Jack London - How I Became a Socialist
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How I Became
A Socialist
A Socialist
Jack
London
London
Jack London
Jack London was born in San Francisco, USA in 1876. In order to support his working class family, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a string of unskilled jobs, before returning briefly to graduate. Around this time, London discovered the public library in Oakland, and immersed himself in the literature of the day. In 1894, after a spell working on merchant ships, he set out to experience the life of the tramp, with a view to gaining an insight into the national class system and the raw essence of the human condition. At the age of nineteen, upon returning, London was admitted to the University of California in Berkeley, but left before graduating after just six months due to financial pressures.
London published his first short story, Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, in 1893. At this point, he turned seriously to writing, producing work at a prolific rate. Over the next decade, he began to be published in major magazines of the day, producing some of his best-remembered stories, such as To Build a Fire. Starting in 1902, London turned to novels, producing almost twenty in fifteen years. Of these, his best-known are Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike Gold Rush. He also produced a number of popular and still widely-anthologized stories, such as An Odyssey of the North and Love of Life. London even proved himself as an excellent journalist, reporting on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
London was an impassioned advocate of socialism and workers rights, and these themes inform a number of his works most notably his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, published in 1907. He even ran unsuccessfully as the Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland on two occasions. London died in 1916, aged 40.
CONTENTS
Athol Books, 10 Athol Street, Belfast BT12 4GX, Northern Ireland.
First printing, July 1977
Second printing, June 1978
Second printing, June 1978
INTRODUCTION
Jack London and Nietzsche
Jack London is best known for his animal stories, White Fang and The Call of the Wild , "books which appealed to the Anglo-Saxon sentimentality about animals", as George Orwell put it. He is also known for his quite ferocious story, Love of Life , in an introduction to which Orwell made the foregoing comment. Love of Life was read to Lenin as he was dying, and appealed to him very strongly. It is the story of a wounded man painfully making his way across the Arctic to keep an appointment with a ship. He becomes aware that he is being stalked by a sick wolf, and that the wolf is waiting for him to become weak enough to pounce on. He adapts himself to the situation by stalking the wolf in turn. Man and wolf see each other as food. And it is the man who sinks his teeth in the wolf's throat.
The unconditional will to live is basic to London's writings. It is what he expresses best. But his writings are, of course, not a simple expression of the will to live. They are literature about the will to live, they are the will to live reflecting on itself and forging out of itself marketable short stories and novels. It is therefore not at all paradoxical that Jack London should have committed suicide. It is one thing to survive an encounter with a wolf in the Arctic by drinking its blood. It is quite a different thing to survive in the cultural milieu of California as a successful writer on the primitive will to live.
It is not suggested that London was in any sense a fraud, or that he was only acquainted as an observer with the basic subject of his writings. He was born illegitimate and poor, went to work in a factory at eleven, became a working sailor at sixteen, and made his way in a tough world by sheer strength and determination. He was in that respect quite unlike Nietzsche, who had weak nerves, an absurdly sensitive stomach, constant neurasthenia, and a most cultured biography.
Jack London became a socialist "in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians" as he puts it in one of the articles reprinted in this pamphlet. His best known socialist work is the novel about counter-revolution in an advanced capitalist society, The Iron Heel . This novel is in some respects an anticipation of fascism. It is a unique work in socialist literature. It was published in 1907 and took on a new lease of literary life after 1933.
George Orwell's virtue was his ability to ask awkward questions, and his insistence on asking them. This wayward characteristic gave him a greater affinity with Jack London than any other recent writer has shown. Orwell commented on The Iron Heel :
"the book is chiefly notable for maintaining that capitalist society would not perish of its 'contradictions', but that the possessing class would be able to form itself into a vast corporation and even evolve a sort of perverted Socialism, sacrificing many of its privileges in order to preserve its superior social status. The passages in which London analyses the mentality of the Oligarchs are of great interest:
'They as a class believed that they alone maintained civilisation... Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged... I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole Oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realise it... The great driving force of the Oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right.'
"From these and similar passages it can be seen that London's understanding of the nature of a ruling class that is, the characteristics which a ruling class must have if it is to survive went very deep. According to the conventional left-wing view, the 'Capitalist' is simply a cynical scoundrel, without honour or courage, and intent only on filling his own pockets. London knew that this view was false. But why, one might justly ask, should this hurried, sensational, in some ways childish writer have understood that particular thing so much better than the majority of his fellow Socialists?
"The answer is surely that London could foresee Fascism because he had a Fascist streak in himself... His outlook was democratic in the sense that he hated exploitation and hereditary privilege, and that he felt most at home in the company of people who worked with their hands: but his instinct lay towards acceptance of a 'natural aristocracy' of strength, beauty and talent. Intellectually he knew, as one can see from various remarks in The Iron Heel , that Socialism ought to mean the meek inheriting the earth, but that was not what his temperament demanded. In much of his work ore strain in his character simply kills off the other: he is at best when they interact" (Introduction to Love of Life , 1946)
In The People of the Abyss , (which has many points of similarity with Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London ), Jack London describes life amongst the lumpenproletariat of the London East End in 1902. And London found what was probably his most appreicative British readership in a later generation of the lumpenproletariat. In the Rowton Houses of Camden Town and Kings Cross about 1960 there was a cultural elite to whom Jack London was well known and amongst whom he was well understood. They appreciated Orwell, but they appreciated London much more. It was not just that London had written about an earlier generation of themselves. Their interest in him went far beyond The People of the Abyss . They appreciated his whole way of looking at the world.
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