The Iron Heel

As perhaps the first 20th century dystopian novel, Jack London's The Iron Heel is a fascinating read for how its predictions of the 20th century successively and unsuccessfully predicted the course of the era. An avowed socialist by the time the novel was published in 1907, London's Ernest and Avis Everhard thoroughly believe in Marxian social evolution and stages of production, but the particular nature of the trusts in the US combining even further and seizing governmental authority openly to institute an Oligarchy (the titular Iron Heel), prevents for centuries the "Brotherhood of Man" (socialist revolution). Like the authoritarian regimes of future dystopias, the Oligarchy openly controls all media, institutions, decimates the small business-class and middle-class, and relies on a "labor aristocracy" and Mercenaries to keep the regime afloat while constructing 'wonder-cities' like Asgard and Ardis. 

Needless to say, the miserable proletariat, already weak before the Oligarchy seizes power in the 1910s, has become a mass of slaves forced to give their labor to any projects organized by the Oligarchy. The rest of the world has also fallen under their own forms of the oligarchy or developed socialist commonwealths, but the US Oligarchy is the world power after a near-war with Germany. Indeed, North America and the Caribbean fall under the control of the Iron Heel, while Japan dominates East Asia, the British Empire crumbles, and India eventually frees itself. As for social relations under the Iron Heel, a favored cast of skilled labor and the Mercenaries receive special privileges in the regime, even given separate housing in superior cities, just as a way to divide the working-class and create an unstoppable military class. Through strict segregation of these social classes and passports, the Oligarchy has created a mass of working and unemployed wretches, described as almost bestial in the account of Everhard.

Like historical authoritarian regimes of the 20th century or future dystopian novels, the Oligarchy also relies on a vast number of agents, provocateurs, and spies to monitor the resistance and control their subjects. Beliving fully in the moral righteousness of their rule, as the capitalists in complete control of profit and labor who have saved civilization, the underlying ideology of the regime is power for the sake of power. In order to make use of the surplus-value of US production, they have conquered as much of the world market as possible, thus investing the rest in futurist wonder-cities where the socialists of the distant future reside after the fall of the Oligarchy. Since the reader already knows, from the notes of the future reader centuries in the future, that Ernest and Avis failed to unseat the Iron Heel, most of the novel focuses on the early rise and socialist resistance to the Oligarchy. Much of the final chapters comprise the "Chicago Commune," a reference to the Iron heel's brutal crackdown on the "people of the abyss" and socialists planning a revolution, taking the reader along the way into a journey of urban hell. Bombings, mobs, machine guns used to mow down the slum dwellers from Chicago's South Side, and inter-building combat bring to mind future urban revolts of the 20th century totalitarian regimes, such as the Warsaw Uprising. Undoubtedly, urban warfare and massacres of WWII were already predicted by London in 1907. 

However, London's fictional Oligarchy lacks any interest in "race." Unlike Nazi ideology other totalitarian regimes, there is no palingenesis or overt white supremacy undergirding the Iron Heel. Even though London himself was racist and a proponent of eugenics, there is a sympathetic "mulatto" character on the side of the Cause, who makes a brief appearance in the story. The other black staff on the Pullman train to Chicago are not stigmatized by race, either.  And, perhaps through references to social evolution and Darwinism, unfavorable comparisons to Native Americans are made by Ernest Everhard, suggesting the atavistic qualities of "savage" peoples and their parallels with the petit-bourgeois who cannot see their future futility in social evolution. Yet, outside of these scattered allusions to non-whites, the working-class of London's novel is almost entirely made up of white Americans and European immigrants. Arguably, Ernest Everhard himself and Avis's description of him as a natural aristocrat (unlike most of the masses under the Oligarchy), may hint at some eugenic or pro-Anglo-Saxon politics, but the Oligarchy itself never utilizes racial ideology. I would not be surprised if this is a reflection of London and the Socialist Party's own racial biases and belief in eugenics, focused as they were on whites and the perfectibility of humanity that socialist would usher.