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Select
quotes from Jack London's The Iron
Heel:
Our boasted civilization is based upon
blood, soaked in blood, and neither
you nor I nor any of us can escape the
scarlet stain. (p. 38)
The weakness in their position lies in
that they are not biologists nor
sociologists. If they were, of course
all would be well. A business man who
was also a biologist and a sociologist
would know, approximately, the right
thing to do for humanity. But, outside
the realm of business, they are
stupid. They know only business. They
do not know mankind nor society, and
yet they set themselves up as arbiters
of the fates of the hungry millions
and all the other millions thrown in.
History, some day, will have an
excruciating laugh at their expense. (p.
46)
To those who believe in Jesus and His
Gospel there can be no other relation
between man and man than the relation
of affection. Love alone is stronger
than sin--stronger than death. I
therefore say to the rich among you
that it is their duty to do what I
have done and am doing. Let each one
of you who is prosperous take into his
house some thief and treat him as his
brother, some unfortunate and treat
her as his sister, and [we] will need
no police force and no magistrates;
the prisons will be turned into
hospitals, and the criminal will
disappear with his crime. (p. 74)
Not a word of what he uttered will
see print. You have forgotten the
editors. They draw their salaries for
the policy they maintain. Their policy
is to print nothing that is a vital
menace to the established.... The
newspapers will purge his heresy in
the oblivion of silence. The press of
the United States? It is a parasitic
growth that battens on the capitalist
class. Its function is to serve the
established by moulding public
opinion, and right well it serves it.
(p. 75)
When the combination of the trusts
will control all legislation, then the
combination of trusts will itself be
the government. (p. 87)
And such profits! Colossal profits!
Strong enough themselves to weather
the storm that was largely their own
brewing, they turned loose and
plundered the wrecks that floated
about them. Values were pitifully and
inconceivably shrunken, and the trusts
added hugely to their holdings, even
extending their enterprises into many
new fields--and always at the expense
of the middle class. (p. 112)
You have no souls to be influenced.
You are spineless, flaccid things. You
pompously call yourselves Republicans
and Democrats. There is no Republican
Party. There is no Democratic Party.
There are no Republicans nor Democrats
in the House. You are lick-spittlers
and panderers, the creatures of the
Plutocracy.... I know that you will
not vote for this bill. You have
received the command from your masters
to vote against it. (p. 160)
You have said, a dozen of you
tonight, that socialism is impossible.
You have asserted the impossible, now
let me demonstrate the inevitable. Not
only is it inevitable that you
small capitalists shall pass
away, but it is inevitable that the
large capitalists, and the trusts
also, shall pass away. Remember, the
tide of evolution never flows
backwards. It flows on and on, and it
flows from competition to combination,
and from little combination to large
combination, and from large
combination to colossal combination,
and it flows on to socialism, which is
the most colossal combination of all.
(p. 91) |
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For someone with a BA in English from
Cornell and an
MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn
College there sure are a lot of holes in
my education. I suppose that isn't a
surprise--with a few token faculty
exceptions, Ivy League universities are about as
establishment as it gets and creative writing workshops
tend towards solipsism. So it's up to thrift stores to fill the
gaps! Last year it was the discovery of Raymond Chandler.
This year it's Jack London, who I'd mistakenly
assumed wrote adventure stories for boys. I
found a nice hardback of his complete short
stories at Good Will and it was my preferred bed
and sauna reading for a couple of months.
Searching SPL's catalog for more, I
was intrigued by the titles No Mentor But Myself (writings
on writing), John Barleycorn (an
alcoholic memoir), and The Iron Heel, an
all-too-plausible novel of the rise of fascism
in America. Written in 1907, London predicts:
oligarchical takeover of US government; a
bought-off judiciary beholden only to the rich;
fatalistic hypocrite Christians praying for the
endtimes; a lapdog media spreading
disinformation; a pervasive and invasive
security apparatus of cops, spooks, and
mercenaries; sell-out labor leaders and
eviscerated unions; a decimated middle class;
and a general population too harried and
distracted to present any organized resistance.
But despite this gloomy forecast London was
ultimately an optimist. Unlike the dystopian
books it prefigures--It Can't Happen Here, 1984, Brave New World--in The
Iron Heel the good guys ultimately prevail...
even if it does take 300 years of bloody
struggle. London was an avowed and active
Socialist at a time when that party had some
clout and he believed that a worldwide
Brotherhood of Man was an evolutionary
inevitability, even if it would have to be
precipitated by the necessarily violent seizing
of the means of production. He didn't live to
see the Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the
reign of terror which followed. Maybe that's the
inherent flaw with fighting fire with fire--one
oppressor is replaced by another--but what else
can you do when the guns are all pointed at you
and prisons are being built faster than schools?
London himself provides one workable pacifist
option: general strike.
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