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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