The United States prior to World War I was a veritable breeding ground of corporate corruption. Such colorful figures as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller became icons of capitalism. They had hundreds of millions of dollars – billions in today’s dollars – to such a degree that Rockefeller’s personal assets once bailed the U.S. government out of a financial slump. Industry prior to World War I was largely unregulated; unions were broken up and union members beaten and fired. The United States was not a pretty place prior to World War I. England after World War I was similarly a bastion of capitalism, a place where prosperity enticed people to buy things. The mass production of products for the consumer, one of the major projects of the Industrial Revolution, had come to a head.
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907) takes capitalism to task for being socially unjust and being conscious of the fact that it is socially unjust. The Iron Heel is a frame story; the outer frame is some time far into the future, when a “manuscript” has been found. This manuscript – the narrative of the novel – details the events leading to a capitalist takeover of the United States and the takeover itself. The author of the manuscript is Avis Everhard, wife of the leader of the socialist resistance, Ernest Everhard (Ernest, meaning true; Everhard meaning staunch or unyielding).
Most of the events of The Iron Heel until the takeover of an oppressive, autocratic capitalist government called the Oligarchy mirror contemporary events. In one instance, a man named Jackson loses his arm in an industrial accident then sues the company he works for, alleging that they worked him so much that he became exhausted and inattentive. The company counter-sues and prevents him from getting any damages out of the incident. London’s footnotes to The Iron Heel note that such an event did actually happen (47). Everhard’s manuscript also makes references to court decisions allowing the capitalists to extort as much work as they wanted out of workers. This is a not-so-subtle reference to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). In that case, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the working hours of bakers. The Court reasoned that a person had a right to sell as much labor as he wanted. In The Iron Heel, London takes the position that this ruling allowed owners to extort as much labor as they wanted from workers. Decisions like the one in Lochner v. New York – which favor business owners – lead London to believe that people in positions of power in the United States have been bought by capitalists:
We [the Socialists] captured the state legislature of Oregon and put through splendid protective legislation, and it was vetoed by the governor, who was a creature of the trusts. We elected a governor of Colorado, and the legislature refused to permit him to take office. Twice we have passed a national income tax, and each time the supreme court smashed it as unconstitutional. The courts are in the hands of the trusts. (87)
Capitalists come together in a conglomeration known as the Oligarchy, or alternatively, The Iron Heel, which gets its name from this image: “We will grind you revolutionaries down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces” (63). The various trusts (The Tobacco Trust, The Dairy Trust, The Standard Oil Trust) squeeze out smaller businesses until large corporations have control over entire industries (100). While the existence of trusts is based in fact, their takeover of entire industries is not. This Oligarchy proceeds to take over the state and become the government: “The Plutocracy has all power in its hands today. It today makes the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures. [. . .] Today the plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the law it has at its beck and call the police, the army, the navy, and lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of us” (103). The book is filled with socialist ideology, which is unsurprising, considering that London himself was a Socialist.[1]
The influence of corporations in the operation of the state, however, is something that occurs early in the century and then becomes less overt due to antitrust legislation passed shortly thereafter. The influence of corporations returns at the end of the century, notably in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), which I will discuss later, and dystopic films like The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) and RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987).
Yet, there is some hope for humanity in The Iron Heel. The outer frame, from what can be gathered from diegetic footnotes (footnotes that exist within the world of the outer frame), as well as the Foreword, is set sometime in the twenty-seventh century. This future is actually a socialist utopia where Ernest Everhard is revered. As with Margaret Atwood’s “Historical Notes” in The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s “The Principles of Newspeak” from Nineteen Eighty-Four, London implicitly posits that the world of the Oligarchy will not always exist, and thus it is possibly be overthrown. And if it can be overthrown sometime in the future, then why can it not be overthrown in 1907, before it begins? Patrick D. Murphy refers to this technique as “pseudo-documentary framing”; it “encourages discomforting reading and social action through implicitly or explicitly commenting on the reader’s contemporary predicament” (26). The outer frame, the twenty-seventh-century world, is “the ‘present’ for the fictionalized reader’s experience of the novel, while the narrative is located in a time which has already occurred” (31).
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is also a critique of capitalism. In Huxley’s dystopic society, Henry Ford is idealized for his manufacturing processes. Everything in Brave New World centers around Henry Ford, from religion to architecture to time-keeping (the year in Brave New World is 632 A.F. – “After Ford,” meaning after the introduction of the Model-T in 1908). Ford is revered so much because his assembly-line system has been used to create human beings. Low-class Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons are created in a process that produces dozens of identical, disposable people – “the principle of mass production at last applied to biology” (7).
Brave New World differs from The Iron Heel in that in The Iron Heel the control of the Oligarchy is clearly not a good thing: the capitalists are out to destroy other people in their quest for power. Not so with Mustapha Mond, one of the powerful World Controllers who are in charge of Brave New World’s society. Mond’s justification for physical and mental oppression is that he is making people happy (229). Making people happy requires fulfilling their every desire and keeping free thought to a minimum. London’s critique stops at industry and the proletariat. Huxley indicts the bourgeoisie for bringing such a society of complacency upon itself:
People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled – after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. (228)
The way Mustapha Mond tells the story, it was the people themselves who wanted to be repressed. They traded freedom for security, for some surety that they would never have to live again through the horror of the Nine Years’ War (possibly a reference to World War I, which was, at the time, the most horrific war human beings had yet fought). This world differs markedly from later dystopias in which totalitarian regimes seize power forcefully. In Huxley’s universe, the bourgeoisie asked to be relieved of the power to do evil. The result is a super-bourgeois society where people “lack individual identities, despite the myth of individualism that informs bourgeois society. Instead, they exist principally as specimens of their class” (Booker 49).
While London and Butler talk about the horrors of the transition from the capitalist system in which they and their audiences live to hypercapitalist (meaning “beyond capitalism,” a term I use to denote capitalism which exists for its own sake, without much of a profit motive) society, Huxley’s world is fully entrenched in capitalism to the point where the only manufacturing that goes on is the manufacturing of people. To ensure that the bourgeoisie continue living their swank lifestyle, entire classes of people are manufactured who can do the jobs of supporting an economy that allows Alphas and Betas to live comfortably. The pseudo-scientific theory of Social Darwinism has become truth through the machinations of the World Controllers, who have indeed bred genetically inferior people who are fit only to do the menial tasks that alphas and betas do not want to do. Such institutions as soma and “feelies” provide these low-class workers (as well as upper-class workers) with creature comforts that keep them docile: “No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more could they ask for?” says Mustapha Mond (224). It is no coincidence that Henry Ford, the person upon whom this society is built, was himself a white supremacist. Huxley’s society is rife with racism that has become justified by the elite scientists: Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons are smaller and dumber than Alphas and Betas because they have been manufactured that way.
All the time, however, members of all classes must consume. Early on in the novel, one of the lower directors explains to a group of students why they instill in Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons a fear of nature:
Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers – flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport. [. . .] A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. (22-23)
The masses exist only to consume. The elites (Alphas and Betas) exist to control the masses. This society is stagnant. People like Bernard Marx and Mustapha Mond have administrative jobs. In fact, most Alphas and Betas devote their lives to operating the society. The society itself is a static cycle of consumption and production, overseen by such figures as Bernard Marx and Mustapha Mond.
And yet, like Orwell’s, Huxley’s criticism is two-fold. Where Orwell indicted both Stalinism and fascism for their abilities to oppress, Huxley criticizes capitalism and socialism. He criticizes capitalism for its emphasis on mass-production and dehumanization and socialism for its ability to control. Bernard Marx’s friend, Hemholtz Watson, is sent to a far-off colony for people who are too good at their jobs. Hemholtz Watson is a superior poet, not merely a mediocre one, and his superiority poses a threat to the carefully controlled society that Mustapha Mond has helped create. As Mustapha tells John the Savage, a society had existed that was populated by geniuses, but this society ultimately failed because the geniuses fought amongst themselves: “The land wasn’t properly worked, there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed [. . . .] Within six years they were having a first-class civil war” (223). Socialism allows the society to function – “eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above” (223) – because of its ability to use the machinery of the state to control people and keep them in their places.
Huxley identifies “science” as one of the institutions that keeps the elite World Controllers in power. Science in Brave New World amounts to (1) genetic manipulation that automatically places people into particular categories before they are born (putting alcohol into fetuses’ blood-surrogate, for example) and (2) environmental manipulation that brainwashes people into thinking in particular ways. “Hypnopaedia” conditioning – playing tapes with particular suggestions on them while children are asleep – teaches them the values they should have, depending on what class they are from.
Huxley is deeply suspicious of science, and he imbues Mustapha Mond with this same suspicion. Science in Brave New World does not seek to learn higher truths. It merely exists to keep the status quo in control. “All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s supposed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook,” says Mustapha Mond (225). True science would be a threat to the stability of the society that Mond has spent so much time attempting to create and sustain. The only kind of scientific innovation permitted in Brave New World is innovation that, curiously, stifles innovation. “We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes – because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory,” says Mond (224).
This criticism applies to the twentieth century, as well, with its pervasive theories that still attempted to justify the genetic inferiority or superiority of particular races. Eugenics was merely racism justified by attaching “science” to it. Brave New World criticizes these kinds of pseudo-science as methods of allowing some groups of people to continue to be oppressed, but with a more “rational” means for a more rational world. As long as the justification for racism appears scientific, then agency is removed from human beings (“It’s not my fault the Gammas are inferior; they were born that way”). Huxley goes a step beyond exposing racism in science and creates a world in which science itself creates the conditions that justify that racism. We should be wary of science, Huxley suggests, for it can be used by elites to reinforce their control over marginalized peoples.
[1] Socialism here is defined as the belief that the state should control the means of production, as opposed to communism, in which the people themselves control the means of production. I use the “socialism” and not “communism” because London himself uses the word “socialist” and also because it more accurately describes Everhard’s goal of an economy that is regulated by the government in order to make life more equitable. “Capitalism” is private ownership of the means of production (private meaning by a non-state entity), and “oligarchy” is political rule by a small group of people.
<< Introduction | Main | Dystopias of the Post-War and Cold War Eras >>