By Jerome Metellus
An American young woman of good family, steeped in the prejudices of her social background, falls in love with a socialist leader and discovers, through their union, the sociological realities of capitalism, the intellectual forfeiture of its leaders, and the daily struggle of the working class.
On this romantic backdrop, Jack London paints the picture of a slice of life of the American working class, from the first discrete steps of its rising to the day of its bloody defeat. However, and this is its more striking aspect, this work was written in 1907, and its action takes place between 1914 and 1918: thus, in a time when reformism and pacifism constituted the official doctrines of the very large majority of the socialist leaders contemporary to Jack London, he drew, on the contrary, the prospect for a colossal confrontation between the capitalists and the working class, during which reformism and pacifism would be, in fact, pulverized under the "iron heel" - the expression by which the author names the leading class and its various representatives.
In 1907, it was easy to accuse the novel of pessimism, as the reformists did, and to explain that after all it was fiction, that the author had a quite dark imagination, and that Socialists held well in hand the true reins of social progress. But this criticism does not hold. Jack London is not satisfied to arbitrarily pose the possibility of a serious defeat of the working class, but, quite to the contrary, described the historical process and policy that carries it out.
It clarifies, in particular through various individual adventures that give it life, the fundamental tender of the whole of the capitalist system to the interests of the economically dominant class, and in this regard capitalism must unceasingly give the illusion to be contingent on transparent democratic structures. Jack London shows how the press, justice, the education system and political institutions, once disengaged from the forms of the independence to which they relate, prove to be strongly closed. However, precisely because they are instruments of domination, a socialist leader must have a true comprehension of their role and the possibility of using them, such as they are under a capitalist mode, for the benefit of the labor movement. On the political level, the danger exists in not seeing the limits of the official wheels, where it is no longer "constitutional". When the situation requires it, the dominant class does not hesitate to play a slight of hand with the sacred political constitution, to substitute to it the political forms of the degree of repression that it requires. Several times, the principal character of the novel, Ernest Everhart, lucid leader of the labor movement, tries to convince his comrades of the idea that electoral victory by electoral victories, step by step, a law by law, the Socialists will transform the world, by a show of hands, the top of their parliamentary seat. In vain. And it is well the phantom of the reformism which one feels to grind, at the end of the novel, along the streets of encumbered Chicago of massacred workers.
The story largely confirmed the historical prospect for the Iron Heel. But the prophetic clearness of this work reaches its climax in the description of the mechanisms of the dictatorial body that is organized to counter the push of the labor movement. The social and political aspect of what was Fascism is indeed recognized: its mode of terror, the extension of the army, the strapping of organized labor in illegality, and finally the formation of a "working aristocracy" being used as a social tank with the reaction. This connection counters all the Sunday historians (whose study of history is sometimes, alas, their principal activity) which interprets Fascism as the sudden and irrational irruption of a phenomenon of collective madness, it should be noted that a socialist writer knew to anticipate certain major characteristics of them, whereas nothing concrete, at its time, belied it.
The Iron Heel has other qualities: its sharp style is with crossed very beautiful images; certain dialogues, and in particular those of the proponents of capitalism against Ernest, are living exposés, often very amusing, of certain points of Marxist theory. But now, when, in France and elsewhere, the political and trade union leaders of the labor movement again serve us the dish of reformism, a thousand times reheated and thousand times regurgitated, it is undoubtedly the revolutionary aspect of the Iron Heel that makes it a relevant work.