Free Download
The Iron Heel
The Iron Heel
A futuristic tale of fascist tyranny and socialist revolution considered a classic work of American radical literature. Much admired by Eugene Debs, Leon Trotsky, and George Orwell.A prophecy in retrospect The Iron Heel concerns the era from 1912 to 1932, as viewed from seven hundred years in the future. A journal kept by Avis Everhard during that period, but not published until 419 B. O. M. (Brotherhood of Man), tells of her husband's part in organizing and carrying out the plans for the First and Second Revolts which eventually lead to worldwide socialism. The novel, which might better be described as a socialist tract rather than a work of fiction, progresses from the philosophical to the physical as the action moves from drawing room encounters between intellectuals to street clashes between militia and laborers. Because of its history of Labor strife, Chicago is the site chosen for the revolts, although most of the planning takes place in California.--Book Review Digest, 1908
Book Excerpt
ude of
social processes.
Capitalism was adjudged by the sociologists of the time to be the culmination of bourgeois rule, the ripened fruit of the bourgeois revolution. And we of to-day can but applaud that judgment. Following upon Capitalism, it was held, even by such intellectual and antagonistic giants as Herbert Spencer, that Socialism would come. Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.
Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the Oligarchy was there--a fact established in blood, a stupendous and awful reality. Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows, was any permanence attributed to the Iron Heel. Its overthrow was a matter of a few short years, was the j
Editor's choice
(view all)
Popular books in Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction
More books by Jack London
(view all)
Readers reviews
5.0
LoginSign up
This book strikes to the heart of what it is to be human in an inhuman world. Read it, think about it, and beware the Iron Heel in real life........
- Upvote (0)
- Downvote (0)