Jack London died in 1916, forty years old, of what the death certificate listed as uremia and the truth listed as everything. He had drunk, farmed, prospected, sailed, sold out, bought back in, and written fifty books before his body decided it was done negotiating. The obituary writers of the day mostly remembered the dog novels. The Call of the Wild. White Fang. The boys’ adventures. It took the twentieth century another twenty years to notice that the book of his that actually mattered was The Iron Heel.
Published 1908. Predicts — and here is where you set the book down and pour yourself something — almost all of it.
The Iron Heel is framed as a manuscript recovered seven centuries in the future, after the long reign of the plutocratic oligarchy (the Iron Heel) has finally ended and humanity has entered its post-oligarchic Brotherhood of Man. The manuscript is the memoir of Avis Everhard, the wife of socialist organizer Ernest Everhard, covering the years 1912 to 1932. It describes the capture of the American democracy by a consortium of industrial trusts, the crushing of the farmers, the co-opting of the labor unions, the creation of a mercenary state militia, the calculated humiliation of the middle class, and finally the secret police and the black lists and the disappeared.
London wrote this when Theodore Roosevelt was president. The United States was not yet in the First World War. The Bolshevik Revolution was nine years away. Mussolini was a schoolteacher. Hitler was a failed art student in Vienna. London did not have the word fascism because the word had not yet been coined. He described it anyway.
He got the mechanism right in ways that unsettle. He understood that the takeover would not come as a coup. He understood it would come as a merger — the slow consolidation of industries, the gradual fusion of corporate interest and state power, until the distinction between “government” and “business” would become a courtesy the well-bred still used in print. He understood that democracy could be killed without a single public statue falling, because the state would simply stop answering to its citizens and start answering to its shareholders. He understood, most unsettlingly, that a great many workers would volunteer to enforce the new order against their own interests, because fear is a more efficient currency than solidarity and the new order would print it by the ton.
What he got wrong: the recovery. London could not conceive that the Iron Heel might simply remain. He was a revolutionary socialist, not a pessimist. He believed the heel would eventually be pried off by the working class, because the working class had history on its side and the oligarchy did not. He was wrong about that. A hundred and seventeen years after publication, the Iron Heel is still on the neck. It just wears better shoes now.
Reading him today is an odd experience, like receiving a letter from a dead uncle who turned out to have been right about the inheritance all along. The uncle is long gone. The inheritance is what you’re living in.
If you are coming to London for the first time through the dog books, do not skip The Iron Heel on the grounds that it is “political” and the dog books are “literary.” The dog books are political too — they just talk about domination in the language of wolves. The Iron Heel talks about it in the language of American farms and American foundries. Same subject. Wider camera.
What stays with me — and what marks London as a writer and not just a prophet — is Avis Everhard herself. The book is not technically Ernest’s story, though he is the firebrand. It is hers. It is a woman watching her country die and learning, slowly and at enormous cost, to organize against the thing that is killing it. London wrote her in 1908, which puts him ahead of most of his contemporaries and a surprising number of ours. The final pages of her manuscript break off mid-sentence. She is being arrested. We never learn what happened to her. The book’s editorial framing, from the twenty-seventh century, adds a clinical footnote. That is the last kindness the novel allows.
Rest easy, Jack. You saw it coming. Nobody listened. That doesn’t make you wrong.
A related vagobond.com essay: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society — a thread London would have pulled on if he had another forty years.
Readers and fans of The Iron Heel will really enjoy The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 — twenty-six kinds of anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet, each one written from inside its own life. A provocation, an anthology, an argument about how to refuse the Iron Heel when it’s already on your neck. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
