Jack London, the man who wrote “The Iron Heel”

Submitted by Anon on 26 September, 2008 - 10:18 Author: Paul Hampton

Jack London is remembered today mainly for children’s fictional stories — Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905) remain his best-known works. It is often forgotten that London was a socialist.

A recently published collection of his writings edited by Jonah Raskin, The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution (University of California Press) goes a long way towards restoring his place in the history of the international labour movement.

Jack London was born in 1876 on the cusp of American industrialisation, and this is reflected in his writing. He would spend much of his early life in California, but in the course of his literary career he travelled widely to Alaska, England, Mexico, Korea and Australia.

London became an active socialist in the 1890s. Already notorious before the age of 20, he had written an article “What Socialism is” for the San Francisco Examiner at the end of 1895. In 1896, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the “Boy Socialist”. In 1896 he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), led by Daniel De Leon, and later that year had a letter published in the Oakland Times urging readers to study Marx’s Capital.

London left the SLP to join the breakaway socialists around Eugene Debs. He ran as the Social Democratic Party candidate for mayor of Oakland in 1901 and as the Socialist Party candidate for the same post in 1905. During the early years of the twentieth century, he wrote and spoke up for the burgeoning socialist movement.

In “The Scab” (1903) London provided a fitting epithet for those who ignore workers’ solidarity. He wrote that workers apply “the opprobrious epithet ‘scab’ to the labourer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labour-power. The sentimental connotation of scab is as terrific as that of ‘traitor’ or ‘Judas’, and a sentimental definition would be as deep and varied as the human heart… The labourer who gives more time, or strength, or skill, for the same wage, than another, or equal time, or strength, or skill, for a less wage, is a scab. This generousness on his part is hurtful to his fellow labourers, for it compels them to an equal generousness which is not to their liking, and which gives them less of food and shelter…”

In 1905, London founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to propagate socialism among students. London spoke at Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League universities, spreading the message of class struggle. In “Something Rotten in Idaho” (1906) he defended the miners’ union leaders Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer, who had been arrested and fitted up for murder.

London dropped out of active socialist politics by the end of the noughties. In 1914 he supported the allied side in World War One. He resigned from the Socialist Party in early 1916. He wrote that he had left “because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle”. The criticism was right, but he too had withdrawn from agitation to the comfort of his ranch.

London died when he was forty, after writing 50 books in 17 years.

influence

The younger generation of American socialists were raised on his prose. James P Cannon learned his early socialism from London’s books, especially The People of the Abyss (1903), London’s account of the East End of London sweatshop workers, and the Iron Heel (1908).

And his significance extended into the international socialist movement. According to Krupskaya’s memoirs, she read London’s fiction to Lenin in the days before his death.

It was probably The Iron Heel that made London’s reputation politically, although it was not well received at the time. Trotsky received a copy of the book from London’s daughter Joan while he was living in Mexico. He wrote a fitting eulogy on 16 October 1937, first published in New International, April 1945. “The book produced upon me — I speak without exaggeration — a deep impression… The book surprised me with the audacity and independence of its historical foresight. The world workers’ movement at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century stood under the sign of reformism. The perspective of peaceful and uninterrupted world progress, of the prosperity of democracy and social reforms, seemed to be assured once and for all…

“Jack London not only absorbed creatively the impetus given by the first [1905] Russian Revolution but also courageously thought over again in its light the fate of capitalist society as a whole. Precisely those problems which the official socialism of this time considered to be definitely buried: the growth of wealth and power at one pole, of misery and destitution at the other pole; the accumulation of social bitterness and hatred; the unalterable preparation of bloody cataclysms — all those questions Jack London felt with an intrepidity which forces one to ask himself again and again with astonishment: when was this written? Really before the war? One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labour bureaucracy and to the labour aristocracy in the further fate of mankind…

“However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilising the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous role of the labour bureaucracy. But his most ‘romantic’ hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called sober politicians. It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies.

London saw the tendencies to the concentration and statisation of capital, which gave birth to a powerful, international working class. He wrote:

“This change of direction must be either toward industrial oligarchies or socialism… Should an old manufacturing nation lose its foreign trade, it is safe to predict that a strong effort would be made to build a socialistic government, but it does not follow that this effort would be successful. With the moneyed class controlling the State and its revenues and all the means of subsistence, and guarding its own interests with jealous care, it is not at all impossible that a strong curb could be put upon the masses till the crisis were past. It has been done before. There is no reason why it should not be done again. At the close of the last century, such a movement was crushed by its own folly and immaturity. In 1871 the soldiers of the economic rulers stamped out, root and branch, a whole generation of militant socialists.

“In other words, the oligarchy would mean the capitalisation of labour and the enslavement of the whole population. But it would be a fairer, juster form of slavery than any the world has yet seen. The per capita wage and consumption would be increased, and, with a stringent control of the birth rate, there is no reason why such a country should not be so ruled through many generations.

“When capitalistic production has attained its maximum development, it must confront a dividing of the ways; and the strength of capital on the one hand, and the education and wisdom of the workers on the other, will determine which path society is to travel.”

socialism

London did not believe that socialism was inevitable. In fact he foresaw a long period of rule by the bourgeoisie. But he expressed the hope that workers would win out in the struggle:

“It is possible, considering the inertia of the masses, that the whole world might in time come to be dominated by a group of industrial oligarchies, or by one great oligarchy, but it is not probable. That sporadic oligarchies may flourish for definite periods of time is highly possible; that they may continue to do so is as highly improbable. The procession of the ages has marked not only the rise of man, but the rise of the common man. From the chattel slave, or the serf chained to the soil, to the highest seats in modern society, he has risen, rung by rung, amid the crumbling of the divine right of kings and the crash of falling sceptres. That he has done this, only in the end to pass into the perpetual slavery of the industrial oligarch, is something at which his whole past cries in protest. The common man is worthy of a better future, or else he is not worthy of his past.”

London’s article 1908 “Revolution” was straightforward. Inspired by events in Russia, he argued that there had never been anything like the workers’ revolution in the history of the world, and that it was not analogous to the bourgeois American and French revolutions. He summed up the essential solidarity of socialism:

“They call themselves ‘comrades’, these men, comrades in the socialist revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip service. It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt. This red banner, by the way, symbolises the brotherhood of man, and does not symbolise the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind. The comradeship of the revolutionists is alive and warm. It passes over geographical lines, transcends race prejudice.”

“We are revolutionists”, London wrote, warning that socialism ment the expropriation of capital by the workers.

“The cry of this army is, ‘No quarter! We want all that you possess. We will be content with nothing less than all that you possess. We want in our hands the reins of power and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are strong hands. We are going to take your governments, your palaces, and all your purpled ease away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your metropolises. Here are our hands. They are strong hands’.”

The idea of working-class socialism was central to this revolution. London wrote:

“Another thing must be clearly understood. In spite of the fact that middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt. The world over, it is a working-class revolt. The workers of the world, as a class, are fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class. The so-called great middle class is a growing anomaly in the social struggle. It is a perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary), and its historic mission of buffer between the capitalist- and working-classes has just about been fulfilled. Little remains for it but to wail as it passes into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents Populistic and Jeffersonian-Democratic. The fight is on. The revolution is here now, and it is the world’s workers that are in revolt.”

He also warned again that the capitalist class would resist:

“The revolution is a revolution of the working-class. How can the capitalist class, in the minority, stem this tide of revolution? What has it to offer? What does it offer? Employers’ associations, injunctions, civil suits for plundering of the treasuries of the labour unions, clamour and combination for the open shop, bitter and shameless opposition to the eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat all reform child-labor bills, graft in every municipal council, strong lobbies and bribery in every legislature for the purchase of capitalist legislation, bayonets, machine-guns, policemen’s clubs, professional strike-breakers, and armed Pinkertons — these are the things the capitalist class is dumping in front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth, to hold it back.”

To read London today is to recall the great tradition of the American labour movement a century ago. As Raskin points out, London “often uncritically reflected the received notions of his time” — notably on race, gender and empire. But socialism was central to London’s life. Raskin gets it right with his verdict: “socialism gave him life, infused him with passion, and he poured all his passion into socialism, too, until nothing remained”.

• Many of London’s writings are at

http://www.jacklondons.net

http://london.sonoma.edu

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