RP Book Club

The most recent Book Club

This time, we didn’t listen to the audiobook during the meetings. We spent the sessions discussing what we read instead. We put together audio of each chapter with read-along text to make it easy for everyone to access the book. Find links to all the chapters below.

With Jack London’s The Iron Heel, RP Book Club made our first foray into fiction.

Most of us know Jack London only as the author of the classic nature stories The Call of the Wild and White Fang.  The Iron Heel will come as a surprise. According to Goodreads, it is “generally considered to be the earliest of the modern Dystopian.” It was the first American novel to warn against the rise of fascism and the emergence of a right-wing dictatorship in the US. London drew heavily on the teachings of Marx, that capitalism is unsustainable and would destroy itself.

The publication of The Iron Heel in 1908 coincided with a world in transition, shaped by intense class struggles, the early rumblings of revolutionary movements, and the nascent forces that would later manifest as fascism. Trade unions and labor strikes were becoming more organized and militant, especially in industrialized nations. The first Russian revolution occurred just a few years earlier, in 1905.

As socialist and labor movements gained momentum, the ruling classes responded with increasing repression. Anti-union violence, strike-breaking, and surveillance were commonplace, similar to the oligarchic tactics of The Iron Heel. The novel anticipates fascism by depicting a regime that merges capitalist control with authoritarian governance, crushing dissent through propaganda, militarism, and violence.

London’s prescience gives us much to discuss.

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