... but tall black leather boots are still incredibly cool

‘Prophetic’ is an adjective usually applied to religious seers. But there are other ways to be prophetic. If you have a scientific understanding of society, you can grasp general trends of development and extrapolate them. This is what allowed Jack London, a Marxist, to predict the rise of socialism and fascism in The Iron Heel.

The novel is half exposition and half adventure novel. The first part details the coming to socialist consciousness of his protagonist Avis, a ruling class woman who meets an agitator. London’s love story is clunky. The agitator, Ernest Everhard, whose name wouldn’t sound out of place in a porn film, has “bulging muscles and a prize-fighter’s throat”. He appears Christ-like to Avis, who falls deeply in love with him and wants nothing more than to hang off his every word. This draws much from the sexist tropes of romance literature, then and today; but London deserves credit for making Avis more than a foil for Ernest’s rhetoric. Through her love she politicizes and becomes a revolutionary herself. She goes to the ghettos and interviews workers, learning about their squalor first-hand. It’s only then that Ernest’s words make sense.

The rugged revolutionist - Jack London

Ernest, meanwhile, spars verbally with representatives of different classes. Socialist readers will recognize The Communist Manifesto’s critique of other socialisms in his debates, but they’re restated marvelously. Ernest destroys the myth of ruling class nobility, showing how their refinement rests on bloody exploitation. He savages the church for preaching salvation to the rich, and feeble-minded utopians who believe socialism can arrive through piecemeal reforms. He shows farmers & petit-bourgeois to be representatives of a dying class, killed off by capitalist concentration. In fact Ernest gives a neat exposition of Capital Volume One, explaining surplus value and capitalism’s need to send excess money abroad to invest profitably. Ernest says,

When every country stands with an unconsumed and unsalable surplus on its hands, the capitalist system will break down under the terrific structure of profits that it itself has reared…. The struggle then will be for the ownership of the machines. If labor wins, your way will be easy… [if not, then] labor, and all of us, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism.”

London is writing in 1907, 25 years before the onset of German fascism, and 7 years before World War One which, as the Marxists foresaw, arose precisely because of those surpluses.

Monopoly is not just a game

Here London brilliantly foreshadows both the war, and the betrayal of reformist socialists, the Second International, who supported their own ruling classes and refused to stop WW1 from happening. In The Iron Heel the socialist 'international fraternity' acts according to its principles: they threaten a general strike if their leaders go to war. The latter do anyway, and the strike takes place. The war stops, and the world erupts in revolution, forcing the ruling classes to fight for their lives.

London predicts two monumental events: firstly, the creation of a ‘labor caste’ who receive material riches while their oppressed comrades in the mines and fields are slaughtered. This closely follows Lenin’s conceptions of the ‘labor aristocracy’: workers who receive some crumbs from the capitalist table.

Class warriors - armed, striking miners portrayed in John Sayles' Matewan, based on a true story

Secondly, London foresees the revolutionary wave that followed WW1. In the book, the struggle creates ‘cooperative commonwealths’ in many countries. In reality, the war’s end saw revolutionary uprisings across Europe and Asia, while American mines were scenes of some of the bitterest class wars in the early 20th century, where armies of miners and soldiers confronted each other.

With the establishment of ‘the Iron Heel’ – the fascist oligarchy in North America – Avis & Ernest go underground. The resistance movement plots a revolution, the fascists learn of it and the stage is set for a bloody showdown in Chicago. Hundreds of thousands of workers die. His skill as an adventure writer shows in his gory descriptions of the revolt, and his narrative draws a clear link between the politics of capitalism and its bloody results.


A capitalist says to Ernest,

…there are a million and a half of revolutionists in the United States. That is a fact. He has said that it is their intention to take away from us our governments, our palaces, and all our purpled ease… We will not reply to the bear in words. Our reply shall be couched in terms of lead. We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power… in roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns shall our answer be couched.

(London predicted the Socialist Party would receive 1.18 million votes in the 1908 election; in reality, he was very close; having received 400,000 votes in 1904, the party got almost 900,000 by 1912.) Ernest replies,

We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power.

The class war is the bitterest truth of the 20th century, something London predicts with chilling accuracy.


While it makes for gripping reading, London’s weakness is here: he assumes the slaughter would happen at home. He correctly shows the lengths capitalism will go to in order to survive, and it’s refreshing to read a book with no illusions in any part of the capitalist system, either the state or the media. London even attacks artists for creating beauty for the rulers, and he fortells the building of ‘wonder-cities’ for the rich while the poor starve. But it all takes place within national boundaries; each country fights its own ruling class. When, of course, the history of 20th century capitalism shows it exporting its contradictions. Massacres happened in Indonesia, Vietnam and Iraq; mass famines occur in Africa; colonialism, which London sees as dying out, played a huge role in Rwanda. Racism is a key tool for dividing the world’s working class and ensuring the passivity of the west, but London barely touches on it. In short, while London accepts the internationalization of capital, he fails to see how it’s going to work.

But this is a tiny criticism for a book written in 1907, based as it was on a coming American socialist revolution, something many commentators predicted at the time. London foretells WW1, fascism and a stratified labour movement. He details the role of the state, the media and the church in crushing class struggle. His predictions aren’t based on his imagination; like any good Marxist, he’s extrapolating current trends – trends that Marxism alone allows him to examine. As for London’s writing, Avis and Ernest may be wooden characters, but they’re swept up in events and we’re swept up along with them. Yet he also shows the struggle is animated by comradeship:

There was much fun and delight. We were not mere gloomy conspirators. We toiled hard and suffered greatly, filled the gaps in our ranks and went on, and through all the labor and the play and interplay of life and death we found time to laugh and love.

Eugene Debs, leader of the U.S. Socialist Party, of which London was a supporter

This is the strongest recommendation for The Iron Heel, and for socialist politics in general. Capitalism destroys the unique qualities of human existence. But London recognizes that through resisting capitalism, we experience the love and comradeship that makes us truly human.