reviewed by Alice Malone
A high school reading list classic?
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908)1 is a novel about how capitalism turns into a violent and opulent oligarchy while workers sink deeper into miserable poverty and subjugation. The book bears some similarities to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): both were set in their respective near futures; both feature a dystopian, oppressive government; and in both the author’s political agenda takes priority over literary elegance. However, only Orwell’s novel is read by every schoolkid in America. Why is that?
At first blush, The Iron Heel would fit even better on US reading lists. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s a homegrown novel: London sets his novel in and around his hometown of San Francisco, while Orwell and his setting are British.2 While both novels feature censorious governments that suppress all dissent, London’s story takes actual US history as its point of departure. By rooting the story in reality, many of the plot points in The Iron Heel could be ripped from the headlines of today. For example, in one scene, a disillusioned farmer reports “Twice we have passed a national income tax, and each time the supreme court smashed it as unconstitutional. The courts are in the hands of the trusts.” Likely, London was thinking of cases like Lochner v. New York (1905) when he wrote these lines, but modern readers will no doubt think of Citizens United v. FEC (2010) or any of the many recent anti-labour Supreme Court decisions.3
If the goal of the education system was to introduce students to dystopian literature and topical themes of government oppression and censorship, American teenagers would be reading The Iron Heel, not Nineteen Eighty-Four. That Orwell’s novel weighs down backpacks across the country instead is because of institutionalized anti-communism4: Orwell’s political foes are the communists—Stalin and the USSR, in particular—while London’s foes are the capitalists.
London is not subtle in this point: his narrative strips away every imaginary flower that liberal ideology uses to hide its chains. Freedom of the press? Not if you’re questioning capital. Fair trials? Not if you’re opposing capital. Democracy and fair elections? Not if you’re a threat to capital. London also gives the reader the tools to throw off these chains: the reader comes away with a basic understanding of Marxist theories on historical materialism, surplus value production, imperialism, and capital accumulation.5 That an unabashedly socialist novel is quietly relegated to dusty shelves while CIA-approved anti-communist propaganda6 dominates US curricula is itself an argument against the relevance of Orwell’s prophecies for today. Unlike the Orwellian forced repetition of absurd statements and violent elimination of dissent, liberal governments prefer censorship via obscurity, drowning out dissent by elevating supporting narratives. We could compare the receptions of The Iron Heel and The Call of the Wild, one of London’s other works. The latter lacks overt socialist messaging and has become a much-adapted scholastic classic.
“I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.”
So what will the reader who rescues this novel from relative obscurity find? London’s political novel is structured as an incomplete found manuscript, helpfully annotated some seven centuries later by a fictional historian, Anthony Meredith. Writing from the comfort of an idyllic global socialism, Meredith’s footnotes are a humorous way for London to censure 20th century capitalist society. For example, one footnote explains the need for insurance systems and the waste and corruption that often accompanies them, noting, “To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is laughably absurd and primitive.” In contrasting the barbarism of capitalism with the peaceful rationality of socialism, Meredith’s footnotes also serve as a Chernyshevskian palace,7 communicating to the reader that a better world is possible.
Through his fictional scholar, London also argues for the need for fiction or memoirs about revolution:
[The manuscript is especially valuable] in communicating to us the FEEL of those terrible times. Nowhere do we find more vividly portrayed the psychology of the persons that lived in that turbulent period embraced between the years 1912 and 1932—their mistakes and ignorance, their doubts and fears and misapprehensions, their ethical delusions, their violent passions, their inconceivable sordidness and selfishness. These are the things that are so hard for us of this enlightened age to understand. History tells us that these things were, and biology and psychology tell us why they were; but history and biology and psychology do not make these things alive. We accept them as facts, but we are left without sympathetic comprehension of them. This sympathy comes to us, however, as we peruse the Everhard Manuscript. We enter into the minds of the actors in that long-ago world-drama, and for the time being their mental processes are our mental processes.
Avis, the writer of the found manuscript, is our vehicle for exploring the emotional side of revolutions. Avis grows up comfortably well-off, as the daughter of a University of California, Berkeley professor. The first arc of the novel follows the journey of her disillusionment with liberalism and her subsequent joining of the socialist cause—a path likely to be familiar to many readers.8 She marries Ernest Everhard, a larger-than-life leader in the socialist movement. Their tender scenes in each other’s arms after long days of trying to bring about the revolution provide some relief as the monopoly trusts tighten their iron grip: life goes on amidst increasing political turmoil. Her adoring eyes also provide some cover for Everhard’s unbelievable brilliance: did Ernest really crush debates with businessmen and billionaires with the wit most people only find on the staircase, or is Avis an unreliable narrator (as Meredith suggests)? These debates serve a pedagogical role: Ernest is London’s mouthpiece for the necessity of socialism, the logical case paired with Avis’s emotional case.9
As London’s world devolves into increasing corporate control, the novel shifts from “vivid portrayal of psychology” and Marxist lectures to a more faux-documentary style, veering towards prophecy. The reader would be forgiven for finding themselves confirming the publication year of the book: a decade before the October Revolution and several decades before the rise of fascism in Europe. Even Orwell reluctantly admitted that London understood “just how the possessing class would behave when once they were seriously menaced” in his otherwise negative review of this book.10 For example, the oligarchy takes advantage of conflicting interests within the working classes, making concessions to some workers to strengthen its position, thereby creating an “aristocracy of labor.”11
However, unlike the fascism of Europe and unlike the America of today, London’s Iron Heel oligarchy doesn’t legitimize its power through mobilization of the masses nor Bonpartist leaders that claim to represent the spirit of the nation.12 The oligarchy also never points fingers at the externalized threat of a racialized Other to achieve and wield power. In fact, there is a startling absence of racial liberation struggles in London’s novel, given that he lived in a segregated Jim Crow-era America. Black characters feature just once: as servants, described according to racist caricature.13 Rather than describing the rise of oligarchy as an intensification of institutions and ideology present from America’s very founding14, London’s oligarchy achieves power through economic coup—a simplistic and overly charitable understanding of power in America.
London and left-wing Nietzscheanism
Another notable absence, given the novel’s socialist perspective, is that of workers. London portrays workers as dumb and suffering masses and not political agents in their own right.15 In contrast, Ernest is introduced this way:
He was a natural aristocrat—and this in spite of the fact that he was in the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.
Even without the explicit mention, Nietzsche’s influence in London’s narrative is unmistakable: the unthinking, toiling, ugly masses are transcended by the beautiful, heroic Übermensch.16 The revolutionaries of The Iron Heel view themselves as elevated above the masses, who they plan to use as diversion and cannon-fodder at their climactic attempt to seize power.17 However, the oligarchy turns the masses against the socialist movement, and some of London’s most vivid writing appears in this section to illustrate Avis’s horror in discovering the revolution was lost:
It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic—a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood—men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death’s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.
This Dionysian mob is contrasted with Avis’s cool Apollonian collectedness18. In the midst of this climax of revolutionary activity, our protagonist undergoes a Nietzschean “transformation”, attributing her weathering of these chaotic moments to her “passionless transvaluation of values.”19 “Death meant nothing, life meant nothing,” she concludes. Although Avis survives this battle, the war is soon lost.
Is the failure of the movement a critique of Nietzschean heroism? It would be a hard case to make: London’s heroes die martyrs and the masses never get their redemption arc. Although the frame story assures us a socialist victory eventually happens, it’s not clear how we get there or what lessons to take from the Everhards’ failure.20 A lesson unintended by the author might be the difficulty of fusing Nietzsche with left-wing politics. As Domenico Losurdo argues, a unifying thread in Nietzsche’s often contradictory philosophy is his staunch opposition to the leveling forces of socialism.21 Although London himself seemed to recognize the incompatibility of Nietzschean individualism and socialism22, his Nietzschean influences may have ultimately limited his ability to envision a solution to the oligarchy of his novel.
Conclusion
London’s heroes failed in their revolution, and London’s contemporary American socialists failed in theirs, too. Many of the mistakes of the 20th century left find their counterparts in London’s novel: a neglect of class struggles that take racial or gender forms, and a doomed desire to enlist Nietzsche for egalitarian emancipation. Unlike London’s Meredith, we read Avis’s manuscript not from the security of world socialism but with a long road ahead. Despite its flaws, The Iron Heel is a fun read, with memorable scenes. Discussing its hits and misses would make for an enjoyable socialist book club, or high school curriculum.
Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908). Available in the public domain at Project Gutenberg. The Librivox audiobook is very well done. ↩︎
Isaac Asimov notes in his review of Ninety Eighty-Four that Orwell’s setting is only ostensibly London: “Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is much more geographical than temporal. The London in which the story is placed is not so much moved thirty-five years forward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thousand miles east in space to Moscow.” Isaac Asimov, “Review of 1984” (1980). ↩︎
Lochner v. New York struck down a law limiting the length of the working day. Citizens United v. FEC allowed corporations to pour unlimited money into advertising for their preferred political candidates. For more on recent Supreme Court labour law cases, see Steven Greenhouse, “Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become”, The Guardian (June 2024). ↩︎
For a more complete treatment of Orwell and anti-communism, see Roderic Day, “On Orwell”, Red Sails (2020). ↩︎
Marx is not just a Doylist inspiration but a Watsonian one too; the reader is given a biographical sketch of Marx, the outline of some of his ideas, and a famous line: “The knell of private capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 32. ↩︎
Nicholas Shakespeare, “Novel explosives of the Cold War” (2019-08-24), The Spectator. ↩︎
“A person who’s never seen anything except hovels would look at a picture of an ordinary house and mistake it for a luxurious palace. How can one ensure that such a person should perceive the house as a house and not a palace? In the same picture one must depict at least one corner of a palace. From this corner it will be clear that a palace is really a structure of a completely different sort than the one in the picture, and the observer will realize that the building is really nothing more than a simple, ordinary house in which all people should live (if not in better ones!).” N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, Chapter 3 (1863). ↩︎
For an in-depth look at Avis as a classic heroine of a bourgeois bildungsroman, see Kathy Knapp, “The Iron Heel and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel” in The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams (2016). ↩︎
The Iron Heel has unfortunately little to say about gender liberation. Or perhaps we should read what it has to say about it from its contrasting of Avis and Ernest, feminine and masculine, heart and mind. The closest discussion of gender oppression might be when one revolutionary swears off marriage and children, because “a child of her own would claim her from the Cause”, thereby acquiring the nickname “the Red Virgin.” ↩︎
George Orwell. “Prophecies of Fascism” (1940). ↩︎
For concessions granted by capitalists facing the “menace” of the USSR, see Alice Malone, “Concessions”, Red Sails (2023). ↩︎
Bonapartism takes its name from Napoleon III of France, but the strategy has been effectively used elsewhere (e.g., the UK’s Disraeli, Germany’s Bismarck, and US presidents ranging from Roosevelt to Trump). The approach provides the appearance of democracy without ceding power to the masses, and allows concentration of power in the hands of the country’s leader—particularly in times of war. Domenico Losurdo describes its history and tactics extensively in Democracy or Bonapartism (1993). “The president was now the ‘steward of the people’, authorised to proceed ‘actively and affirmatively’, without waiting for a ‘specific authorization’ and without letting himself be hobbled by a ’narrowly legalistic point of view’: the president alone was the interpreter of the ‘public welfare’ and the ‘common well-being of all of our people’ and was answerable to the people alone. The figure of the ‘guide’—the condottiero and duce of his people—emerged in the United States before it did in Europe, albeit obviously within a political framework characterised by respect, at least in normal conditions, for precise rules of the game. It was these rules that would be swept away in countries like Italy and Germany, given both the particular harshness of the Second Thirty Years’ War in these countries and their lack of any rooted tradition of guarantees akin to the American one.” ↩︎
See, for example, Nia Frome, “The Constitution: A Bulwark Against Democracy”, Red Sails (2023). ↩︎
“The great helpless mass of the population, the people of the abyss, was sinking into a brutish apathy of content with misery.” ↩︎
“When Nietzsche prophetically states that only ‘from you that have chosen yourselves will grow the Overman,’ what he means is that the class struggle is ultimately decided on the basis of an unavoidable heroism that must sprout from the scene of contesting wills, where a passive mass of workers are dead and asleep, mired in ressentiment, but among whom is the rare and heroic Übermensch capable of deciding their greatness.” Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (2024). ↩︎
“In short, a sudden, colossal, stunning blow was to be struck. Before the paralyzed Oligarchy could recover itself, its end would have come. It would have meant terrible times and great loss of life, but no revolutionist hesitates at such things. Why, we even depended much, in our plan, on the unorganized people of the abyss. They were to be loosed on the palaces and cities of the masters. Never mind the destruction of life and property. Let the abysmal brute roar and the police and Mercenaries slay. The abysmal brute would roar anyway, and the police and Mercenaries would slay anyway. It would merely mean that various dangers to us were harmlessly destroying one another. In the meantime we would be doing our own work, largely unhampered, and gaining control of all the machinery of society.” ↩︎
In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of rationality and order while Dionysus is the god of wine, irrationality and chaos. The Dionysian/Apollonian duality is a key theme in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: according to Nietzsche, a union of both aspects is needed for authentic culture and under modernity, the Apollonian dominates. In this work, Nietzsche is implicitly arguing against Hegel, the author of The Philosophy of History, who believed the history of the world tended towards one of rationality and justice: Nietzsche considered the subtitle “A Contribution to the Philosophy of History” for this work. For more on Nietzsche, the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy and socialism, see Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel by Domenico Losurdo (2019), particularly Chapter 1.14. The glimpses we see of London’s socialist utopia paint an Apollonian picture: Meredith regularly refers to the order and rationality of his world. ↩︎
Nietzsche urges the “transvaluation of values”, a radical break with all previous systems of morality. Nietzsche believed existing morals prevented man from achieving greatness, which he viewed as requiring “two distinct castes of society: that of the working class, and that of the leisured class who are capable of true leisure; or, more strongly expressed, the caste of compulsory labour and the caste of free labour.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human §439 (1878). ↩︎
London does seem aware of some practical pitfalls of Nietzschean heroism: “Whenever strong proletarians asserted their strength in the midst of the mass, they were drawn away from the mass by the oligarchs and given better conditions by being made members of the labor castes or of the Mercenaries. Thus discontent was lulled and the proletariat robbed of its natural leaders.” ↩︎
Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel (2019). ↩︎
See Jack London, “How I Became a Socialist” (1905). For more on Jack London’s uneasy mix of Nietzsche and socialism, see Ishay Landa “Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture” (2023) and Tutt, op. cit. ↩︎
Last modified on 2025-05-05
