The Iron Heel

Jack London

4 ideas

1. The Everhard Manuscript and Crushed Commune

   Avis Everhard's memoir, found and footnoted by the scholar Anthony Meredith seven centuries later, tells how her husband, the socialist Ernest Everhard, predicts and then watches a capitalist Oligarchy absorb the middle class, destroy the socialist movement, and drown the Chicago Commune uprising in blood. Along the way, Bishop Morehouse is confined to an asylum for preaching Christ's teachings literally, and the mill worker Jackson loses his arm in machinery and is denied compensation by a bought court. The manuscript breaks off mid-sentence, and Meredith's calm notes reveal that the Oligarchy ruled for three hundred years before the socialist Brotherhood of Man replaced it.

2. Bought-Off Labour Aristocracy Splits Workers

   The Oligarchy survives by giving high wages, housing and security to a few strategically vital unions, such as railroad, steel and machinist workers, which turns them into a privileged hereditary caste with a stake in the system. That caste then abandons the general strike and the mass of unskilled workers, who sink into the degraded 'people of the abyss.' Solidarity is broken not by crushing all labour but by selectively rewarding the part of it whose cooperation power actually needs.

3. Unconsumable Surplus Drives Capitalist Crisis

   Ernest argues that because workers are paid less than the value they produce, a nation's output always exceeds what its wage-earners can buy back. The growing surplus must be dumped in foreign markets, and when every industrial nation competes for the same shrinking outlets, the system faces a breakdown. Capital answers that breakdown by concentrating ownership and ruling by force.

4. Power Answers Argument With Force

   When Ernest wins the debate at the Philomath Club, the magnate Wickson replies that the ruling class will not answer him with words: its reply is 'couched in terms of lead' and it will grind the revolutionists under its heel. Seen this way, a ruling class that loses an argument does not concede; it moves the contest to courts, militias, press control and violence. Movements that trust the ballot and reasoned persuasion misjudge where the decision is actually made.

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