(Book Review)
Did you ever have a book was on your list of books you wanted to get around to reading eventually, but you kept putting it off? And then, when you finally get around to reading it, you discover that it is a real pleasure to read, and you wonder why you never read it years ago?
For me, last year that book was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, which I had been putting off for a long time, and then discovered that it was one of the most interesting and well-written books I’ve ever read.
This month, I’ve just finished “The Iron Heel”, which I had also been delaying and delaying, and now I discover it’s actually a really good read.
I’ve wanted to get around to reading “The Iron Heel” for years now, because its dystopian view of the future is rumored to have influenced George Orwell’s “1984”, and because the fictional Chicago Commune in “The Iron Heel” is modeled on the historical Paris Commune.
God knows why I put it off for so long. I guess I just assumed because it was one of London’s more political novels, and one of his lesser known novels, that it would be packed with thick prose and hard to get through.
It’s actually a really easy read. It’s no great work of literature (I’ll come to its thematic flaws presently) but it is really easy to get through. Since in my youth I was a big fan of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”, I guess I should have expected that this book as well would be clear and easy prose.
The first half of the book is essentially a socialist manifesto masquerading as a novel. The main character Ernest Everhard debates the question of socialism against his various critics, and always emerges from the debate victoriously. Part of the reason Everhard always trounces his critics is because London is putting a lot of strawmen arguments into the mouths of the priests, capitalists, and small bourgeois. This is coupled with repeated descriptions of how handsome and appealing Everhard is. All of this almost varies on self-parody. I almost expected one of the priests to say something like, “Blast these Socialists! Their intellectual cunning is matched only by their stunning good looks.”
And yet at the same time, it’s highly readable. Some of Marx’s economic theories are explained in very simple English, such as why capitalism is doomed to destruction because of over-production. If “Das-Kapital” ever left you with your head spinning, you might try this book instead.
The second half of the book contains a dark vision of a possible future that London foresaw from 1908. According to London, things get worse before they get better. To forestall the Socialist Revolution, the capitalists band together and form an Oligarchic government called “The Iron Heel”. The socialist rebellion in the Chicago Commune is brutally put down brutally put down, and the book ends on a depressing note, however the reader is left with the knowledge that the socialist revolution does eventually take place. The entire book is written as a dairy by Everhard’s wife, and is annotated by a historian 7 centuries in the future, after the socialist revolution eventually took place. The fictional historian will often write comments such as, “This appears to be a reference to something called ‘stealing’, which was rampant in the days when people still had public property”. (I’m paraphrasing slightly, but not by much.)
Some of what London predicts at times seems a little bit extreme, but he uses the footnotes to constantly compare things in his imaginary future with what was happening in his own time. In this way he keeps at least one foot in reality. For example, he compares his fictional Chicago Commune with the actual Haymarket Massacre.
From the standpoint of 2006, it is interesting to see what London got right and what he got wrong. He was quite prescient in forecasting the rise of fascism and the idea that, contrary to what many socialists at the time thought, things might get worse before they got better.
(Incidentally Marx also predicted fascism. Marx wrote that in the last stages before the revolution, the bourgeois would form an alliance with the lumpen proletariat to forestall the rise of the working class.)
Also like Marx, London predicted World War I. Although apparently this wasn’t that hard to do. According to a recent book I read, anyone who was at all aware of world events at the time realized Europe was essentially a powder keg awaiting a match.
London thought that international solidarity among the socialists would be able to prevent World War I, and he was obviously wrong about this, although it was a common sentiment of the time. No one expected the socialists to side with their respective countries and abandon internationalism, as unfortunately most of them did in 1914. As Emma Goldman mentions in her biography, even some anarchists like Peter Kropotkin were caught up in the drumbeat and supported the war.
London predicted the great depression caused by the overproduction of capitalism, the anti-colonial movements, and even the rise of fascism in Japan, and the fact that Japan would try and further its own Imperial ambitions under the guise of pan-Asianism.
Finally, London realized that the labor movement in the United States could be defeated if certain unions were co-opted by the bourgeois and given a stake in the capitalist system. The remaining proletariat would not be able to organize rebellion if its leaders were constantly co-opted.
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Anarchy And The FBI
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