Article: The Iron Heel of Jack-Boot Fascism - A Jack London Perspective

"The novel [The Iron Heel] is of course a warning to Jack London's American Socialist comrades that their strategy of relying entirely on the ballot box to defeat the capitalists is a treacherous illusion" And he points to the most essential fact about fascism: it is the form that the capitalist state assumes when the oligarchy feels that its economic and political power is seriously threatened by working-class revolution."

                                    H. Bruce Franklin, in a Forward to The Iron Heel

     The fascist capitalist class is indeed seriously threatened today, and justifiably so.   A well-deserved worldwide uprising against the debt-money banksters and their criminal enterprise is now on-going, and only the resolution of the "economic question" remains in doubt at this juncture.
     We, the people, have been here before in this classic struggle between labor and capital, between democracy and corporate fascism, and we must learn from the past if we are to influence our future for the general good.
     Jack's London's knowledge about his own, and his prescience about our current situation a century later, is truly startling. As Franklin further relates about London's observations in his 1907 classic novel:
      "London foresees: the creation of attractive suburbs for a relatively privileged strata of the working class while the central cities are turned into what he calls "ghettoes' for the masses of the unemployed and menial laborers, shoved into the darkest depths of human misery; the deliberate economic subversion of public education in order to spread illiteracy and ignorance; adequate food, health care, and housing priced above the reach of more and more people; the ubiquitous secret police infiltrating all organizations opposing the government; the establishment of a permanent mercenary army; the government conspiring in real and phony bomb plots, in the suppression of books and the destruction of printing presses, in witch hunts aimed at dissident labor leaders, professors, and authors, in destroying the reputations of some of its opponents, imprisoning many others, and murdering the few it finds too formidable; spontaneous mass rebellions of the downtrodden people of the central cities; and urban guerilas battling the government's army of mercenaries and police in the canyons of the cities."
     A century later this is our dismal situation today, but hope arises from the global nature of today's uprising and the communication tools missing from the poor souls struggling at the turn of the nineteenth century in a corrupt and gilded-for-the-very-few age much like our own.
   As Franklin further relates, "London understood better than any of his American intellectual contemporaries the utter ruthlessness and ferocity the capitalist class would display if it felt its survival at stake" his most insightful prediction concerns the strategy of the capitalist class, a strategy that would prove to be the means of its preservation and power for decades to come. He predicts that the ruling class would use its super profits to buy off a section of the working class, co-opting it, turning it into an '"aristocracy of labour' that would serve as the main agent of control over the rest of the working class."
      Divide and conquer is indeed a very old strategy as is the false flag problem-reaction-solution gambit used to sucker the people into allowing a fascist state to tighten its grip under the pretense of a "war on terrorism" -- and this when the real terrorists are the pathological members of the ruling elite who have proven throughout our sordid history that they will go to any lengths to prevent the emergence of any form of economic democracy.
     As London's American revolutionary character, Ernest Everhard, relates:
"The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely business men. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists or sociologists. If they were, of course, all would be well. A businessman who was also a biologist or sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense."
      The laughter has begun.

Kent Welton,
TheCenterForBalance.org