The Original Alt-Hist, Steampunk, Dystopian Novel
by the Socialist Jack London,
December 28, 2012
This is an terifically fun novel for (a)
science fiction fans or (b) history buffs or (c) Jack London afficianados. The
story is a novel written by London in 1908 that describes the failed putsch by
socialists during the period running from approximately the 1910s through 1930s
as a memoir recovered by a future Socialist utopia hundreds of years in the
future. This last conceit allows London to describe the repressive government -
the "Iron Heel" or "Oligarchy" - that inevitably follows the Marxist laws of
history until the really succesful Socialist revolution occurs in the year 2180,
aka Year One of the "Brotherhood of Man." The novel follows Ernest Everhard, and
his wife Avery, who is the putative author of the memoir, so this novel also has
what may be a unique perspective of London writing in the first person as a
woman character, as they try to establish a socialist revolution in a world that
is in the death grip of Capitalism.
From a historical perspective, this
book is fascinating in that it seems to offer a glimpse into the worldview of
the Left prior to World War One. The novel has more than its fair share of
polemical moments when London preaches the Socialist gospel through the mouth of
Everhard. We learn, for example, that capitalism is doomed to failure as it
invests its surplus wealth into the development of foreign markets, which in
turn become competitors, leading to a crisis where no further investment is
possible. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The rich, who control the
governments, pass legislation eliminating the independent middle class and
reducing the poor to a state of serfdom. The rich create a special
janissary-class of poor, who serve as the police and the army, to oppress their
fellow class members. Ultimately, this develops into the institution known as
the Oligarchy or the Iron Heel which rules mankind with a, well, Iron Heel for
two hundred years, until people finally get it right and establish the socialist
Brotherhood of Man, which is just enlightened and no one is poor or has
acne.
All in all, this is darkly paranoid view. Interestingly, after the
closing of the 2012 American presidential campaign, we can see a certain amount
of this mindset still informing the nightmares of the left, who are still
expecting the Iron Heel to fall, albeit delayed by nearly one hundred
years.
London's "future history" is fascinating for what he almost got
right and what he definitely got wrong. He was right in predicting a major
European war in the middle of the 1910s, but that was something that had been
widely expected by many writers. He was wrong in thinking that the "working
class" on all sides would lay down arms, end the war and show their latent
power. Like many Socialists, London miscalculated the power of national
identity. London was also wrong on the devolution of democracy and civil liberty
over the next twenty years, albeit the Great Depression must have been seen as a
vindication of the polemical view of socialism as recounted in this
book.
So, as a science fiction fan, I read this book as a kind of
"alternate history" with its "point of departure" in the failure of the working
class to end World War I, although London was writing a straight up science
fiction book - where the "science" was "economics" - that projected the future
based on his premise that Marx was right.
What is also fascinating is the
picture of Jack London as a Socialist. We generally think of London as a "man's
man" who wrote adventure stories. Generally, today, we don't think of socialists
as being "rugged individualists," rather we think of socialists as living in
cities, working at universities and engaging in long discussions about the
dialectics of literature at the local coffee shop.
What we get from The
Iron Heel is the suspicion that after World War II, Socialists deliberately
sought to distance themselves from a certain kind of socialism that found a lot
of value in "manly" philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus, we have London
describe Ernest Everhard, through the voice of Avery, as "He was simple, direct,
afraid of nothing, and he refused to waste time on conventional manners...He was
a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described, and in addition he
was aflame with democracy."
Today, we associate phrases like "a blond
beast" and "a superman" with the Nazis, forgetting that the Nazis were
socialists. We forget that the Communists also had their cult of the "superman"
- the New Soviet Man - who would not waste time on frippery like "manners" and
so would be willing to dispense with bourgeoisie morality and put a few thousand
rounds of bullets into a few thousand skulls of "class enemies" who needed to be
"liquidated."
Throughout the book, London's Nietzschian perspective on
socialism was a constant theme. It was obvious how London could write those
"man's man" novels and a novel about a future socialism utopia.
Although
I am a conservative libertarian, I found "The Iron Heel" to be a fun read. It
moved along quickly. Obviously, it is filled with anachronisms and turns of
phrases that are jarring to our modern ears. I wouldn't rank it with the great
works of literature, but as an early example of science fiction, it is well
worth reading. I would pair this book with Robert Hugh Benson's
Lord of
the World, written about the same time, but from a Catholic perspective, as
sharing the same flavor of "alt-hist, steampunk, future dystopian history" for
those who enjoy either science fiction, history or great Catholic literature.
Posts
