not to love?

How capitalism recruits the captains of labour and dominates the choices of all involved is the next issue for the reader to digest. The foremen, the company lawyers, and the media outlets all have constraints when it comes to expressing the truth. Today, we point to Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent as an essential work to understand power relations under capitalism.

The unholy and inhuman experience of being a cog in the profit-making machine is covered in chapter four: “Slaves of the machine” where a worker loses his arm while trying to save the company some money.

The Ruling Class

The most sobering chapter is the next one, The Philomaths. This is where our socialist cadre addresses a meeting of a couple of hundred members of the ruling class, and it doesn’t disappoint. This scene is based on Jack London’s own experience at just such an event.

The super-rich facetiously listen to what they think is another social reformer as he lays out how rotten he has found the character of the rich to be, and how badly they have mismanaged the world. At this point, “his terrible diatribe had not touched them. I looked about me at their faces and saw that they remained complacently superior to what he had charged. And I remembered what he had told me: that no indictment of their morality could shake them.”

Then, the socialist leader begins to describe the revolution. He describes how the very people who have provided the rich with all their wealth will be organised by people like him to rise up and take it all away. And, the more he describes why the lower classes will revolt and how they will do it, the more agitated his audience gets. Their demeanour changes, their smug calmness is lost, and they try to take our hero to task with snarls and lost tempers. It is here that London explains the reason he chose the book’s title and delivers his best lines:

“It was at the end of the discussion that Mr. Wickson spoke. He was the only one that was cool, and Ernest treated him with a respect he had not accorded the others.

“No answer is necessary,” Mr. Wickson said with slow deliberation. “I have followed the whole discussion with amazement and disgust. I am disgusted with you gentlemen, members of my class… You have been outgeneralled and outclassed. You have been very wordy, and all you have done is buzz. You have buzzed like gnats about a bear. Gentlemen, there stands the bear” (he pointed at Ernest), “and your buzzing has only tickled his ears.”

“Believe me, the situation is serious… He has said that it is their intention to take away from us our governments, our palaces, and all our purpled ease.”

The oligarch then turns to Ernest.

“This, then, is our answer. We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain… There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

It’s here we learn about the limits of bourgeois democracy and rights in a capitalist dominated society, in chilling drama-filled detail.

Combination versus Competition

The last staged dinner scene is called the dinner of The Machine Breakers. Everhard meets with the smaller company owners whose main complaints are against the trusts, not seeing that the trusts are doing to them what they themselves do to their workers. It is their solution that is interesting:

“This is a dilemma… and the only way out, as it seems to you, is to destroy that which takes from you your profits.”

“I have listened carefully, and there is only one name that will epitomize you. I shall call you that name. You are machine-breakers… In the eighteenth century, in England, men and women wove cloth on hand-looms in their own cottages. It was a slow, clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth, this cottage system of manufacture. Along came the steam-engine and labor-saving machinery. A thousand looms assembled in a large factory, and driven by a central engine wove cloth vastly more cheaply than could the cottage weavers on their hand-looms. Here in the factory was combination, and before it, competition faded away. The men and women who had worked the hand-looms for themselves now went into the factories and worked the machine-looms, not for themselves, but for the capitalist owners. Furthermore, little children went to work on the machine-looms, at lower wages, and displaced the men. This made hard times for the men. Their standard of living fell. They starved. And they said it was all the fault of the machines. Therefore, they proceeded to break the machines…

“Yet you have not learned their lesson. Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines. By your own confession the trust machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can. That is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you would break those machines… And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on destroying you.”

Here, London ties in how increasing productivity of labour is a contradiction under capitalism, all the gains are swallowed up by the owners of the means of productivity. The answer is not to try to reverse history, it is to ensure that the contradiction is resolved by socialising the ownership of the means of our survival:

“Combination is stronger than competition. Primitive man was a puny creature hiding in the crevices of the rocks. He combined and made war upon his carnivorous enemies. They were competitive beasts. Primitive man was a combinative beast, and because of it he rose to primacy over all the animals. And man has been achieving greater and greater combinations ever since. It is combination versus competition, a thousand centuries long struggle, in which competition has always been worsted. Whoso enlists on the side of competition perishes.”

He continues his discussion with the small capitalists in the next chapter “The Mathematics of a Dream.” Here, London is at his most ambitious. He tries to lead the reader through a Marxist explanation of the contradiction between labour and capital in the form of the theory of surplus value. He does an admirable job, even if it’s a bit out-of-date by today’s standards. What is most impressive is that he’s writing a science fiction novel and has managed to squeeze in a realistic conversation between the protagonists that allows the reader to gain some insight into an essential Marxist concept.

The Class Struggle

The rest of the novel is a summary of the twists and turns for how the Iron Heel comes to power and drowns the many revolts in blood before the eventual final victory of the workers against capital. No spoiler alert needed; this is explained in the foreword. This section is less powerful for it is but an imagined future of how the class war played out.

London did, however, predict some things in more or less accurate fashion. Written mostly in 1905, London anticipated WW1 but he thought it would last the period that in reality covered both WW1 and WW2. He also got right the creation of the national security apparatus, that big labour sell-outs would occur, and that outright fascism would follow attempted revolts.

Some might point to the recent developments in the United States as a good reason to re-read this classic. They’re not wrong.

It was Brecht who said that art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it. The Iron Heel by Jack London should be considered to be one of the finest examples in the struggle for socialism.

Jack London, quoted in 1916, said:

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” – The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916.