I was surprised to learn recently that Jack London, like me
a native of Oakland, California and, unlike me, the first person ever to become
a millionaire by writing (and a million in 1900 was a fortune indeed) was an
outspoken and dedicated socialist and that his name is known around the world for
his socialist writings. I am not
surprised that the American educational system has emasculated his literary
reputation by teaching only his early works ("White Fang" and
"Call of the Wild") and relegating him to the category of adventure
writer. [You gotta love this guy: he is also responsible for introducing
surfing to the U.S.]
In 1908 Jack London published "The Iron Heel," an
odd little novel of the genre I would call Social-Science Fiction. Like Bellamy's "Looking Backward",
it purports to be a future history in which events in our future are recounted
from the perspective of an even more distant future. In London's book, the conceit is that an
account of a socialist revolution begun in our time was written by one of the
participants and that this account has come to light only in the 27th
century. Thus we have a first-person
narrative of a revolution with commentary and footnotes provided by a scholar
700 years from now.
What astonished me most about the book is that it so
accurately describes the major geopolitical and economic events of the 20th
century even though it was written before any of them happened. London seems to have foreseen the Stock
Market Crash and ensuing Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the labor unrest of
that period, the strategy by which FDR co-opted the union movement and saved
capitalism, the economic basis of the two World Wars, a U.S. foreign policy
intent on keeping the country permanently at war, the development of the
suburbs, the creation of NAFTA, and even the rise of the Christian Right as a
political power.
What lends weight to
the remarkable similarity between events that London imagined and events as
they played out over 100 years is that London presents all of these developments
as the inevitable result of observable facts about capitalism in the United
States. London does not argue for
socialism on moral or political grounds:
he argues that an empirical observation of the society in which he lived
would necessarily lead one to conclude logically that a nascent revolution of
the working class would be crushed by a capitalist class that co-opted the
political institutions of democracy to establish its own plutocracy. London believed that the only possible
outcome of conditions in his day would be that liberty and justice for the
worker would be crushed under the Iron Heel of the oligarchy, and such is the
story the novel tells.
The story revolves around a revolutionary leader who bears a
striking resemblance to London himself.
Early in the novel, this working-class hero, Ernest Everhard, addresses
a meeting of a secretive group of the most powerful capitalists and politicians
in the country, something like the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. Here is his indictment of capitalism:
"If modern man's producing power is a thousand times
greater than that of the caveman, why then, in the United States today, are
there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and not properly
fed? Why then, in the United States today,
are there three million child laborers?
It is a true indictment. The
capitalist class has mismanaged. . . .
you have mismanaged, my masters, . . . you have selfishly and criminally
mismanaged."
Everhard goes on to say that eventually the oligarchy will
be overthrown by the power of the working class:
"There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is
greater because it cannot be taken away.
Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our
hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers."
The working class revolution, London believed, would
eventually establish a more just and peaceful social order. But before that resolution can come, we must
pass through a period of increasing domination and oppression. The story describes the overwhelming power of
the oligarchy, using as it does all the types of power available. Police and military, universities and
intellectuals, the news media, publishers, the churches and the clergy all
cooperate with the oligarchy, reinforcing the self-justifying ideas and values
it formulates. Because the myths and
propaganda of the oligarchy are so aggressively propagated, and the general
population so relentlessly indoctrinated, only a prolonged suffering will
awaken the proletariat to the true nature of the situation.
Simply put, The Establishment consisting of wealthy white
males will not give up power easily. The
workers may have history and justice on their side, but the oligarchy has the
military, the courts, the banks, the media, and the police to support and
enforce its hold on power. The
oligarchy's dedication to the maintenance of its power is made clear when a
member of the Capitalists' club answers the revolutionary hero thus:
"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 our 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 new book "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer reports in
detail about the network established by the Koch brothers to take control of
all levels of our government (municipal, state, and federal) and to control who
is elected to all legislative and executive offices, from the small-town mayor
to the President of the United States. I
know that many scoff at the idea that this country is being taken over by the
extremely wealthy elite (just as many of the characters in London's novel
refuse to believe the hero.) Many will
reject books such as "Dark Money", calling it alarmist and portraying
its author as a "conspiracy theorist" who is not fully in touch with
reality. Many will think such things
about me. And they will say something to
the effect that Jack London lived a long time ago and that things are surely
much different now than they were then.
But before you dismiss all the talk of an oligarchy scheming
to control our government at every level, consider what Jimmy Carter had to say
in a speech he gave to a meeting of the Atlantik Bruecke ("Atlantic
Bridge"), a non-profit that fosters better relations between Germans and
Americans. The former President said in
his speech that "America does not at the moment have a functioning
democracy." Carter's remarks were
not reported by a single mainstream news agency in the United States, but they
were reported in Der Spiegel, the leading German news magazine. (The report, by the way, did not appear in
the English language version of Der Spiegel either, but only in the German
one.)
*
In the final chapters of "The Iron Heel," the
oligarchy does indeed bring its Iron Heel down on the people. It walks on their faces. And all that the revolutionary hero can do is
to repeat the following again and again as bloody events swirl around the
revolutionaries:
"How many rifles have you got? Do you know where you can get plenty of
lead? When it comes to powder, chemical
mixtures are better than mechanical mixtures, you take my word."
