Excerpt from THE RADICAL JACK LONDON
London’s socialism - like every other movement, cause and philosophy that he embraced - never stood still. Moreover, he could be a socialist without surrendering any of the dozen different astral selves that he pursued – or so he thought. His fame and wealth went hand in hand with the cause, and he recognized no inconsistency. As a radical, he went through a series of metamorphoses: from moderate to extremist: from reasonable socialist party candidate for mayor of Oakland, to revolutionary firebrand who advocated political assassination and, in 1905, even terrorism. Socialism taught him that the United States - contrary to popular belief - was a deeply divided class society, with fierce social and political antagonisms that could not be peacefully resolved. At the start of the 20th century, he was certain that class war would be intensified, especially in light of the closing of the frontier and the rise of American corporations. Both of those historical changes would lead, he argued, to the loss of economic and political freedom, and bring smoldering class war into the open, and into the streets.
All through 1905, and again at the start of 1906, he traveled across the country, with his Korean valet, lecturing on socialism, from Berkeley to Harvard and Yale, taking time out, only briefly, to go to Jamaica and Cuba on a honeymoon with Charmian. “The socialist movement is limited only by the limits of the planet,” he told college students everywhere. As though to demonstrate his point, he managed to transcend his own racism and his sexism, too, and he wrote eloquently of women factory workers, and children, and insisted that urban, American men and women lived poorer lives than primitive men and women in prehistoric times. “No caveman ever starved as chronically as they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for as long hours as they toil,” he wrote.