This is Jack London like you’ve never read him. In THE IRON HEEL, his sweeping Dystopian novel published in 1908, a young upper class woman meets a socialist firebrand and becomes entwined in his destiny to play a part in a bloody class war fought on the streets of America.
Labor, pushed deep into poverty and fed up with its share of the produce of capital, rebels against the capitalist class and elects socialists to Congress, which dispels with the trappings of democracy and forms a fascist government in order to hold onto its vast wealth and subvert labor to slavery. So the socialists, who believe the answer is to bring ownership of capital to everyone, begin their long revolution … The result is a novel George Orwell called a “truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME,” and according to Orwell’s biographer influenced his writing of 1984.
London was remarkably prescient about some things–the capitalists trump up a war to eliminate their capital surplus (the pretext of which is the Germans launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor) to start a world war in 1913, a Great Depression occurs, the press and church attack people who speak out on behalf of social justice, fascism takes root, and so on. He also explains the never ending class struggle in easily understandable terms that are relevant today.
While most Americans value socialism for certain things (Social Security, Medicare, post office, police, firefighters, etc.), they have a cultural distaste for it, and so the modern reader will likely not embrace the socialist solution proposed in the novel, seeing as how it worked out for the Soviet Union. And yet this was written long before the New Deal, progressive taxation, Social Security, the GI Bill, legal unionization/striking, Sherman Antitrust Act and so on helped to build what was once a strong middle class in America–a system that attempted to balance capitalism, which produces innovation, growth and opportunity, and socialism, which reduces cost for certain services, protects labor from capitalism’s excesses, and tries to make the system as a whole serve the needs of the many, not just the few.
Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.
the iron heel by jack london Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.
THE IRON HEEL will make you think. Guaranteed. It will make you think about where America came from, what it might have been, where it might be going. I highly recommend it.
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