A Lone Wolf Singing The Song Of The Pack

The clue to Jack London's socialism can be found in his proletarian youth, in the important, germinal movement in his life when he viewed the picture of the social pit, wherein he saw himself hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength, not far above the shambles at the bottom. The vision stood as a central, generative image in the shaping of his attitude toward society and enhanced his determination to escape from the social pit. From his reading of Darwin, Spencer, he picked out the survival of the fittest theory, which explained or reinforced his vision of society as a struggle for existence in the pit, as the conflict of man against man, as the domination of the weak by the strong. In order to struggle upward away from the nightmare of the pit, Jack London strove desperately to become top dog. Despite an illegitimate son, he became an prince of oyster pirates at fifteen, an able-bodied sailor at seventeen, a tramp and a work beast, a trudger after Coxey's Army, a prospector in Alaska, and at last he became rich by means of writing and made big fortunes. It might be said that London's real private struggle with life for him became an epitome of the Darwinian struggle for existence, his success an example of the Spencerian survival of the fittest. The follower of Herbert Spencer by instinct made his socialism always interpenetrated by his individualism. This can explain why he became a landed gentleman rather than a great revolutionary socialist in the end when he became the best-known and highest-paid writer in the world.For many, a central figure in the social struggle came to be the superman. In his ruthless quest for power this giant among men would help along the selection of the fittest by crushing the weak and helpless. The superman so appealed to Spencerian thinking that surely he would have been invented by someone else if not by the German philosopher Nietzsche. Temperamentally, London was the closest to Nietzsche, as his supermen and superdogs attest. It is the man of power, the aspirant superman, who bestrides London's books, always a blond beast strangely bearing Jack London's own strength and Jack London's good looks. Therefore, his socialism was in truth unconscious condescension; he rejoiced in the consciousness of a power, which could be shared by the masses, a power that spilled over from the leader, as in TheIron Heel. His deep sympathy for the class from which he sprang was deep enough, but it was a kind of sympathy founded on pity, the consciousness of common sufferings in the past; his own loyalty to it was capricious because London's strongest ambition was to escape from the working class himself. At the same time the role of unbridled individualism in the evolution of society was being challenged by the philosophy of socialism provided by Marx and Engles. In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx had called upon the workingmen of the world-the supposedly weak and helpless victims of natural selection-to unite and overthrow their exploiters and oppressors, the industrialist ruling classes. According to the followers of Marx, not the superman individualist but the socialist community of workers must be the instrument of evolutionary progress. Jack London enthusiastically accepted the social analysis of The Communist Manifesto. He was drawn to Marx partly by the Marxian vision of a better world, where, London usually agreed, the strong would support the weak instead of thrusting them downwards; but even more was he drawn by the violence of the class war and of the developing revolutionary struggle, which Marx predicted. The struggle of the workers against a capitalist class for him was a reproduction on world scale of his own intense drive to struggle upward lest he drop into the shambles at the bottom of the pit. Thus, it can be seen that his fear and his consequent drive to power, which was the fear's positive reaction, played a key role in the shaping of his socialism in his formative period.Benjamin Kidd, the British popularizer of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer also deeply im...