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War of the Classes by Jack London (Heathen Edition)

War of the Classes

Spine #15
Author
Jack London
Translator
First Edition
1905
Heathen Edition
February 6, 2022
Refreshed
January 30, 2023
Pages
128
Heathen Genera
Propaganda
Paperback ISBN
978-1-948316-15-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-1-963228-15-1

But in this struggle fair women and chivalrous men will play no part. Types and ideals have changed. Helens and Lancelots are anachronisms. Blows will be given and taken, and men fight and die, but not for faiths and altars. Shrines will be desecrated, but they will be the shrines, not of temples, but marketplaces. Prophets will arise, but they will be the prophets of prices and products. Battles will be waged, not for honor and glory, nor for thrones and scepters, but for dollars and cents and for marts and exchanges. Brain and not brawn will endure, and the captains of war will be commanded by the captains of industry. In short, it will be a contest for the mastery of the world’s commerce and for industrial supremacy.

Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney; 1876–1916) was a prolific American short-story writer, novelist, journalist, adventurer, and social activist, who pioneered accessible commercial fiction with two of his best-known works The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), which established him as one of the first highly successful American authors. Claiming neither to be a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London’s brand of socialism grew out of his life experience, beginning with his scrappy, working-class youth spent hopscotching through myriad jobs in San Francisco and Oakland, to sailing the high seas, joining the Alaskan Gold Rush, and tramping across the United States – all before the age of 20. War of the Classes, the first of two essay collections espousing his views on socialism, presents the origins of his hard-won socialist philosophy and, when viewed through the lens of today, eerily prophesies the burning fuse of capitalism advancing toward the powder keg of our current international social strata.

Test Your Might

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"As timely today as when it was first written."
Jonah Raskin
The Radical Jack London

As for the text, London wrote for the masses so his text overall is a short, breezy read. However, he was still a writer of his time and his original text is peppered with the evidence, so we’ve updated a few instances of archaic and hyphened words to reflect their modern usage.

Simple though the text seems, the great majority of our work for this edition lies in its nearly two hundred footnotes. We resolved to leave no stone unturned as we cross-checked London’s vast array of sources and researched his long list of quoted names. His original text also included eight footnotes of its own and to differentiate between those and our numbered additions, we have set the originals out using asterisks.*

To read our full thoughts, check out “Yours for the Revolution”

And read London’s take on writing here: Writers on Writing: Jack London