How I Became a Socialist
By Jack London
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Jack London
Jack London (1876-1916) was not only one of the highestpaid and most popular novelists and short-story writers of his day, he was strikingly handsome, full of laughter, and eager for adventure on land or sea. His stories of high adventure and firsthand experiences at sea, in Alaska, and in the fields and factories of California still appeal to millions of people around the world.
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How I Became a Socialist - Jack London
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