The Iron Heel - Analysis

Analysis

Given that The Iron Heel is over a century old, this novel has a somewhat alternate history feel because, as with Orwell's 1984, the dating of these novels is now in the past. Jack London ambitiously predicted a breakdown of the US republic starting a few years past 1908 but various events have caused his predicted future to diverge from actual history. Most crucially, though London placed quite accurately the time when international tensions will reach their peak (1913 in "The Iron Heel", 1914 in actual history), he (like many others at the time) predicted that when this moment came labor solidarity would prevent a war that would include the US, Germany, and other nations. In reality, international solidarity of labor and socialists did not avert war.

Further, London assumed that the Socialist Party would become a mass party in the United States, strong enough to have a realistic chance of winning national elections and gaining power – while remaining a revolutionary party fully committed to the dismantling of capitalism, the whole book is based on Marx's view that capitalism was inherently unsustainable. This would precipitate a brutal counter-reaction, with capitalists preserving their power by discarding democracy and instituting a brutal repressive regime. Although this exact scenario never came to pass in the US, where the Socialist Party remained small and marginal, events closely followed London's script elsewhere – for example in Chile in 1973, where the government of Socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by a CIA backed coup and forces led by General Augusto Pinochet, prompting later publishers of London's book to use a cover illustration depicting a poster of Allende being ground beneath the heel of a boot.

The assumption of a strong and militant mass Socialist Party emerging in the US was linked with London predicting that the middle class would shrink as monopolistic trusts crushed labor and small to mid-sized businesses. Instead the US Progressive Era led to a breakup of the trusts, notably the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act to Standard Oil in 1911; at the same time, reforms such as labor unions rights passed during the Progressive Era with further reforms during the New Deal of the 1930s. Further, economic prosperity led to dramatic growth of the middle class in the 1920s and after World War II.

Through the writing of Everhard and, particularly, the distant future perspective of Meredith, London demonstrated his belief in the historical materialism of Marxism which some have interpreted as predicting an inevitable succession from feudalism through capitalism and socialism, ending in an a period without a state, based on Marx's maxim of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'