The Iron Heel

Description

Originally published in 1908, Jack London’s The Iron Heel is a classic dystopian political novel warning us of the dangers of a rising fascist regime—what he calls “the Oligarchy” or “the Iron Heel.”

This group of powerful capitalists, unable to maintain control by democratic means, increasingly rely on fascist terror and eventually seize government power to violently repress a socialist uprising.

Within a few decades of writing The Iron Heel real fascists would come to power throughout Europe and instigate mass murder on a scale London likely thought unimaginable.

While a work of fiction, The Iron Heel reminds us just how fragile bourgeois democracy is. It also reminds us that a mass movement—what London calls a “socialist brotherhood”—can and will eventually defeat fascism.

International Publishers is proud and honored to publish this edition of The Iron Heel with a new Foreword by Joel Wendland-Liu, Associate Professor of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University, and author of Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature, Settler Colonialism, and Racial Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth-Century.